Convicted of murdering Robert F. Kennedy in 1968, Sirhan Sirhan is one of those rare figures whose name everyone knows, but whom nobody much discusses. Recently, however, he has been in the news again.
I remember being a kid, maybe an early teenager, sitting at the table with my father. He was cheerful that afternoon, a rare occasion in those days. He was my hero, but my insistence on doing poorly in school had caused lots of strain and we spent much of our time at loggerheads. He greeted rebellion with even more severe punishment. My father was kind and decent, but relentlessly confident in his idea of discipline.
But on that afternoon we were relaxed. We connected well through my burgeoning curiosity about the world, the Middle East in particular. It was before the internet and satellite TV, and dad hated talking on the phone, especially long distance (which was expensive in the old days), yet he always seemed to know what was going on back home. We were nibbling at nuts and olives and chitchatting without any of the usual tension.
I mentioned Sirhan Sirhan, whom I’d recently learned about from a news story. I thought it was hilarious that he had the same first and last name.
“He’s an Arab, you know,” my father said. His tone was one of both dignity and regret.
“He is?”
“From Palestine.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“A Christian, too.”
Same tone.
Wait a minute, I thought. My family matches those descriptions and we didn’t seem like the kind of people who assassinate politicians. It was confusing. I had a decent awareness of my ethnic background, but my parents didn’t dispense any kind of cultural instruction. We were what we were. Suddenly I didn’t know what the hell that was. Our daily rituals and ways of being didn’t come out of a manual. “Arab” was more or less an external category.
Thus my confusion. Why, for starters, were Arabs always in the news for doing terrible things? I learned some years later that corporate media coverage is more terrible than the behavior.
Almost three decades on, having developed a more sophisticated understanding of identity and experience, I was fired from a tenured position at the University of Illinois. The reason: advocacy for Palestine. There was a lot more advocacy for Palestine in the USA in 2014 than in 1968, but it was still seen as a great peril to American values.
Overseeing the circus was UIUC Chair of the Board of Trustees, Christopher Kennedy, son of Robert. He was completely inflexible. He refused to undo the decision despite tons of negative press and an incoming lawsuit. It was easy to attribute the inflexibility to typical class politics. Kennedy was a wealthy man—royalty in a supposedly anti-royal country—and served at the pleasure of politicians and big-money donors. But it wasn’t lost on some observers that another factor might have informed his hostility.
“If you think about it,” a colleague suggested to me one day in a whisper, “he probably hates Palestinians.”
That possibility had occurred to me. Sirhan Sirhan and I, after all, share an identity.
*****
He is 77 now. His skin is tan and smooth and his hair is the distinctive shade of silver that fits so nicely on elderly Middle Eastern men. It is cut short with a clean part. His hairline is struggling but he isn’t bald. He looks like a kindly jiddo or maybe a retired social studies teacher. He certainly doesn’t look like a murderer.
But there’s something troubled about his eyes. They are jittery, glazed with hesitation. It might be the natural outcome of being in prison for over five decades or it might be a physical manifestation of psychological ambivalence. Whatever the case, this strange something is perceptible. Sirhan Sirhan doesn’t seem fully present, at least on camera.
Sirhan Sirhan at 77
It is easy to imagine him having been hypnotized the night of Kennedy’s murder, as some claim. He had the same troubled look at 24, when he became infamous, but back then he was darker, swarthy, with a healthy thatch of jet-black hair. He looked like the prototype of a Hollywood villain.
I wonder if he did it. He claims to wonder the same thing. Over the years, all kinds of strange information has emerged about RFK’s assassination. Sirhan may have been a patsy for the CIA’s MKULTRA mind-control program (along with his future neighbor at California’s Corcoran Prison, Charles Manson). He possibly got bamboozled by a honeypot. He was certainly drunk, or at least properly buzzed. For whatever reason, he simply doesn’t remember the decisive moment when he opened fire in the vicinity of RFK. Psychologists don’t think he’s faking the amnesia.
A few years ago, I began reading about the assassination and came to believe that the official version of the story is unsound. No foolproof theory exists, but a lot of convincing evidence indicates that there was another gunman in the pantry in which RFK was murdered. Combined with Sirhan’s spotty memory and a CIA up to its eyeballs in evil, it’s no act of tinfoil conspiracism to suggest that there was more to the assassination than the spontaneous meltdown of an aggrieved Palestinian.
