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Martin Kozloff, a professor of Education at the University of North Carolina, is nervous. "Christian, I'm going to get fired," Kozloff told me in a long phone conversation.

He might be right. Earlier today, a blogger named Ed Cone posted excerpts of a post to HorseFeathers that Kozloff later admitted was his. The post was a long rant about defending our country from terrorists, and the excerpts are startling.

Ordinary Americans are arming themselves for war with you. I and many of my friends have closets full of handguns, rifles, shotguns and thousands of cartridges. If we had enough ammunition and time, we would kill every last one of you.
One day soon, our planes and missiles will begin turning your mosques, your madrasses, your hotels, your government offices, your hideouts, and your neighborhoods into rubble.

And then our soldiers will enter your cities and begin the work of killing you, roaches, as you crawl from the debris.

And if you come to this country and harm a child, shoot a mother, hijack a bus, or bomb a mall, we will do what we did in 1775. Millions of us will form militias. We will burn your mosques. We will invade the offices of pro-arab-muslim organizations, destroy them, and drag their officers outside.

We will tell the chancellors of universities either to muzzle or remove anti American professors, whose hatred for their own country we have tolerated only because we place a higher value on freedom of speech. But we will no longer tolerate treason. We will muzzle and remove them.

We will transport arab-muslims to our deserts, where they can pray to scorpions under the blazing sun. You have fucked with the wrong people. We will rid the world of your foul breath. Your caliphate will be your grave.
[HorseFeathers - LETTER TO OUR ENEMIES - Martin Kozloff - 09-25-04]

After two days of the post remaining anonymous, Professor Mark Kozloff identified himself and took credit for the post.

It's more than nice to know that my feelings are shared by so many other folks--most of whom have served their nation longer and better than I.
For a long time I've become more and more alien to my (former) friends, and they to me. Unless there is something fundamentally different in how we make sense of things, I can only believe that they have never allowed themselves (never "lowered" themselves enough) to imagine what it would feel like to jump out of the Twin Towers to avoid being burned to death, and never listened to a man scream through his bleeding neck stump after being butchered before the camera.

Even my dear wife has begun to suspect that "Martin may be obsessing about this war and about combat." Why, she actually insists that I NOT have a loaded .45 at the dinner table! [So, I just carry it concealed.]
[Posted by: Martin Kozloff at September 27, 2004 10:45 PM]

"I am afraid for our Democracy. The same thing that is happening to our country happened to Athens and Rome," Kozloff told OutletRadio.com in a phone interview. "People are writing the Chancellor and trying to take my job away over this. This is supposed to be a Democracy."

Kozloff distanced himself from his post, and a later post claiming authorship, suggesting the post was a literary device in the vein of Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal," which satirically advocated the Irish fight famine by eating children.

"I wrote this to a friend, Steve Rittenberg, hoping it would get people to look at themselves. The letter was sociological in intent. It was a literary device to get readers to examine their own assumptions," He added. In a later post, Kozloff wrote, "The letter was NOT my opinion. I was NOT advocating ANYTHING in that letter."

Shortly after the blogosphere echoed his post (EdCone | Atrios), and OutletRadio.com called, Kozloff posted long retraction saying, "I have NO hatred of Arabs or Muslims in general--only killers, as clearly stated in the letter."

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Posted by Christian at 05:29 PM |