Friday, November 03, 2006

Who Shot Yitzhak Rabin?

Update: I recognized when I put up this post that it would be controversial, to say the least. In response to various commenters, in order to explain my attitude towards the issue more fully, I said this:

I agree; this is a wild theory. That’s why I put it here along with a whole shaker full of salt.

But Carl (who is not a nut-case at all) raises a contradiction that cannot be resolved without an explanation that goes beyond the official one: If Rabin was shot in the back, then how to account for the clearly-sourced references to his being shot in the chest?

Maybe the doctors involved misspoke themselves or made some kind of mistake. Maybe there is some other kind of reasonable explanation.

But some kind of explanation definitely needs to be found.


Yigal AmirOn November 4, 1995 (eleven years ago today if you’re reading this in Israel), Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated. A young man named Yigal Amir was convicted of the crime and sentenced to life in prison plus eight years.

Mr. Amir has been characterized as a right-wing extremist who was unhappy with Mr. Rabin’s part in the Oslo accords and his dealings with the PLO. According to the prevalent theory, the conspiracy to kill the Prime Minister — of which Amir was simply the triggerman — wanted to put a stop to the Oslo process.

In the years since the assassination, various conspiracy theories have swirled around the incident, claiming that Amir was not in fact the assassin, and positing various alternative scenarios involving nefarious government functionaries, and probably the Illuminati, for all I know.

But Carl in Jerusalem has recently outlined a coherent theory of what might have happened, a version that explains all the anomalous facts. I had hesitated to post about it, since he was relying on a single source, his friend “Dr. Josh”.

However, today Carl has collected other odds and ends of evidence, mostly videos in Hebrew, that illustrate the yawning gaps between the official version of events as recorded at Mr. Amir’s trial, and the evidence from other sources.
- - - - - - - - - -
The main problems with the official version are twofold:

1. According to the trial record and as shown in the video of the assassination, Yitzhak Rabin was shot in the back. Yet there are at least two accounts, plus Dr. Josh’s report on the official autopsy evidence, which state that Mr. Rabin was shot in the chest.
2. The assassination occurred within a 90-second drive from the nearest hospital. Yet it took 22 minutes form Mr. Rabin’s aides to get him in the car and arrive at the hospital, by which time the Prime Minister was dead.

Here’s what Carl has to say:

Notice in the video that Rabin is shot in the back. Now (with apologies to those without sufficient Hebrew to understand this), watch an interview with Dr. Barabash, who was then the director of Ichilov Hospital (I believe that today he’s the managing director of the Ministry of Health) — where Rabin finally arrived 22 minutes after he was shot at a place that is 90 seconds (tops) from the hospital by car. Note that Dr. Barabash says specifically that Rabin was shot in the chest.

Now, last but not least, we have Dr. Ephraim Sneh, the current Deputy Defense Minister and then the Minister of Health, being interviewed as he leaves the hospital on the night of the assassination. Note that he too says that Rabin was shot in the chest.

But you will all recall that two screens ago you saw Amir shoot Rabin in the back! And that, my friends, is one reason why none of this makes any sense. Now, go back and read my friend Dr. Josh’s explanation, the historical context for what happened, and the fact that the government will not even let Amir see Rabin’s x-rays (and believe me — the suppression of evidence during the ‘trial’ was much worse).

This is an outline of the most plausible (and least outlandish) theory of what really happened.

The Rabin government was facing trouble in the upcoming election, due to the unpopularity of the Oslo Accords. To prop up the popularity of the Prime Minister, certain of his subordinates concocted a bizarre plan: they recruited a sympathetic contact, Yigal Amir, to pretend to make an assassination attempt on the Prime Minister using a gun loaded with blanks.

The idea was that Mr. Rabin would miraculously escape assassination, public opinion would rally to him in sympathy, and the elections would go well for him and his party, and for the “peace process”.

What the conspirators were unaware of is that blanks fired at close range can seriously harm a person, especially if he has a history of medical trouble. The firing of the blanks induced a coronary (or something similar) in Mr. Rabin, and when his aides got him into the car, he was dead or dying. Realizing that they were in deep trouble, they took a detour on the way to the hospital, arranged to have Mr. Rabin shot, to make the assassination narrative credible, and later conspired to destroy or hide evidence that would expose their botched plan.

But they made the mistake of shooting him in the back, and that unhinged their whole scheme.

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

This is a pretty wild conspiracy theory, and readers are welcome to take with as many grains of salt as necessary. Maybe a whole shaker.