I don’t obsess over the details, though. I read enough about the event and its many ambiguities to form a comfortable opinion and so the endless factoids and speculation concern me less than the effects of that event on my generation of Arab Americans.
It’s possible that the event had no effect at all, that it is meaningful to me only because of a random conversation with my father. Our brains are funny that way. We can forget spectacular incidents and remember banalities that come to be deeply consequential. Taking stock of the past suggests forgetfulness. I never heard the name “Sirhan Sirhan” at any of the Palestine solidarity events or academic conferences I attended. I rarely thought about him, either. He wasn’t much a subject of debate or inquiry for Arab Americans in general or Palestinian Americans in particular. As’ad Abukhalil used to discuss him sometimes on the now-defunct Angry Arab Blog and some radical groups in Palestine clamored for his release in the 1970s, but by and large Sirhan Sirhan isn’t a subject of analysis among Arab Americans. Still, he’s always been around even when he wasn’t present. Sirhan Sirhan is a momentous nonentity.
I suppose that Sirhan, or what we understand through various historical filters to be Sirhan, represents some complicated and uncomfortable conditions for Arab Americans. We can identify with his deeply-felt anguish about Palestine. We can empathize when he speaks of his brother’s death in childhood. We can believe that the government would railroad somebody of his background. We can see in him so many characteristics of paternal authority.
We can also recognize that in being named Robert F. Kennedy’s assassin, Sirhan Sirhan became the essential, inescapable Arab in the United States: mysterious, violent, irrational. The Palestinian cause has always been a tough sell in this country, a settler colony in which Zionism is completely legible, and it was practically verboten amid the triumphalism of Israel’s victory in the June 1967 War. Sirhan stepped into the spotlight and validated every negative belief about Palestinians and Arabs precisely when the negativity was most needed. He was us no matter how much we tried to create distance. Those who manage the war economy wouldn’t have it any other way.
And now, nearly six decades on, we’re ready to acknowledge him again, this quiet, elderly man whose continued imprisonment has come to seem rather cruel, or at the very least archaic.
*****
He is in the news again because after 15 failed attempts he finally made parole. His release isn’t guaranteed because California governor Gavin Newsom still needs to approve the parole board’s decision and is under heavy pressure to decline. If Sirhan is released, he might immediately be deported to Jordan.
The parole decision stirred up a lot of repressed sympathy for Sirhan among Palestinian and Arab Americans, who largely welcomed the news. Also pleased were anti-carceral activists, proponents of mercy and forgiveness, advocates for criminal justice reform, and believers in Sirhan’s innocence.
A lot of pundits were mortified, however. Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe in particular appeared deeply affected, with a message for Newsom to ignore two of Kennedy’s children: “The plea by two of RFK’s sons to release Sirhan Sirhan should count for nothing. RFK’s assassination was a crime against the people of California and America, not just against the Kennedy family. Justice and the safety of potential future victims aren’t theirs to give away.”
Tribe changed course after six of Kennedy’s other children, including Christopher, came out against parole: “Governor Newsom: PLEASE LISTEN TO THESE SIX CHILDREN OF BOBBY KENNEDY. THEY WERE AMONG THE HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF SIRHAN SIRHAN’S INNOCENT VICTIMS. JUSTICE IS NOW IN YOUR HANDS.”
Tribe elicited hundreds of like-minded responders bemoaning everything that Sirhan had taken from them and their beloved polity. Those complicated feelings I had years ago came into focus: Sirhan Sirhan wasn’t merely an assassin; he was a filthy Arab who had prevented America from realizing its potential. Along with other core groups, Arabs carry the onus of the American liberal’s perpetual frustration: an unfulfilled sense of messianism guides this peculiar political creature. Arabs disrupt the natural order of things. The neverending conflict, the misogyny, the dictators, the superstitions, the suicide bombs, the greedy oil sheikhs. Those Arabs, senseless and incessant, keep forcing us into an aggression that is anathema to our enlightened sensibilities. How much easier would American democracy have been without these savage inconveniences?
There is a flipside to Tribe’s grievances that hardly anyone asks: what about the U.S. government’s innocent victims? Merely raising the question abdicates the liberal’s devotion to exceptionalism and so it is not ignored of negligence, but of necessity.
