Word: sirhan
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...liyah to an Arab. When payment for a wrong must be exacted in blood, it is rujūliyah that steels the avenger's hand. It is rujūliyah that can rob death of its dread. It was perhaps ruj#363;liyah that took Sirhan Bishara Sirhan to a serving pantry in Los Angeles' Ambassador Hotel last June and there cost Senator Robert Kennedy his life. And it was ruj#363;liyah that attorneys for the young Jordanian assassin were forced above all to battle in their efforts last week to spare him from the death penalty...
...First, Sirhan's lawyers had to overcome his determination to seek death in California's gas chamber, even though his suicidal outbursts were silenced in court by Judge Herbert V. Walker (TIME, March 7). It was not, it transpired, that Sirhan objected to the prosecution's having read from his notebook diaries the passages recounting his resolve to kill Kennedy, an essential element of the prosecution's contention that he acted with premeditated malice. Sirhan would actually have preferred to die rather than subject his family to what he deemed the public shame of an airing...
Like a Saint. To Sirhan's trio of defense attorneys, there was the nightmare prospect of a repetition of his earlier psychic detonations. When they promised not to call as witnesses the girls named in his diaries, Sirhan became glib and almost ingratiating when he spoke of the man he had killed. When he first glimpsed his victim two days before the assassination, Sirhan had thought of Kennedy as looking "like a saint." Yet three weeks earlier, his admiration for the Senator had turned to vitriolic hate. "If he were in front of me," Sirhan declared last week, relating...
...Sirhan's 56-year-old mother, Mary Sirhan, helped explain her son's rage, telling of a baby born in Jerusalem amid the turmoil of war-torn Palestine. When Arab fought Jew in 1948, the street before their home became a barbed-wire no-man's-land. As a toddler, Sirhan had witnessed a terrorist bombing, and one of his brothers was killed by a car speeding to outrun hostile gunfire. From modest comfort, the family was reduced to the mindless misery of refugees. It was, Sirhan insisted, a tragedy that had transformed him into a rootless...
...Sociologist Peter McEwan, is that he is "extraordinarily secure. Other people are either wrong or going about life ineffectually. He thinks that he has the answer." That definition might equally fit Atheist O'Hair ("I will separate church and state, by God"), Hugh Hefner, Admiral Hyman Rickover-or Sirhan Sirhan. In fact, genuine eccentricity generally stops far short of pathological conduct. According to McEwan, the real thing is deviant behavior that does not require society to do anything about the behavior...