Pino's department page lists this biographical information:
Julio Cèsar Pino is Associate Professor of History at Kent State University, Ohio, specializing in Latin American History. He received his Ph.d in History from the University of California at Los Angeles. His current courses include "Comparative Latin American Revolutions.", “Afro-Latin America” and “History of Women in Latin America" and In 1997 he published Family and Favela: the Reproduction of Poverty in Rio de Janeiro (Greenwood Press), dealing with household organization and the feminization of poverty in the Rio shantytowns...This academic background sounds fairly straightforward, given the "social movements" emphasis in contemporary historical studies. However, Pino's apparently a convert to Islam and he's alleged to self-identify as the "most dangerous Muslim in America."
Here's this from Discover the Networks:
Disillusioned with Catholicism and Christianity generally, Pino in 2000 became a Muslim after reading The Qur’an on a plane ride. “All religions claim they are more than just a religion but a complete way of life, but only in Islam is this vow fulfilled,” he says....There's more at the link. See also Pino's own essay, "Born in the Fist of the Revolution: A Cuban Professor's Journey to Allah."
In an April 2002 guest column for the Kent State campus newspaper, Pino penned an effusive tribute to Ayat al-Akras, a teenage Palestinian suicide bomber who had murdered two Israelis at a Jerusalem supermarket on March 29. In that piece -- titled “Singing out Prayer for a Youth Martyr” -- Pino insisted that Akras was no terrorist but had “died a martyr’s death … in occupied Jerusalem, Palestine.” Pino also derided President Bush as a “numbskull,” and called for boycotts of all Israeli and American products.
In 2005 Pino wrote another controversial letter to his campus newspaper, this time lauding University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill for his “righteous obsession with European and American genocide and terrorism against peoples of color all over the world, from 1492 to 2001.” Pino also claimed that during the Cuban missile crisis, President John F. Kennedy had planned a “genocide against the Cuban people”; that President Bill Clinton had killed “more than 500,000 Iraqi children” via sanctions against Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq; and that “cocaine cowboy” George W. Bush had “added an extra 100,000 corpses to the pile of brown colored [Iraqi] corpses.” Referring to his students at Kent State as his "little jihadists" and his “beloved Taliban,” Pino made it clear that he sought to indoctrinate, not merely educate, the young men and women in his classes. He concluded that “[i]n an America rapidly descending toward Christian fascism, we need more Ward Churchills.”
Pino says that his worldview is animated by his “unfulfilled need to bring social justice to the world.” In the classes he teaches at Kent State, he compels his students to approach the study of Latin American history from the perspective of leftist “Third World” politics, which he identifies with such revolutionaries as Fidel Castro and the communist Sandinista regimes of Central America. Pino blames the political upheavals of Central America wholly on the “daily” butchery of “American-trained death-squads,” and praises the Sandinistas for having “succeeded in building a society free of class exploitation and gender inequality.”
Pino's apparently been at the center of campus controversies at Kent State, for example, when the chair of the department was removed from the chairmanship for granting Pino academic leave for travel to the Middle East (an academic pilgrimage for jihad?).
Some of Pino's students apparently are not that happy with the professor's teaching. The first entry at Pino's RateMyProfessors link say, "makes Noam Chomsky look patriotic..."
That's not the best endorsement of radical teaching, athough maybe some leftist blog outfits can give Pino a gig if things don't work out at Kent State.
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