On August 7, 1970, Mark Lane wrote an article for The Los Angeles Free Press entitled “CIA Killed JFK to Keep War Going.”471 This cannot be true. Neither the CIA nor the Pentagon wanted to “keep the war going.” What the hawks wanted was to quickly end the war by a full scale American victory. If there was one country that had an interest in keeping and maximizing the tension while avoiding a decisive clash, it was clearly Israel.
Serial Assassinations
On April 4, 1968, Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. was killed in circumstances not unlike those surrounding the murder of the late President Kennedy. The name, portrait, and profile of the alleged lone sniper were broadcast almost instantly. As William Pepper, King’s friend and attorney, has shown in An Act of State: The Execution of Martin Luther King (2003), the mentally deficient James Earl Ray had been handled by some unidentified “Raul” (possibly connected to Jack Ruby), who had arranged for his housing in a room overlooking King’s balcony at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, and for a gun to be found under his window with his fingerprints on it. The lawyer appointed to defend Ray had no trouble convincing him to plead guilty in hopes of receiving leniency from the court. Nobody paid attention when Ray recanted three days later, maintaining his innocence thereafter until his death in 1998. Reverend King had embarrassed Johnson’s government through his stance against the Vietnam War, and further through his project to gather “a multiracial army of the poor” in a “Poor People’s Campaign” that would march on Washington and camp on Capitol Hill until Congress signed a “Declaration of the Human Rights of the Poor.”
Since it is seldom pointed out, it is worth emphasizing that King had also strongly disappointed the Jewish-Zionist community, who felt he had never paid back an important debt. King had received strong support—in money, legal advice, media coverage, and other areas—from American Jews, leading to his receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964. Many Jews had helped organize his march on Washington, DC, which culminated in his famous “I have a dream” speech of August 28, 1963, in front of the Lincoln Memorial. As Seth Berkman recalled on the fortieth anniversary of that historic landmark: “Arnie Aronson was a little-known but crucial organizer; Rabbi Uri Miller recited the opening prayer; Rabbi Joachim Prinz delivered a stirring speech just before King’s historic words.” It was the same Joachim Prinz who had in 1934 applauded the Nazi state for being “built upon the principle of the purity of nation and race,” now claiming that Jews have always taught “that when God created man, he created him as everybody’s neighbor.”472
In return for their support, Zionists expected from King some friendly gesture toward Israel. He was officially invited more than once to Israel, but always politely declined (“too busy”). According to Haaretz, “Documents that have come to light 45 years after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. show Israel’s efforts to woo the civil rights leader—a campaign that never came to fruition.”473 After 1967, black nationalists, such as SNCC’s leadership, became increasingly critical of Israel. There was a rift within the civil rights movement, many resenting the disproportionate presence of Jews. King’s visit to Israel would have broken the movement apart. Whether or not King was assassinated for failing to pay his debt, it is a matter of record that, after his death, Zionists abused his legacy by pretending he had expressed support for Israel in a letter written to an anti-Zionist friend, containing the following passage: “You declare, my friend; that you do not hate the Jews, you are merely ‘anti-Zionist’ […]. And I say, let the truth ring forth from the high mountain tops, let it echo through the valleys of God’s green earth: When people criticize Zionism, they mean Jews […]. Anti-Semitism, the hatred of the Jewish people, has been and remains a blot on the soul of mankind. In this we are in full agreement. So know also this: Anti-Zionist is inherently anti-Semitic, and ever will be so.”
This letter is a hoax. It first appeared in the book Shared Dreams: Martin Luther King, Jr. & the Jewish Community by Rabbi Marc Schneier (1999), an attempt to fight against rising black anti-Semitism, naively forwarded by Dr. King’s son, Martin Luther King III. Although fully proven fake, it has since been reprinted in many books and web pages. The Anti-Defamation League’s Michael Salberg used that very quote in his July 31, 2001, testimony before the US House of Representatives International Relations Committee’s Subcommittee on International Operations and Human Rights.474 And so King provided, once dead, the very support to Israel that he had always refused to give when alive.
