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We moved to California in 1963 after the end of the school year. Pres. Kennnedy paid a visit to the Naval Ordinance Test Station China Lake in June of that year. I really don't remember much of that event when I was nine. Moving from the East Coast to the desert was too much of a shock to my psyche.
He was assassinated that November. Being a self-absorbed fifth grader, I did not understand why all the sixth graders were so upset that day at school. It eventually sunk in at home. Kennedy had to overcome resistance to his Catholicism in 1960 to get elected. It was just 36 years before that the Indiana KKK went to the Notre Dame campus to rumble.
The memory comes to the surface when I hear of the kind of things being shouted out at Palin rallies. Hate is not helping my 401k. John "Country First" McCain takes no responsibility for these outbursts. Remind you of "No one could imagine . . ."? The traditional media was mostly silent as this was being built on weeks of dog whistles and drum beats. John McCain never lost his base. How did we get to this point?
Independent, The (London), Nov 13, 2000 by Eric Silver
AFTER THE Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated five years ago this month, his widow Leah cast herself as the unforgiving scourge of the Israeli right, which she blamed for fostering the atmosphere in which a Jewish radical, Yigal Amir, pulled the trigger. She constantly chastised the West Bank settlers and other opponents of the Oslo peace agreement for hounding her husband as a "traitor".
When young peace campaigners went to her Tel Aviv flat to comfort her after the murder, she asked them accusingly why they hadn't come during the long months when Rabin's abusers picketed them there every weekend. She shunned the Likud leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, who had spoken at a Jerusalem rally in which demonstrators brandished photo-montages of Rabin in Nazi uniform.
Hours after Rabin's state funeral, Leah told an Israeli television interviewer: "There definitely was incitement which was strongly absorbed and which found itself a murderer, who did this because he had the support of a broad public." Earlier, when Rabin's coffin was lying in state, she frostily told an opposition leader who came to pay his respects, "It's too late."
Along with Shimon Peres, who shared the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize with Rabin and Yasser Arafat, she saw herself as the custodian of the Oslo process. In one of her last interviews, when she was dying of lung cancer, she reproached Ehud Barak for abandoning the gradualist strategy of the 1993 accords and trying to solve all the problems in the century-long Israeli-Palestinian conflict before completing the necessary foundation of mutual trust. Only last week, she urged the Prime Minister to let Peres meet Arafat and seek a ceasefire.
I thought back to the Israeli-Palestinian Peace talks in Shepherdstown. Why the breakdown? There was a lack of trust from years of hateful speech on the radio and in the streets, let alone the situation of the ground. Prime Minister Rabin of Israel was assassinated by his own countryman, one of his own faith even. How did the Israelis get there?
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