Good piece by Prof. Gil Troy.
Even then, "lone wolves" were being called "mentally disturbed", or crazy "individual losers" or some such nonsense in order to obfuscate the true nature of their motivation.
Here, Troy waslks us through.
"Sirhan Sirhan, a 24-year-old Christian Arab born in Jerusalem, who
had immigrated with his family to the US when he was 12, said, when
arrested, "I can explain it. I did it for my country." In his notebooks,
he had scribbled: "Kennedy must die by June 5th,” the Six-Day War
anniversary."
"Further proof of Sirhan Sirhan’s identity as a
Palestinian terrorist came in March 1973, when Black September
terrorists took diplomats hostage at the Saudi Embassy in Khartoum,
Sudan. The terrorists demanded a prisoner exchange, which included
Sirhan. Eventually, Yasir Arafat ordered his henchmen to murder the
three Western diplomats, a Belgian and two Americans -- a brutal crime
that also was frequently overlooked."
"Sirhan’s defense fed the
confusion. Sirhan’s ironically named Jewish defense attorney, Emile Zola
Berman, argued diminished capacity, calling Sirhan an “immature,
emotionally disturbed and mentally ill youth.”
"But reasons for
denying Sirhan’s true intentions, and soft-pedaling totalitarian
Palestinian terrorism, run deeper. Palestinian rejectionist terrorism
was in its infancy in those pre-Munich Olympics massacre, pre-Entebbe
hijacking days. Americans were in collective denial regarding the toxic
strain of anti-Americanism providing oxygen to Palestinian totalitarian
terrorism, lying at the ideological intersection of Arab nationalism and
Third Worldism, not yet inflamed by Islamism."