Two months after King’s death, it was the turn of Robert Kennedy, John’s younger brother and former attorney general—and a strong supporter of King—to be assassinated in a still more bizarre way. On March 16, 1968, Robert had announced his candidacy for the presidency. All those who had mourned John found hope that Robert would regain control of the White House and, from there, reopen the investigation into his brother’s death. He was assassinated on June 6 in Los Angeles, just after winning the California primaries and thereby becoming the most likely Democratic candidate. The presumed assassin, Sirhan Sirhan, has always claimed, and continues to claim, that he has never had any recollection of his act: “I was told by my attorney that I shot and killed Senator Robert F. Kennedy and that to deny this would be completely futile, [but] I had and continue to have no memory of the shooting of Senator Kennedy.” He also claims to have no memory of “many things and incidents which took place in the weeks leading up to the shooting.”475
Psychiatric expertise, including lie-detector tests, have confirmed that Sirhan’s amnesia is not faked. In 2008, Harvard University professor Daniel Brown, a noted expert in hypnosis and trauma-induced memory loss, interviewed Sirhan for a total of sixty hours, and concluded that Sirhan, who belongs to the category of “high hypnotizables,” acted involuntarily under the effect of hypnotic suggestion: “His firing of the gun was neither under his voluntary control, nor done with conscious knowledge, but is likely a product of automatic hypnotic behavior and coercive control.” During his sessions with Dr. Brown, Sirhan could remember having been accompanied by a sexy woman, before suddenly finding himself at a shooting range. According to Brown, “Mr. Sirhan did not go with the intent to shoot Senator Kennedy, but did respond to a specific hypnotic cue given to him by that woman to enter ‘range mode,’ during which Mr. Sirhan automatically and involuntarily responded with a ‘flashback’ that he was shooting at a firing range at circle targets.” Months after Sirhan recalled these details, Dr. William Pepper found an entry in the police file that showed that Sirhan had visited a police firing range and signed the register just days before the assassination. He was handled by a man who did not sign the register.476
Available information is too sketchy to reconstitute entirely how Sirhan was programmed. We know that he had been treated by a neurosurgeon after a head injury, after which his behavior had changed, according to his mother. We also know he was interested in occultism and attended the Rosicrucian order AMORC, founded by Spencer Lewis. Sirhan may have fallen into the hands of an agent working for CIA MKUltra projects, supervised by the infamous Dr. Sidney Gottlieb (not a Nazi doctor, incidentally, but the son of Hungarian Jews whose real name was Joseph Scheider). Under Gottlieb’s supervision, teams working on a research project named Bluebird had to answer such questions as: “Can a person under hypnosis be forced to commit murder?” according to a document dated May 1951.477
One person who may have been involved in Sirhan’s programming, and who reportedly bragged about it to two prostitutes, is famed hypnotist Dr. William Joseph Bryan Jr. Bryan makes no secret of having worked for the Air Force in the “brainwashing section.” His biggest claim to fame, which he bragged about all the time, was how he had hypnotized the Boston Strangler, Albert Di Salvo, into confessing to the crime. In the notebook found at his home, Sirhan Sirhan had written, in the same style reminiscent of automatic writing as other incriminating words: “God help me . . . please help me. Salvo Di Di Salvo Die S Salvo.” It is surmised he heard the
name while under hypnosis.478
Other pages of the same notebook, which Sirhan recognizes as his own handwriting but does not remember writing, are also reminiscent of automatic writing: “My determination to eliminate R.F.K. is becoming more the more of an unshakable obsession . . . R.F.K. must die RFK must be killed. Robert F. Kennedy must be assassinated R.F.K. must be assassinated . . . R.F.K. must be assassinated assassinated . . . Robert F. Kennedy must be assassinated before 5 June 68 Robert F. Kennedy must be assassinated I have never heard please pay to the order of of of of of.”479