Can Sirhan be considered a victim of the U.S. government? Yes, as can all victims of the nakba, which Sirhan suffered as a young child. Those of Tribe’s mentality cannot fathom the possibility because to them the nakba is at best a nonevent, and more probably a laudable force of progress. Palestinians like Sirhan are an impediment to the liberal’s ideal society.
Old Arab architecture in Sirhan’s childhood neighborhood of Musrara, Jerusalem, now under Zionist jurisdiction
What happens, though, if we take Sirhan’s trauma seriously? The United States is suddenly implicated in a terrible violence that precedes Sirhan’s encounter with Kennedy. Sirhan is suddenly no longer a crazed loner but a participant in elaborate and unsettled histories. And suddenly no superstar politician is going to save a United States that has never practiced democracy without inflicting misery on surplus populations inside its own borders and around the world.
We cannot therefore take Sirhan Sirhan’s trauma seriously.
*****
He has spoken of the settlers who stole his home, of his mother’s anguish, of uprooted lives, of dead bodies. He has wept over the suffering and privation he witnessed. His childhood hardship has earned more scorn than sympathy. The audience’s loss is more important. By stealing their future, Sirhan forfeited his past. They demand explanations, but carefully patrol for any hint of the unsuggestible. We are damned by voice. We are damned by silence.
*****
People writing about Kennedy or Sirhan should come to realize that they are dealing in abstractions. The two men are neither dead nor alive, not in the public imagination, anyway. They symbolize antagonistic civilizational ideals, the timeless hero and antihero. Both are emblems of American virtue: Kennedy in his homegrown brilliance, youthful and telegenic; Sirhan in his foreignness, hirsute and sinister. We rarely view the two men as byproducts of an interconnected, even intimate, politics.
I try to think through the abstractions and consider them as actual people, for Kennedy no more held the secret to U.S. salvation than Sirhan facilitated its decline. For me, considering Kennedy as a person means viewing him through a prism of fatherhood and so inevitably I think about his children. It doesn’t surprise me that they’re split over Sirhan’s parole. Siblings are known for epic disagreement. The second-oldest son, Robert Jr., considers Sirhan innocent; the second youngest, Douglas, supports Sirhan’s release on grounds of compassion. Six others deem Sirhan guilty and want him to die in prison. The ninth living child, Kathleen, has made no public comment.
Although I adamantly support Sirhan’s release, on various grounds, I cannot take issue with the six children who oppose it. Theirs is a filial point of view that feels too visceral and sensitive for my opinion. I have no idea how I would react to pleas for relief from a person who killed my father. Even if a sibling cast doubt on the perpetrator’s guilt, I don’t have a clear sense of how I would actually react as opposed to how I like to imagine my reaction. I simply cannot inhabit the position.
The filial paradigm isn’t private, though. RFK has long been an ideological nostrum, the parental surrogate of a fallen nation. A distinct idea of America bled out with him in the Ambassador Hotel. In its wake, an illiberal and regressive force emerged. It started with Nixon and continued through Reagan and ended up at Donald Trump. Sirhan Sirhan, another dark object in this Manichean universe, allowed it all to happen.
We look for saviors and end up finding villains. The United States, an experiment with so much promise, never quite lives up to the billing. The liberal dreamer is always aggrieved, his satisfaction foiled at the most inopportune time by foreigners, leftists, and sundry undesirables so rudely interfering with a straightforward destiny.
*****
I take an accounting of my life: born in Appalachia to immigrant parents; relentlessly bullied; uninterested in the American dream. In time the uninterest would evolve into hostility. The hostility was helped into existence by the discomfort of my upbringing. My foreignness was conspicuous. I saw violence in the ideals that supposedly made us exceptional. I became extremely suspicious of orthodoxy.
There were no heroes to consult, really, because those who would have satisfied my preferences were unavailable to American children. I had to rely on the unglamorous company of siblings and parents. They at least offered a sense of security. To this day I can’t bear to interact with people I perceive as untrustworthy. This reticence has been a terrible impediment to my career.
My hometown of Bluefield. West Virginia in the foreground; Virginia in the distance
In time the great figures fall away and we are left with the daily intimacies of conflict and affection. We don’t always get to choose what moves us. Memory isn’t calibrated to reproduce fleeting notions of social virtue. We are organisms trying to survive. Sometimes we find comfort or familiarity in the phenomena we’re supposed to abhor. Arab Americans never had the luxury to uncritically claim U.S. heroes as our own. We are related to half-people whose inhumanity is fundamental to America’s reverent self-image. Our intimacies are no less meaningful, though.
