Understanding RFK's assassination as Palestinian terror

[Mosby]

7. His hatred of Israel is part of the court record

Last edited Tue Jun 11, 2013, 05:27 PM - Edit history (1)

He made his motivation clear to the police and also during the trial and subsequent interviews.

Sirhan is an Arab Christian who was born in Jerusalem and who strongly opposed Israel. In 1989, he told David Frost, "My only connection with Robert Kennedy was his sole support of Israel and his deliberate attempt to send those 50 bombers to Israel to obviously do harm to the Palestinians." Some scholars believe that the assassination was the first major incident of political violence in the United States stemming from the Arab–Israeli conflict in the Middle East.

A motive cited for his actions is the Middle East conflict.[17] After his arrest, Sirhan said, "I can explain it. I did it for my country."[17] Sirhan believed he was deliberately betrayed by Kennedy's support for Israel in the June 1967 Six-Day War,[26] which had begun exactly one year to the day before the assassination. During a search of Sirhan's apartment after his arrest, a spiral-bound notebook was found containing a diary entry which demonstrated that his anger had gradually fixated on Robert Kennedy, who had promised to send 50 fighter jets to Israel if he were elected president. Sirhan's journal entry of May 18, 1968, read: "My determination to eliminate R.F.K. is becoming the more and more of an unshakable obsession...Kennedy must die before June 5th


During Sirhan's testimony, Cooper asked him to explain his reasons for the attack on Kennedy. Sirhan launched into "a vicious diatribe about the Middle East conflict between Arab and Jew".[13][17] Defense counsel Emile Zola Berman, who was Jewish, was upset by Sirhan's statements and expressed his intentions to resign from the defense team. Berman was eventually talked out of resigning by Cooper and stayed until the end of the trial.


Later in prison, Sirhan stated that his motivation was anger fueled by liquor. An interview with Sirhan in 1980 revealed new claims that a combination of liquor and anger over the anniversary of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war triggered his actions the night he assassinated RFK. "You must remember the circumstances of that night, June 5. That was when I was provoked," Sirhan says, recorded in a transcript of one of his interviews with Mehdi, later president of the New York-based American-Arab Relations Committee. "That is when I initially went to observe the Jewish Zionist parade in celebration of the June 5, 1967, victory over the Arabs. That was the catalyst that triggered me on that night." Then Sirhan said, "In addition, there was the consumption of the liquor, and I want the public to understand that..

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sirhan_Sirhan