Besides the question of Sirhan’s programming, there are serious ballistic and forensic contradictions in the official explanation of Kennedy’s murder. Evidence suggests that, in fact, none of Sirhan’s bullets hit Kennedy. For according to the autopsy report of Chief Medical Examiner-Coroner Dr. Thomas T. Noguchi, Robert Kennedy died of a gunshot wound to the brain, fired from behind the right ear at point blank range, following an upward angle. Noguchi restated his conclusion in his 1983 memoirs, Coroner, and his conclusion has been backed by other professionals. Yet the sworn testimony of twelve shooting witnesses established that Robert had never turned his back on Sirhan and that Sirhan was five to six feet away from his target when he fired. Moreover, Sirhan was physically overpowered by Karl Uecker after his second shot, and, although he continued pressing the trigger mechanically, his revolver was then not directed toward Kennedy. Tallying all the bullet impacts in the pantry, and those that wounded five people around Kennedy, shows that at least twelve bullets were fired, while Sirhan’s gun carried only eight. On April 23, 2011, attorneys William Pepper and his associate, Laurie Dusek, gathered all this evidence and more in a 58–page file submitted to the Court of California, asking that Sirhan’s case be reopened. They documented major irregularities in the 1968 trial, including the fact that laboratory tests showed the fatal bullet had not been shot from Sirhan’s revolver, but from another gun with a different serial number; thus, instead of incriminating Sirhan, the ballistic test in fact should have proved him innocent. Pepper has also provided a computer analysis of audio recordings during the shooting, made by engineer Philip Van Praag in 2008, which confirms that two guns are heard.480
There are strong suspicions that the second shooter was Thane Eugene Cesar, a security guard hired for the evening, who was behind Kennedy at the time of shooting, and seen with his pistol drawn by several witnesses, one of whom, Don Schulman, positively saw him fire. Cesar was never investigated, even though he did not conceal his hatred for the Kennedys, who according to him had “sold the country down the road to the commies.”481
Just hours after Robert’s assassination, the press was able to inform the American people not only of the identity of the assassin, but also his motive, and even his detailed biography. Twenty-four-year-old Sirhan Bishara Sirhan was born in Jordan and had moved to the United States when his family was expelled from West Jerusalem in 1948. After the shooting, a newspaper clipping was found in Sirhan’s pocket, quoting favorable comments made by Robert regarding Israel and, in particular, what sounded like an electoral commitment: “The United States should without delay sell Israel the 50 Phantom jets she has so long been promised.” Handwritten notes by Sirhan found in a notebook at his home confirmed that his act had been premeditated and motivated by hatred of Israel. Jerry Cohen of The Los Angeles Times wrote, in a front page article on June 6, that Sirhan is “described by acquaintances as a ‘virulent’ anti-Israeli,” (Cohen changed that into “virulent anti-Semite” in an article for The Salt Lake Tribune), and that: “Investigation and disclosures from persons who knew him best revealed [him] as a young man with a supreme hatred for the state of Israel.” Cohen infers that “Senator Kennedy […] became a personification of that hatred because of his recent pro-Israeli statements.” Cohen further learned from Los Angeles Mayor Samuel Yorty that: “About three weeks ago the young Jordanian refugee accused of shooting Sen. Robert Kennedy wrote a memo to himself, […] The memo said: ‘Kennedy must be assassinated before June 5, 1968’—the first anniversary of the Six-Day War in which Israel humiliated three Arab neighbors, Egypt, Syria and Jordan.” In a perhaps cryptic final note, Cohen cited Prof. Joseph Eliash of UCLA, who remarked that “his middle name, Bashara, means ‘good news’.”482
In 2008, on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of Bobby’s assassination, this tragic day was installed into the post-9/11 mythology of the Clash of Civilizations and the War on Terror. The Jewish Daily Forward wrote: “One cannot help but note the parallel between Kennedy’s assassination and the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. In both tragic cases, Arab fanaticism reared its ugly head on American soil, irrevocably changing the course of events in this country.” “Robert Kennedy was the first American victim of modern Arab terrorism.” “Sirhan hated Kennedy because he had supported Israel.” Writing for the Boston Globe, Sasha Issenberg recalled that the death of Robert Kennedy was “a first taste of Mideast terror.” He quotes Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz, a former volunteer in Robert Kennedy’s campaign (better known as Jonathan Pollard’s lawyer), reflecting: “I thought of it as an act of violence motivated by hatred of Israel and of anybody who supported Israel,” “It was in some ways the beginning of Islamic terrorism in America. It was the first shot. A lot of us didn’t recognize it at the time.”483 The fact that Sirhan was from a Christian family was lost on Dershowitz, who speaks of “Islamic terrorism.” But The Jewish Forward took care to specify Sirhan’s faith, only to add that Islam ran in his veins anyway: “But what he shared with his Muslim cousins—the perpetrators of September 11—was a visceral, irrational hatred of Israel. It drove him to murder a man whom some still believe might have been the greatest hope of an earlier generation.”484