I can’t help that Sirhan Sirhan provided one of the nicest memories I have of conversing with my father.
*****
They always mention that he’s Palestinian. Even when I don’t know the intent, the effect is clear. Being Palestinian implies disrepute. It suggests violence. Sirhan Sirhan might not look like a murderer, but he sounds like one.
The habit always nagged at me. It’s not unique to Sirhan. We know the ethnicity or nationality of many notorious figures. It seems more pronounced and insidious with Sirhan, though. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a news story that doesn’t call him Palestinian. The description explains what might otherwise be an incomprehensible deed while encouraging the audience to scuttle any empathy for Palestine. The story of Kennedy’s assassination is incomplete without an accounting of Zionist atrocities and yet for decades corporate media have left Israel out of it in order to pursue a lazy narrative of Palestinian barbarity.
We’ve spent lots of time thinking about what Sirhan owes the Kennedys and the country they represent, but maybe it’s time for Americans to think about what they owe Sirhan’s compatriots. Untold Palestinians have fallen to assassins’ bullets supplied by the United States. Palestine was always set up as the origin of Sirhan’s irrationality. Now, thanks to decades of thankless and largely anonymous efforts, a great many people recognize Palestine as a victim of the United States. What is supposed to be an incriminating descriptor acts more and more like an invitation to contemplate a deeper story.
Sirhan Sirhan, the Palestinian. These days it really doesn’t sound so bad.
Very thoughtful. Thanks.
Steve,
Really, who are you fooling? Murderers, terrorists, genocidaires, and antisemites rarely look like one, if there is such a description. The crime for which you were taken off the “hired” list, as was Richard’s of Jeopardy? Your tweets said something much more that support of the Palestinian Arabs lost cause. They betrayed a sense of antisemitism that alarmed the university. You had “cancelled” yourself and you became an early, now unsung, victim of cancel culture. Thank Linda Sarsour for your fate.
Sirhan Sirhan, a rarity among “supporters” of “Palestine” in that he became a violent Christian terrorist. He decided to change the politics of the US, for the worse, with his act. His notoriety is in line with Loeb and Leopold, two murderers whom were rarely discuss. However, they were brilliant teenagers. We also do not discuss the Palestinian Arabs, in support of “Palestine,” murdered Leon Klinghoffer, a 69-year-old Jewish New Yorker who had been confined to a wheelchair since he was disabled by a stroke. The terrorists shot him in the head and threw his body, and his wheelchair, into the sea. That was their, as you so sweetly and innocently put it, “advocacy for Palestine.”
Sirhan does not represent “the Arab” in America. We do not even think of him, as we do not think of you, when “Arab” is the center of the conversation. Shirly Temper and her relatives come to mind. Saddam Hussein and Al-Assad, Arab leaders who have committed genocide come to mind. Arab-Americans never come to mind.
Here is the Sirhan that the US knows “Don’t you understand, I did kill the president. Kennedy would have been president. And if he was that pro-Israel when he wasn’t president, imagine how he would be as president. So I decided to change history.” and “he made up all that trance and hypnosis stuff . . . He told me the love for the Kennedys was declining, so now he wanted to make himself look more sympathetic in the media . . . I found out Sirhan was highly intelligent, one-directional, emotionless, and suspicious, the perfect terrorist;”
You are right about the continuous and monotonous labeling Sirhan as a Palestinian. It is pejorative. And to a majority of the world, and to many other Arabs, the Palestinians have earned that notoriety. There are too many Sirhans in Palestinian “civil” society, encouraging murder to change their world.
What your comment indicates is a failure of empathy evident in your desire to ascribe evil when it conforms to your worldview and your thinly veiled effort to equate pro-Palestinian advocacy as antisemitism. If you wanted to take a jab at Steven you should’ve just done that without the odious gaslighting and fake sanctimony. That at least would’ve been honest.
A failure of empathy for a terrorist who murdered an American Icon who would have done wonders for the people of the US, because of that terrorist’s hatred of Israel? Yes, I have no empathy for him.
No sanctimony required. Gaslighting is a form of psychological abuse where a person or group makes someone question their sanity, perception of reality, or memories. That does not appear in my post. I infer that Steve is minimizing what he did to be thrown out of academia. He infers, without proof, that Sirhan’s murder of the father of one of those that decided Salaita’s fate was a factor. Of course, that does not explain why his academic posting, in an Arab state, after that also ended in failure.
