Tell me you didn’t see this one coming. Professor Julio “Assad” Pino, the jihad-spewing associate professor of history at Kent State, says he is an advocate for free speech.

In this case, defined as support for Islamic supremacism and the murder of US citizens.

And he won’t answer when asked directly if he contributes to the vile “Global War” web site.

A Kent State University faculty member accused of authoring an anti-American Web site said Thursday he “absolutely” does not support jihad, even though his photo and writings by him appear on the site.

Julio Pino, 46, said he calls the truth as he sees it. “I am not the issue,” he said calmly as he prepared for a class in Afro-Latin American History in KSU’s Business Administration building. “The issue is free speech.”

The associate professor of history has been the center of a firestorm since a columnist on the conservative Web site Townhall.com connected him to a jihadist news service Wednesday. The blogger’s views were picked up by the Drudge Report and spread from there. [Actually, it was posted at LGF before the Drudge Report picked it up. —ed.]

By Thursday night, Kent State had received a flood of calls and e-mails calling for Pino’s dismissal, spokesman Ron Kirksey said. The university issued a terse news release distancing itself from the extremist Islamic Web site and said that Pino’s views did not represent those of the university.

The global-war.bloghi.com Web site is a collection of stories, columns and poetry that provide “battle dispatches, training materials and jihad videos to our brothers worldwide.” The blog includes a head shot of Ahmed al-Haznawi, one of the hijackers of United Flight 93 on Sept. 11, 2001.

On Thursday, Pino declined to comment when asked about a photo on the speech section of the Web site that shows him addressing a crowd of students in Kent State’s Risman Plaza. The site also includes a letter that Pino wrote under his name last year to the student-run newspaper the Daily Kent Stater. The same letter on the jihadist Web site is attributed to “Lover of Angels” but does not mention Kent State or Pino.

“You attack, and continue to attack, us everywhere,” reads the letter on the Web site and in the student newspaper. “The ill done to the Muslim nations must be requited. The Muslim child does not cry alone; the Muslim woman does not cry alone; and the Muslim man is already at your gates.”

The Web site attributes three other postings on its speech page to the unidentified Lover of Angels, one of which reads, “Bush, why don’t you tell your people that your soldiers are committing suicide, taking drugs and hallucination pills to make them sleep? By God, your dreams will be defeated by our blood and by our bodies.”

Pino declined to comment when asked if he was Lover of Angels. “The site is culled from news sources all over the Web, from the Times of London to the Times of India,” he said. “Whatever else is on there I have no comment.”

And another surprise: Pino says it’s his critics who are un-American, not him: KSU professor accused of promoting Jihad.

They said Dr. Pino would not be talking with the news media but he did speak with Channel 3’s Jeff Mayor, and said a critic of his writings is the real Anti-American.

“So the one who’s living up to his duties as an American citizen is me. He’s the one in violation of the principles of this country by wanting to cancel the first amendment,” Pino said.