For The Jewish Forward, it seems, the point was to remind the Jews: “See, it’s always the same eternal hatred of Jews and Israel.” For The Boston Globe, the point was rather to tell Americans: “We are all Israelis.” (The Boston Globe is owned by The New York Times, controlled by the Sulzberger family, although Dershowitz would dismiss such a remark as “nonsense” in a 2010 article, “Do Jews Control the Media?”)485
If Sirhan was, like Oswald, a patsy, only of a more sophisticated type (a Manchurian candidate), the next question is: who had an interest in having people believe that Robert was killed by a fanatic Palestinian motivated by hatred of Israel? To raise the question is to answer it. But then, we are faced with a dilemma, for if Robert Kennedy was supportive of Israel, why would Israel kill him? The dilemma is an illusion, since it rests on a misleading assumption, which is part of the deception: in reality, Robert Kennedy was not pro-Israel. He was simply campaigning. As everyone knows, a few good wishes and empty promises to Israel are an inescapable ritual in such circumstances. And Robert’s statement in an Oregon synagogue, mentioned in the May 27 Pasadena Independent Star-News article found in Sirhan’s pocket, didn’t exceed the minimal requirements. Its author David Lawrence had, in an earlier article entitled “Paradoxical Bob,” underlined how little credit should be given to such electoral promises: “Presidential candidates are out to get votes and some of them do not realize their own inconsistencies.” As for the documentary aired on May 20, 1968, mentioning Robert’s trip in Palestine in 1948, it was another campaign ad aimed at Jewish voters. When Robert Kennedy had visited Palestine, one month before Israel declared its independence, he was twenty-two years old. In the series of articles he drew from that trip for The Boston Globe, he praised the pioneer spirit of the Zionists, and expressed the hope that: “If a Jewish state is formed it will be the only remaining stabilizing factor in the near and far East.” But he had also voiced the fears of the Arabs in quite prophetic terms:
“The Arabs are most concerned about the great increase in the Jews in Palestine: 80,000 in 1948. The Arabs have always feared this encroachment and maintain that the Jews will never be satisfied with just their section of Palestine, but will gradually move to overpower the rest of
the country and will eventually move onto the enormously wealthy oil lands. They are determined that the Jews will never get the toehold that would be necessary for the fulfillment of that policy.”
Less than five years before his presidential bid, Robert Kennedy had not been, in his brother’s government, a particularly pro-Israel attorney general: he had infuriated Zionist leaders by supporting an investigation led by Senator William Fulbright of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations aimed at registering the American Zionist Council as a “foreign agent” subject to the obligations defined by the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938, which would have considerably hindered its efficiency. After 1963, the AZC escaped this procedure by changing its status and renaming itself AIPAC.486 All things considered, there is no ground for believing that Robert Kennedy would have been, as president of the US, particularly Israel-friendly. His brother certainly had not been. The Kennedy family, proudly Irish and Catholic, was known for its hostility to Jewish influence in politics, a classic theme of anti-Kennedy literature, best represented by the 1996 book by Ronald Kessler with the highly suggestive title, The Sins of the Father: Joseph P. Kennedy and the Dynasty He Founded.487 Joe Kennedy had been notoriously critical of Jewish influence during World War II. While US Ambassador in London from 1938 to 1940, he supported Chamberlain’s appeasement policy toward Hitler. When Roosevelt was about to enter the war, he resigned “to devote my efforts to what seems to me the greatest cause in the world today: to help the President keep the US out of the war.” After the war, he reportedly said “the Jews have won the war.”488
From Yahweh to Zion Page 35