By Salaita’s own hand, his “advocacy” was expressed in antisemitic terms. Nothing thinly veiled. It was laid on as thick as he made it to be. He thought he was a academic superstar and could get away with it. It turned out that he is just dense matter. As they say, “he published and published, but perished anyway.”
Is the cause of the Palestinian Arabs righteous? Hardly. They claim to be victims, but they victimized themselves. They attempted genocide and were ruined for the effort. Their tactics and strategy horrify the conscience of mankind. Not every underdog is worthy of sympathy.
“… they victimized themselves. They attempted genocide and were ruined for the effort.”
What an ignorant and racist thing to say.
It is racist to tell the truth about the Palestinian Civil War, started by the Palestinian Arabs with genocidal intent? What is so racist about that?
It is also ignorant? That is the history of the conflict. Try to read more than Arab propaganda. Then you too will know the truth.
I guess you know nothing about the ruthess behavior and ongoing terrorism of Israel? Invaded and occupied Lebanon Syria and Palestine.All still occupied.
Wants US to go to war with Iran, who hasn’t invaded or occupied any country. Has nuclear weapons in violation of UN protocols.
Encouraging murder to change the world? That is Israel.
You expect Israel to turn over the Golan Heights to a genocidaire? Really? Lebanon is no longer occupied. Even the UN says Israel is not occupying Lebanon.
UN protocols do not forbid a state from having nuclear weapons. Even Russia and China, whose governments have murdered millions and China is committing genocide has nuclear weapons.
Iran is exporting terrorism, murders its own citizens, is run by an unstable theocracy, and is trying to acquire nuclear weapons, after threatening to annihilate Israel.
I guess? I know you know nothing.
Typical racist garbage, from a typical garbage racist.
Enough said.
Is this the typical intellectual reply of supporters of Dr. Salaita? Or is this the typical advocate of the Palestinian Arab cause who protests out of ignorance?
There’s little or no point trying to debate with Zionist apologists for apartheid, any more than convincing flat-earthers that our planet is round or climate change deniers that it’s warming. They can see only the well-funded propaganda that the taxpayers of the USA help apartheid Israel create.
You are really falling apart. Flat Earth? US Taxpayers funding propaganda? Screaming “racist garbage” is your idea of a debate? Is Simpson your cartoon name?
I don’t know what you could possibly be hallucinating about, but I see not a smidgen of anti-Semitic sentiment in this beautifully written piece. You seem to bring your fervid prejudice to the commentary you write because of a previous encounter with the writer as you seem to know of him. What does this say about you? That you’re a dishonest commenter because your commentary is not based on the content of the piece but on . You seem to ascribe anti-Semitism to the writer merely because he mentioned Israel in lees than positive light. Such hollow accusations of anti-Semitism doesn’t serve anyone well, least of all Jews. Next time, at least, strive to be honest and bold.
Nothing in the article concerning Sirhan Sirhan dealt with Jews or antisemitism.
What did deal with the above was Steven’s insistence that his contract to teach was voided because he supported the position of the Palestinian Arabs, which most consider a blatant lie: “I was fired from a tenured position at the University of Illinois. The reason: advocacy for Palestine.”
That was issue. His tweets in “support” were little but antisemitic screeches of the worst kind. The accusation was not hollow and Steven possesses the education to understand that the accusation was fairly accurate.
You summation that Steven’s statements were merely “mention(ing) Israel in less than positive light is absurd. What does this say about you?
Does any of this serve anyone? Has Salaita convinced any well-educated person?
I am honest and bold. Steven is admirable in that he allows me the space to criticize him and you. I know he believes he is right, that he is not just some antisemite trolling the internet. But he has wedded himself to a cause that not quite right, and to those whom believe genocide is the answer..
You’ll need to provide a link to those allegedly anti-Semitic tweeks by Mr Salaita. As for murder:
“… since May, more than 40 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank.
