Sirhan Sirhan, the forever terrorist

It was a warm summer day in June 1968 when California Democrats went to the polls in the presidential primary and delivered a resounding victory to Senator Robert F. Kennedy over democratic rival and then vice president Hubert H. Humphrey and Minnesota Senator Eugene J. McCarthy.

America was well on its way, moving toward the presidential conventions, to select the respective Republican and Democrat nominees who would face each other in November in the 1968 presidential election. The no nonsense senator from New York was in a close national nomination race with the vice president known as the “Happy Warrior” and Senator McCarthy.

In light of Senator Kennedy’s triumphant political victory in California and in his many other victories in the previous state primaries, it was clear he was heading toward claiming the Democratic presidential nomination for the 1968 presidential election.

Tragically, as Kennedy was leaving the ballroom of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, after speaking to and thanking his elated supporters, and as he was exiting through the basement kitchen of the hotel, he was shot by a Sirhan Sirhan, a Palestinian, with Jordanian citizenship who had moved to the U.S. a decade earlier with his family. The next day Senator Kennedy succumbed to his wounds.

The assassination of Senator Kennedy was a tragic loss to his immediate family and to the extended Kennedy family who only five years earlier suffered the loss by assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

Not only was the assassination of Senator Kennedy a personal loss to the family and a loss to the nation of a very talented political leader, the assassination was a direct attack on the democratic process and on freedom itself.

One man’s criminal act of murder, especially if politically motivated, is a crime against the entire nation. The murder of Senator Kennedy denied the American people the right to decide who will be their next president. I know of no other individual crime that can cause so much political damage.

After an extensive trial and the presentation of numerous defenses the facts emerged (as reported by numerous sources) according to the defendant’s own words at trial, that he murdered Senator Kennedy because of the senator’s positions supporting the existence and security of the State of Israel.

He stated that he contemplated and planned the crime for a year to coincide with the first anniversary of the liberation of Jerusalem in the Six Day War. This war was the climax of Arab belligerency that compelled Israel to preemptively neutralize a planned massive imminent invasion of Israel by the surrounding Arab countries.

Sirhan Sirhan was sentenced to death by a California court for Senator Kennedy’s assassination. But for the intervening decision by the California Supreme Court in an unrelated case finding California’s capital punishment statute unconstitutional, he would have been executed long ago. Instead his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment.

Over the intervening years, he has been denied parole for lack of remorse and the severity of his crime. That was before this summer. An apparently “woke” District Attorney in Los Angeles during his term of office initiated a policy of not attending (and therefore not opposing) parole hearings.

This summer a Parole Board panel, in the district attorney’s absence, decided to grant Sirhan Sirhan his petition for parole, subject to further administrative review and the Governor’s approval.

Sirhan Sirhan is a convicted Palestinian terrorist. Even if his age has mellowed him, he is an unrepentant terrorist and has shown no remorse for his crime. He is a political figure whose release will be celebrated throughout the world as a martyr by every terrorist organization and terrorist government.

What might be intended as a humanitarian gesture by his release, will be interpreted as another sign of American weakness and lack of respect for our own democratic institutions. Sirhan Sirhan must never live again as a free man.

If you wish to comment or respond you can reach me at melpearlman322@gmail.com. Please do so in a rational, thoughtful, respectful and civil manner.

Mel Pearlman holds B.S. & M.S. degrees in physics as well as a J.D. degree and initially came to Florida in 1966 to work on the Gemini and Apollo space programs. He has practiced law in Central Florida since 1972. He has served as president of the Jewish Federation of Greater Orlando; was a charter board member, first vice president and pro-bono legal counsel of the Holocaust Memorial Resource and Education Center of Central Florida, as well as holding many other community leadership positions.