Rabin’s Widow Lambastes Jfk Jr.

Speaking as the victim of one assassination to the victim of another, the widow of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin took John F. Kennedy Jr. to task on Tuesday for an article that appeared in his magazine George.

At issue for the 68-year-old widow, who rarely minces words, was a recent essay written by the mother of Rabin’s assassin, Yigal Amir.

In the article, Geula Amir writes that her son, a nationalist Jew, was goaded into shooting Rabin on Nov. 5, 1995, by a right-wing agitator who actually was an undercover agent for Shin Bet, Israel’s security agency.

She speculates that Shin Bet thought the attack would be carried out with a doctored gun. The security force allowed the attack to occur so it could take credit for saving the prime minister, she said.

“But something went terribly wrong. The bullets were not blanks; the gun was not a toy,” Geula Amir writes.

Leah Rabin said Kennedy crossed the “red line” of journalism by giving “a platform in his magazine, George, to the mother of my husband’s murderer.”

“How could he, of all people, do such a thing? Perhaps he needed a sensational piece to sell his paper,” Leah Rabin said in a luncheon speech at the National Press Club in Miami.

“I would expect John Kennedy, who lost his father to an assassin’s bullet when he was a mere child and grew up in the shadow of that horrible tragedy, to adopt a higher moral stand,” she added.

In the March issue of George, Kennedy described the piece as “clearly the view of an anguished mother and a staunch right-winger” and not “an objective examination of the events.”