In a single week at the end of July, the Israeli military killed four Palestinians – one of them a child of 12. Two of the 40 were from one village, Beita, which lately has lost six of its residents; five were unarmed protesters, and one was a plumber reportedly summoned to fix a faucet somewhere. None of the four killed in late July posed any threat to the lives of any Israeli soldier or settler. Protected by a silenced media, Israelis were spared this ugly picture of their army and its brutal modus operandi. Protected by that silence, denial and repression, even Israeli politicians and generals were not made to explain or even address the fact that rarely a week goes by in the occupied territories without Palestinian casualties, even during this relatively quiet period.”
https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/israel-cold-blooded-killing-Palestinians-met-silence
Why do I need to provide a link? Are you so incompetent you cannot find the quotes? They are all over the internet. You post antisemitic propaganda all of the time. Surely you are an expert on the search functions. Do you still ask your mother to wipe your butt? I am not your Mom. Grow up. Or you can ask Steve. He is very honest about his tweets while he does tend to downplay what his words actually mean. You do trust Steve?
BTW, what does you post have to do with Sirhan Sirhan or Steven’s antisemitic tweets?
The Plumber: From MEE “An Israeli military spokeswoman said Salim had “advanced rapidly” towards Israeli troops, who reportedly fired warning shots in the air before shooting Salim.” Unfortunately, in a belligerent occupation, it is too often fire first, then ask. Oh well. Perhaps we can go back 73 years and tell the Arabs that waging a war with genocidal intent will give them unheard of dividend and never ending misery and humiliation.
@Sigman
your stubbornness and (Zionist) pride will be your downfall.
Going strong for 73 years while the Palestinian Arabs have been commemorating the Nakba – the never ending humiliation of having the butts handed to them by Jews. Your pride was your downfall. Your pride keeps you from rising.
I’ve found this so many times: far-right trolls such as the one on this site will make unsubstantiated claims; when evidence is demanded, they tell you to look for it yourself, why should they do the work for you, etc. The truth is, as in this case, that there is little or no evidence – it’s their bigoted opinion.
Simpson,
It is often the actual troll calling out those whose opinions, based on facts, show the troll to be an uneducated propagandist. Steven’s antisemitic comments are quite easy to find on the internet. That you refuse to look for them yourself is quite suspicious. The fact that most of your statements are little but misinformation adds to the suspicion.
Truth is truth. Something that seems to permanently escape you as it does not serve your agenda.
Here is an outstanding example of trying to change antisemitic remarks into criticism of Israel:
“Earlier today, we complained to Daily Mail editors about an article by Sam Baker falsely claiming that Professor David Miller was dismissed by Bristol University due to his ‘comments about Israel’. We demonstrated that he was sacked due to his record of conspiratorial antisemitic statements, some of which were directed towards the Jewish students he was teaching – and which reportedly led to Jewish students on campus being subjected to harassment and abuse.”
https://camera-uk.org/2021/10/07/daily-mail-editors-provide-post-truth-response-to-our-complaint/?fbclid=IwAR0suRQGcEyrxH7RYP_SAzC4eMJmFchuvBta2xpJgDFjq12FeUxZW2ies2Q
Perhaps most demoralizing of all was the continuing capture and control of the narrative – the “Occupation of the American Mind” — by Israeli hasbara that has mischaracterized the facts on the ground over there for my entire lifetime and resulted in the marginalization and silencing of Palestinian and anti-Zionist voices by the mainstream media, the Israel lobby, the Israeli Ministry of Strategic Affairs and the cacophony of “pro-Israel” supporters who together have made Palestinians out to be terrorists and their Israeli oppressors victims; when in fact, the Israeli state and settler violence arrayed against the Palestinians has always dwarfed that of the resistance. It has been a remarkable feat of propaganda and narrative control to carry out these crimes against humanity and slowly but inexorably Judaicizing the Land” Pretending to be yearning for a two-state solution while deliberately taking steps to kill any prospect of it. The hasbara has seemed as impenetrable as the Apartheid system it supports.”
Robert Herbst
https://mondoweiss.net/2021/05/lets-have-a-frank-talk-about-israeli-oppression-and-antisemitism/
MondoWeiss? That is your source? The borderline antisemitic e-Zine? That is your what your racism is based upon? Really?
Are you denying that there are Palestinian Arab terrorists? Are you saying that the Palestinian Arabs that murdered a pregnant mom with her 4 pre-teen daughters was a patriotic Palestinian Arab freedom fighter?
While the only viable solution is the two-state solution, few Israelis are enthusiastic about that solution, even though they know it is the right decision. With all of the Palestinian Arabs murdering Jews (and a few Arabs who automatically become martyrs) because they are Jews, the Israeli public is lukewarm about rewarding such behavior.
They are also aghast about how so many ignorant people support the palestinian Arabs in this conflict. It is so 1984ish!
