Word: amirs
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That someone turned out to be Amir, a third-year law student at the religious Bar Ilan University. One of eight children raised in an Orthodox family in Herzliyya, a town north of Tel Aviv, Amir was quiet and unprepossessing, except when it came to the subject of peace with the Arabs. He fraternized with members of a right-wing group called Eyal, also known as the Fighting Jews. According to a friend, Amir once said he felt he had to do something to stop the peace process, but the friend dismissed Amir's words as an empty threat...
...Amir reportedly told police he had been planning to kill Rabin since at least January. The Prime Minister had been scheduled to go to Yad Vashem that month to visit the sacred memorial to the Holocaust, but when the Islamic Jihad launched a suicide bomb at a bus depot at the Beit Lid Junction in Central Israel, he canceled the visit. Several months later, Amir allegedly planned to assassinate Rabin at a highway dedication in Kfar Shmaryahu, but that time he could not penetrate the Prime Minister's security detail...
Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was shot and killed as he left a peace rally in Tel Aviv. His alleged attacker, a 25-year-old Jewish law student named Yigal Amir, was arrested on the spot. He reportedly said he acted alone, although he has been linked to a tiny extremist group called Eyal, which fiercely rejects Rabin's participation in peace negotiations with the Palestine Liberation Organization. "I am very sad and very shocked," said P.L.O. leader Yasser Arafat. President Clinton, who called Rabin "a martyr for his nation's peace," will attend Monday's funeral. The Israeli Cabinet...
...Israel in the 1970s, where he began a political movement called Kach (Thus). It wasn't long before Kahane's toxic rhetoric fomented murder. In 1983, during a rally held by the Peace Now leftist group, a lone right-winger--not much different from Rabin's alleged assassin, Yigal Amir--threw a grenade into the crowd, killing one Israeli man. It was the first time since the nation was founded that Jews had used violence against fellow Jews for political reasons...
Eyal, another Kach offshoot, to which Amir has been linked, is a tiny organization based at Tel Aviv's Bar Ilan University. Its activities tend toward threats and harassment rather than outright violence. But its members, like most of the 15,000 or so extremists in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, tend to believe that any act, including murder, is justified if it thwarts the peace process. Says University of Pennsylvania political scientist Ian Lustick, an expert on Jewish fundamentalism: "It's the equivalent of the right-wing milieu that led to the Oklahoma City bombing." That event shook...