The RFK Assassination: The First Incident Of Islamic Terrorism Against America

WASHINGTON - The shooting of Robert F. Kennedy is widely remembered as part
of the wrenching domestic turbulence of the 1960s. But some scholars are
beginning to see it as something quite different yet no less significant:
America's first taste of the political violence of the Middle East.

Sirhan Sirhan, the young Palestinian-American who shot Kennedy, made
the attack on the first anniversary of the Six-Day War in Israel. In his private
writings, he had demonstrated anger over Kennedy's positions favoring Israel
over the Palestinian cause.

"I thought of it as an act of violence motivated by hatred of Israel
and of anybody who supported Israel," said Alan Dershowitz, a Harvard law
professor who had worked on Kennedy's campaign as a volunteer adviser on
gun-control policy. "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."

Dershowitz said he came to fully understand the significance of the
assassination when he learned that Sirhan had targeted others seen as
pro-Israel. About one year after Kennedy's death, former United Nations
ambassador Arthur Goldberg - for whom Dershowitz had clerked on the Supreme
Court and with whom he shared a fervent Zionism - told Dershowitz that Sirhan
had identified Goldberg as a potential target, too.

By then, Kennedy's slaying, which occurred 40 years ago today, was
widely viewed as part of a cycle of American civic turmoil, marked by
assassinations, urban riots, and violent protests. Yet a generation of
revelations about Sirhan's motives - and a changed environment in which
Americans have come to fear political violence with origins abroad - have drawn
out his crime as a largely unacknowledged prelude to the kidnappings at the
Munich Olympics, the hijacking of the cruise ship Achille Lauro, and the two
assaults on the World Trade Center.

"Even though it wasn't perceived at the time as an act of political
terrorism, on a visceral level - on a subliminal level - the Kennedy
assassination planted a seed of concern in Americans about the Palestinian issue
and the issue of terrorism," said Michael Oren, a senior fellow at the Shalem
Center in Jerusalem and the author of "Power, Faith and Fantasy," a history of
US engagement in the Middle East.

Sirhan, a Christian Arab born in Jerusalem, had moved to
California as a teenager and was 24 when he shot Kennedy. "My only connection
with Robert Kennedy was his sole support of Israel and his deliberate attempt to
send those 50 bombers to Israel to obviously do harm to the Palestinians," he
told David Frost in 1989.

That would have been largely unfamiliar to Americans as a political
cause at the time of Kennedy's murder. UN Resolution 242, passed in the fall of
1967 in the wake of the Six-Day War, does not include the word "Palestinian" at
all, and Middle Eastern issues were barely mentioned in a presidential campaign
dominated by the Vietnam War.

"No one would have thought of this as Palestinian terrorism," Oren
said. "They didn't even know the term 'Palestinian' at the time."