But make sure you go over to Israel Matzav and read the whole thing. Follow the links, and watch the videos. Find someone who understands Hebrew to help you, if you can.

Carl, being an Orthodox Jew and a conservative Israeli, has a vested interest in seeing Yigal Amir exonerated. But his account conforms to Occam’s Razor: it does not multiply entities needlessly.

It’s worth investigation.

16 comments:

Calev-Ben-David said...

Excellent work, This case should be coming to a close in the near future. Finally, the mom of the "patsy" is speaking up. I guess that their deal with the government fell through.
One error in the article. but still good article.

The mistake was that the security guards shot Rabin in the chest to kill him. All the witnesses saw Amir shoot in back. When Rabin was dead already the guards pumped an additional two real bullets in the back for show and the courts.

Mikael said...

This is indeed a wild conspiracy theory.

It's greatest flaw is this: If the labour-party wnated to cash in on an attempted assasination, why didn't Shimon Peres, who took over the leadership of the party and the goverment hold an election after a succesful assasination? He would have got 90 percent of the votes.

Instead he waited several months, and lost narrowly to Likud.


Please, I love his blog. Don't turn it into some Oliver Stonish everything-is-a-conspiracy thing. I implore you!

Mikael said...

Almost forgot: Encyclopeadia Britannica has a good time line on this issue.

james said...

Salt. I'm sorry, but this is moonbatty. When I hit the "fake assassination for sympathy" the meter pegged.

Baron Bodissey said...

James, Mikael, everybody else --

I agree; this is a wild theory. That's why I put it here along with a whole shaker full of salt.

But Carl (who is not a nut-case at all) raises a contradiction that cannot be resolved without an explanation that goes beyond the official one: If Rabin was shot in the back, then how to account for the clearly-sourced references to his being shot in the chest?

Maybe the doctors involved misspoke themselves or made some kind of mistake. Maybe there is some other kind of reasonable explanation.

But some kind of explanation definitely needs to be found.

anonymous poster said...

How about he was shot in the back, but there was an exit wound(s) in the front, i.e. his chest, which led people to say at the site that he was shot in the chest? Just guessin'....

ziontruth said...

My knee-jerk reaction is to regard this as despicable as the garbage coming out of the "9/11 Truth" crowd. But even if that theory has any merit, I would like to think of our side as focusing on the dangers in plain sight, leaving the unearthing of conspiracies, Protocols and Rovian plots everywhere to the Left.

I apologize if you don't like plugs, but this is my piece on the anniversary of Rabin's (hy"d) assassination I wrote last Thursday:

The Legacy of the Assassination

I think the concerns I have voiced in that post are the only relevant ones for us.

Carl in Jerusalem said...

Anonymous poster,

Read the medical report from Dr. Josh that is linked in my original post. They raise and disprove that theory.

Baron,

Thanks for linking it.

Calev,

I have heard claims that the mother of the 'patsy' (as you call him) had written an article telling his side of the story for John Kennedy Jr.'s magazine George right before Kennedy died in a plane crash. The article was never published.

Reliapundit said...

IMHO: carl is bright and right on most things but on this he's just a conspiracy crank.

lookit: carl thinks that OSLO was a traitorous mistake - that rabiun and poeres sold out Israel and created ALL the problems that Israzel now faces in Gaza and the so called West Bank.

this may be true.

so why is so tough for carl - and others like him, who think that Rabin MANY of whom think that Rabin deserved to die - to belive that another peson who also believed it actually took direct action!?

why do they construct these eleaborate conspiracies? especially one which blames labor for it? essentially they argue that rabin had himself killed to get oslo passed. this is as nutty as all the Rovian plots hatched up here by the loony left.

i remind you all that rabion would have won the election BIGTIME, and the result of the assassination peres become the leader of labor - and he lost BIGTIME, as usual. i don;lt think he;s ever won election to anything.

in short: the theory flunks the laugh test.

his own aides shot rabin in the back.

sheesh.

sickeningly idiotic.

this belongs in the crazy hall of fame.

this is as bad as saying Jackie O shot JFK because of his philandering.

Carl in Jerusalem said...

Reliapundit,

Did I say I was blaming Labor for the assassination? Where did you see that in my post (or in Dr. Josh's for that matter)?

And in fact, if you'd bothered to read it, instead of concluding that I'm a conspiracy crank, you would have found out that we didn't say that "one of his own aides shot Rabin in the back," because the tape shows Amir shot him in the back and yet we have two medical doctors, hours after the assassination (not within minutes) saying very specifically that he was shot in the chest. Not only that, but so does the initial hospital admission paper (that's in Dr. Josh's post).