There are so many buffoons who spout Apartheid, genocide, and crimes against humanity (building a home is now a crime against humanity if a Jew does it) that it seems like the Palestinian Arab “advocacy” lobby is made up of Ronal McDonald and Bozo wannabes.
Give it a rest, Clowny.
Dear Jack Frank Sigman,
The difference supporters of apartheid in South Africa (people like your parents) and Israeli-apartheid apologists (like you) is that the former could retreat into obscurity, and always deny their racist past, while your shame will live eternally on the Internet, much to the shame of your children, grand children and great grandchildren.
Dear Poyan,
An interesting analysis of your prejudicial mindset. My children are well aware of the genocidal intent of the majority of the Palestinian Arab community. They are aware that the true Nakba is the humiliating loss of that war against the Jews, waged with genocidal intent. They are proud of their father’s writing and publications that expose the duplicity of those who support the Palestinian Arab cause.
I do not know my parents thoughts concerning the issue of South Africa. I do know that Israel is not an Apartheid state except in the minds of the humiliated and antisemites.
But thank you for commenting.
This is what a mind actually poisomed by hate sounds like: “…the genocidal intent of the majority of the Palestinian Arab community…”
Really? I can assure you that the vast majority of any oppressed people simply want to be able to live, just as you do. But, sure, dehumanize the “enemy” and claim that anyone who points out the obvious is an “antisemite”…
John, your assurances are rather meaningless when it comes to the murderous campaigns of the Palestinian Arabs.
It’s gratifying to see a gradual turning-away from apartheid Israel by increasing numbers of ordinary people around the world. No longer is that racist settler-colony seen as an aspirational project but rather the reality: brutal oppression of Palestinians, snipers murdering children, police treating Ethiopian Jews as third-class citizens, democratic rights only for one ethnic group. There is hope! Witness these courageous people here in Britain:
“Since 6:30 this morning, Palestine Action activists have been occupying the Elbit Ferranti factory in Oldham, Greater Manchester. The site, used for production of a range of Israeli weapons technologies, has been blockaded – with vehicles obstructing entrances and activists locked onto gates. The factory building has been scaled and the site fully occupied, as activists prevent operations and the production of arms bound for Israel. Those occupying the site intend for the action to be as disruptive as possible, and have begun dismantling premises by smashing windows and have covered factory premises in blood-red paint.
This action is being taken to undermine the production of weapons and military components by Israel’s largest arms company, Elbit Systems, who market their products as “battle-tested” on Palestinians.”
https://palestineaction.org/arms-halted-oldham/
It seems that ordinary people are on to the terrorism committed by the supporters of the murderous Palestinians. These are the comments from the British papers carrying the event:
“Go protest outside the Iranian and Syrian embassy then as they supplies missiles ( unguided and totally indiscrimate btw) to Hamas/Palestine ILLEGALLY of course. Elbit Sytems supply equipment LEGAL and compliant with British law, but then again the law doesn’t mean anything to you bunch of vandals does it.”
“If these people want to support the Palestinian cause why not go live there …….please”
“This is why the new policing law is being created, because people can’t protest peacefully. I am all for stopping the innocent lives being lost, but damaging property here isn’t going to stop it, go to the embassy. Two wrongs don’t make a right.”
Thanks for this thoughtful essay on someone of whom I knew little, being a Brit for whom Robert Kennedy meant little. Clearly, judging by some comments here, you touched a nerve.
“The United States, an experiment with so much promise” is a strange assertion. Promise for whom? Not for many, only the few. The USA was and remains a settler-colonial project, viable only by the enslavement of millions of people torn from their communities and societies to spend their whole lives in grinding poverty, working free of charge to make the cotton plantations economically practicable. Then as now, the value of their labour flowed upwards to make a few people immensely wealthy. What promise did that make, what did it fulfil?
All of the dubiously convenient (U.S.) political assassinations of the ’60s can be linked to the vendetta endgame of one man: Lyndon Baines Johnson.
After having been the “go-to”, across-the-board powerbroker of the U.S. Senate (between 1948-1960): Johnson ABSOLUTELY HATED the notion of piggy-backing on the careers of Northeastern, monied Yankee prettyboys the Kennedys. Johnson could never live down how the country never (in his mind) warmed-to his gruff, bullying and unrefined Texan image (when Texas was a solidly BLUE STATE for much of the twentieth century; even though it was later revealed LBJ had, in fact, been a key backstage figure in politically ousting a Congressional Democrat incumbent George H.W. Bush would wind-up starting a “carpetbagged” civilian political career in the district of in 1964!) and give him the ultimate prize of The White House — WITHOUT the Kennedy spectre constantly looming over him.
