Segacs's World I Know

Posts Tagged ‘yitzchak rabin’

Canadian PM Paul Martin is sending Pierre Pettigrew to Arafat’s funeral to represent Canada.

I wish Canada would have the guts to boycott altogeher. But I suppose that’s unreasonable seeing as how the USA, the UK, the EU states, and just about everyone else is sending representation. Canada has never been willing to take a moral stand on anything else, so why would they now?

Martin is also calling for renewed peace efforts in the wake of Arafat’s death, perpetuating the myth that now that Arafat’s gone, the Palestinian people are suddenly ready to renounce terrorism and make peace:

“Chairman Arafat’s influence on regional and global events has been undeniable. While comprehensive peace between Israelis and Palestinians was never attained in his lifetime, chairman Arafat’s efforts, along with those of Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, were recognized in 1994 with the Nobel Peace Prize.”

This day is turning into one long gagging opportunity. Even as Israel makes conciliatory statements, the Palestinians are already blaming Arafat’s death on Israel and calling for a renewed wave of attacks, in what is sure to be an emerging power struggle for the Palestinian leadership where the repulsive mark of victory is the number of dead Jews each group can claim credit for:

Hamas’ top political leader, Khaled Mashaal, told Al-Jazeera television by telephone Thursday, “I hold Israel responsible for the crime of killing Abu Ammar [Arafat].” He offered no evidence.

[ . . . ]

“Yes, death is an act of God and a man the age of brother Abu Ammar may die a natural death, but all the circumstances which we have seen in the past two weeks and medical reports indicate that brother Abu Ammar had been poisoned,” Mashaal said.

[ . . . ]

“The loss of the great leader will increase our determination and steadfastness to continue Jihad and resistance against the Zionist enemy until victory and liberation is achieved,” Hamas said in statement.

The world just doesn’t get it. Arafat led his people towards hatred. He was a terrorist. He invented much of modern terrorism and he offered it as the only path to his people. None of that will be undone overnight by his death. In fact, with Hamas or the Islamic Jihad standing to gain power from this “tranisition”, things may get a whole lot worse before they get better.

There’s a certain category of people – mostly women – who seem to be inexplicably attracted to the scummiest of bottom-feeding scum. And nowhere is that truer than among relationships between prisoners (often murderers on death row, or sadistic serial killers, for example) and the people who love and even marry them.

So it doesn’t surprise me too much that Yigal Amir, the assassin of Yitzchak Rabin, is engaged.

But now he’s asking permission to have kids through artificial insemination:

Yigal Amir, assassin of prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, plans to ask the Tel Aviv District Court on Monday to allow him and his fianc e, Larisa Trimbobler, an immigrant from the former Soviet Union, and a divorced mother of four, to have children through artificial insemination if the court forbids them from holding conjugal visits, Channel 2 reported.

Amir is serving a life sentence for assassinating Rabin in 1995, while his brother, Hagai, is serving a 16-year jail term for complicity in the murder.

Amir’s attorney Shmuel Kasper said his client will ask the court to be permitted to marry and to hold conjugal visits, but if his requests are denied he will ask to be allowed to undergo artificial insemination, a request the prosecution will have difficulty arguing against since there is no apparent security risk in donating sperm.

In fact, it would seem an odd request, if one didn’t know that Amir is an ultra-religious wingnut who believed that killing Rabin was the “will of G-d”. Words fail me to describe the level of contempt in which I hold pond scum like him. But at any rate, his twisted religious mind somehow had a foundation in Jewish law, which dictates that he should “be fruitful and multiply”. And I guess this poor idiotic woman is willing to help him out.

In my opinion, he shouldn’t be allowed to reproduce. But I don’t see how the courts would realistically deny him this right. That’s democracy for you… you can assassinate a Prime Minister and still get married and have children. Sometimes things just seem backwards.

Forgive me for saying this, but in a strange way today feels like 9/11.

Of course, there is no comparison between the horrid loss of over 3000 lives due to a cowardly terrorist attack, and the tragic loss of 7 astronauts due to a scientific error, accident, or malfunction. I wouldn’t even begin to equate the two in terms of scope, implication, or anything else.

That being said, both days have that “twilight-zone” sort of feeling to them like they’re not quite real. Both are disasters that will go down in the history of the United States and that draw sympathy from the world. Both events are those kinds of days that, decades later, I know I will always remember exactly where I was and what I was doing when I first heard – and so will just about everyone else.

In both cases, I heard about what happened on the radio, while only semi-listening. Both on 9/11 and today, a news brief broke into the middle of a music sweep on an FM station – an unusual occurrence. And in both cases, I initially reacted with denial, thinking it was some sort of sick practical joke, and not fully processing what I was hearing. The denial then gave way to shock, and amazingly enough, in both cases I went ahead with my regular daily activities for a few hours (on 9/11 I went to class, and today I went skiing). Both on 9/11 and today, I returned home and glued myself to CNN, and only then did it begin to sink in. In both cases, the aftermath will be much more involved than the actual event.

Like I said, forgive me for feeling this way. But events like today’s tend to leave me shaken.

I’ll always remember when I heard that Yitzchak Rabin was shot.

I’ll always remember when I heard that a bomb went off at Hebrew University . . . at the Sbarro Pizzeria . . . at a Passover seder in Netanya . . . at the Dolphanarium Disco . . . in downtown Tel Aviv . . .

I will always remember when I heard that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center.

And I will probably always remember when I heard that the Columbia Space Shuttle was lost.

In memory of the astronauts of the Columbia Space Shuttle, February 1, 2003