At the time that Rabin was shot, the polls showed he would have lost the election big time. After the assassination, there was a huge jump in the polls for Peres as his successor, but Peres was a fool and waited several months to call elections (he didn't have to call them for about a year after the assassination happened, but they were held in May 1996). In the interim, there was a series of major suicide bombings by the 'Palestinians,' Peres' advantage at the polls evaporated, and with the assistance of a last-minute campaign by Lubavitch Hassidim that he was 'good for the Jews,' Netanyahu narrowly won the election (despite election night projections that said Peres won).

Calev-Ben-David said...

Carl, There were intense negotiations by David Rutstein with the Amir family (mainly Geula) to start telling the press what she was saying privately. Geula refused. Therefor, on www.yigalamir.com it has an embarrssing picture of Yigal that states that
href="http://yigalamir.com">"Yigal is a Pedofile for the Shabak."
Now that Geula spoke up Yigal did not shoot Rabin those embarressing stuff will come down. In hebrew, when one types in Yigal Amir in
google this site pops up number one.

The best technique to get this stuff out is to get videos on www.flix.co.il. Currently the

Miriam Oren witness video has over 42,000 views
in just a few days.

One simply has to be among the most viewed and the web site starts highliting the video. Recently the english site israelnationalnews.com and in hebrew rotter.net agreed with the plan implemented by David Rutstein for the Oren video.

To cut to the chase, David Rutstein is in contact with the Amir family to start making cute videos to end the coverup really soon.

As a side note Nrg.co.il Maariv (the #2 news internet site and newspaper) did a hebrew story on David Rutstein and now the major media seems to be agreeing to start publishing news.

Lots of information here, If Carl or anyone else wants to end this thing soon, it seems best to contact David Rutstein. He lives in Jerusalem.

For the Geula Amir article in George magazine, alot of links are on wiki rabin conspiracy. The George magazine article is one of the links as well as this article.

Baron Bodissey said...

Anat,

I have no Hebrew, so I can't address those issues. However, Dr. Josh has written me directly, and I will post more on this in due course.

I have seen the chest X-ray, and there are clear reasons to question the official story (regardless of what the real explanation finally turns out to be).

Then there are the medical records themselves. When I go through all the material, I will probably end up posting links to pages in Hebrew. At that point you and other readers who read Hebrew can help us all out.

For now, I'm simply keeping an open mind.

Carl in Jerusalem said...

Anat,

Although I was born in the US, I practice law in Israel in Hebrew. I also professionally translate legal documents from Hebrew to English.

Hazeh is a chest. There is no question that both Dr. Barabash and Dr. Sneh said that Rabin had been shot in the chest. They said it several hours after the actual shooting, so it was not said "in the heat of the moment" when mistakes are likely. And they are both doctors, not laymen. There is no question on the video that Amir shot Rabin in the back.

Let's focus on that contradiction.

james said...

I sat in the jury trying a man for violating game laws (turns out there was more to the story, but that was our part of it). One eyewitness swore that the defendant and his buddy carried 4 geese back to the car; another that they only had 2. (Geese are not small.) Witnesses are good to have, but they're not always accurate.

Screwups I can believe in, but that an experienced politician would connive at a fake assassination attempt seems ludicrous. It involves too many people, and the consequences of being caught are huge. Could he count on police not finding any wad fragments and getting curious? Would Amir spill the beans under pressure?

And I don't find the idea of shooting a dead man to be very convincing either. A passerby might find gunshots in an ambulance to be very odd; a doctor might find the lack of bleeding to be curious; and of course you need to have the right gun in hand in case somebody wants to match the bullet.

Too risky.

If the video doesn't match the X-rays (and you have to measure carefully with videos; your eyes can trick you), then maybe you can posit a second gunman or something. But a fake going bad doesn't make sense to me.

Reliapundit said...

carl: u r a decent man. give it up. come back to sanity. please.

Calev-Ben-David said...

In the state of Israel, there is a tremendoud animosity toward religous Jews among a decent percentage of the population. There are people, let's say Anat, who would be really upset to discover that a irreligous jew and not a religous jew killed Rabin. Since Anat reads hebrew and has seen the hebrew web sites on this subject. She has to be lieing when she says that she feels Yigal shot Rabin. The evidence is really beyond any doubt.