Johnson had been infuriated how; during JFK’s presidency, JFK would confer with his brother (RFK) the Attorney General, even before conferring with Johnson on issues as the then-Vice President. There was an underlying feud between Johnson and the Kennedys on SO MANY different levels.
However, as all the tumult of the ’60s unfolded more and more, by 1968: a clear progressive narrative had emerged from the political underground and, had recognized LBJ was lying about Vietnam on a daily basis and the whole war was looking like a futile imperialist effort (amounting to 550,000 troops by 1968) to satisfy defense industry/Red-baiting (Republican) politicians; in exchange for: (the appearance of bipartisan) support for Civil Rights bills and funding the Great Society programs. Robert Kennedy was the first Left of center mainstream Democrat to call (both) LBJ as well as his Vice President (Hubert Humphrey) out on it. This sent a complete shockwave through the DNC establishment at the time.
One historical caveat to what the then-prospective power jockeying of what would’ve been a R.F. Kennedy vs. Hubert Humphrey convention showdown (would have, undoubtedly) caused, would’ve concerned this: there was known widespread corruption involving LBJ’s Supreme Court appointment of justice Abe Fortas in 1965. The corruption centered around Fortas’ relationship to a USSEC federally indicted, Manhattan real estate/insider trader named Louis Wolfson. Fortas had been hired as a lawyer of Wolfson’s on $20,000 lifetime retainer. RFK, being one of N.Y.’s senators, OBVIOUSLY would’ve known about the case and (logically) have made it a further point of distinction between himself and the old/backroom/DNC party-hack types sympathetic to the LBJ/Humphrey/William Daley bureaucrats. If things had worked out differently: Nixon just may NOT have backed-into the White House in 1968 with the narrowest margin of victory since 1912. [Fortas ultimately resigned from the Supreme Court in 1969 while Wolfson was convicted and sentenced to a mere nine months at an Air Force prison base.]
At least there (once) was a shining moment in America when such diabolicism was allowed to be publicized in full view by a vigilant population. No amount of money, though, will ever subvert the axiom: the truth shall set you free!
As always, a thoughtful, beautifully reflective piece of writing, Steven.
Thank you, Marcy!–Steve
I don’t know how old the author is but it’s odd that he does not know that Sirhan Sirhan was not labelled a Palestinian at the time of the assassination and for many years after.
He was always referred to as a “Jordanian.” Check the media from 1968 through the 70’s.
So much for a big chunk of your thesis.
Laurent Guyenot has researched and written extensively on the Zionist ties to the Kennedy assassinations. JFK , while friendly to Israel, absolutely did not want them to develop nukes – he was insistent on inspections at Dimona. And he wanted the Zionist Organization of America and all Zionist orgs to register as agents of a foreign power. If anyone can even begin to understand how vital these two issues in particular were to Israel…
That’s really interesting. I was unaware of Kennedy’s views on Israel. If only those two wishes had been granted. Apartheid Israel would likely be a far more democratic country.
Laurent Guyenot is an antisemitic conspiracy nutcase as well as a holocaust inverter. He blames the victims. Jewish children deserved to die because Some within Jewish leadership in the US decided to economically boycott Nazi Germany in 1933. So glad he is your hero. It explains a lot.
I don’t believe that Sirhan Sirhan killed RFK and neither does Lisa Pease, in her well-researched book “A Lie Too Big to Fail,” (reviewed here: https://pasadenaweekly.com/lisa-pease-uncovers-new-evidence-in-the-50-year-lisa-pease-uncovers-new-evidence-in-the-50-year-old-rfk-assassination-in-her-new-book-a-lie-too-big-to-failold-rfk-assassination-in-he/). Also, my father worked with Sirhan at the Ambassador Hotel, they were about the same age in 1968, and he once told me he didn’t believe in Sirhan’s guilt either, and that there was surely at least one other shooter, likely CIA, in the kitchen that night. In any event, Newsom caved and denied Sirhan parole, so he’ll continue rotting in prison, while the real killer(s) enjoy their freedom, if they’re not already plant food.