How the Democrats Became Sirhan Sirhan's Party

Senate Dems Fulfill Wishes of RFK Assassin

On Wednesday, only seven Democrats in the Senate voted to oppose a resolution introduced by Sen. Bernie Sanders that would have banned the sale—not the gift, the sale—of military equipment to Israel. In his California prison cell, Sirhan Sirhan had to do the Palestinian equivalent of an end zone dance. The Democrats had become his party.

Sirhan is credited with the June 1968 assassination of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy. Although RFK Jr. does not believe Sirhan was the killer, the State of California amassed enough evidence to send Sirhan to the gas chamber, a sentence later commuted to life. The 84-year-old Sirhan remains a guest of the California Correctional system.

In June 1968, fresh from winning the California Democratic primary, Kennedy was well positioned to win his party’s nomination and the presidency. A bullet to the brain, fired in the crowded kitchen of Los Angeles’s Ambassador Hotel, ended the dream. After his arrest, Sirhan said, "I can explain it. I did it for my country.” A Jerusalem-born Christian, Sirhan moved to the US at age 12 but never became a U.S. citizen. Palestine remained his “country,” such as it was.

The diminutive Sirhan, a would-be jockey, was obsessed with Kennedy. “RFK must die. RFK must die. RFK must die. RFK is going to die. RFK is going to die,” Sirhan wrote obsessively in his notebook. Sirhan set the day of destiny for June 5, the first anniversary of the launch of the Six-Day War.

In 1989 David Frost interviewed the.surprisingly well-spoken Sirhan for Inside Edition. When Frost asked Sirhan why he would kill someone who supported the poor and downtrodden, Sirhan claimed that Kennedy had been his hero, “but to have him say he was going to send 50 Phantom jets to Israel to deliver nothing but death and destruction on my countrymen, that seemed a sort of betrayal that was sad for me to accept, hard for me to accept.”

Sirhan ignored the cold war context of Kennedy’s speech. Said Kennedy at the time, "The Soviets have sent supersonic fighters to the Arabs. Soviet planes and pilots they have trained are on Arab soil. Forty Soviet warships are in the Mediterranean, and their advisors are in Arab nations." Added Kennedy, "We all desire an end to the arms race, but it cannot be unilateral-for such a course promises only more aggression and the threat of yet another bloody conflict.”

In the 1968 primary Kennedy was running to the anti-war left of his party’s center. His pledge of support for Israel troubled neither his supporters, nor the New York Times which reported favorably on his speech. The Marxist left, however, took notice. In 1974, Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn dedicated the Weather Underground manifesto Prairie Fire to an assortment of revolutionary heroes, among them Sirhan Sirhan.

If few people took notice, the Kennedy family did. In 2010, Christopher Kennedy, the son of Robert and the brother of RFK Jr., used his influence as chairman of Board of Trustees at the University of Illinois to deny Ayers emeritus status. The nine members of the board either concurred or abstained.

Despite the rejection of Ayers, the Democratic Party was moving in Sirhan’s direction. This movement was due in no small part to the sympathies of Ayers’s protegé Barack Obama. Obama’s early Muslim connections are well enough known. but more relevant to the Sirhan question are his connections to Rashid Khalidi. This Palestinian-American scholar and a one-time shill for the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) was good buddies with both Ayers and Obama.

Obama’s most honest biographer, the Pulitzer Prize-winning David Garrow, writes matter-of-factly about “Barack and Michelle’s attendance at the almost nightly dinners at the Khalidis’ or Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn’s home” as though this were common knowledge. It wasn’t, still isn’t.

In 2003, Obama attended a going-away party for Khalidi, who was leaving Chicago for a job in New York. During the 2008 campaign, the Los Angeles Times acquired a copy of the video shot at the party. Reportedly, the toasts offered to Khalidi went beyond the merely provocative. As the Times editors understood, a Democrat could not then appear to be openly anti-Semitic or aggressively anti-Israel. So they reported blandly about the event but suppressed the video.

The Obamas and the Khalidis at 1998 Palestinian charity event

Media manipulation of this sort has helped cause a tectonic shift in American attitudes about Israel, especially among Democrats. In 2022, according to Pew Research, 53 percent of Democrats had an unfavorable view of Israel.

In a more objective world, Hamas’s grotesque assault on Israeli civilians in October 2023 would have softened Democratic hearts, but the opposite has happened. Today, 80 percent of Democrats own up to having an unfavorable view. The Senators voting to leave Israel defenseless were simply appeasing their deeply propagandized base.

The Senate vote, like the Pew poll, took place while the US was waging a hot war with Iran, a war that Democratic senators and citizens both hope that Iran somehow manages to “win.” The TDS is that strong. Despite brewing anti-Israel sentiments in his own party, President Trump has learned through experience which “allies” can be trusted and which cannot.

Said Trump Friday on Truth Social "Whether people like Israel or not, they have proven to be a GREAT Ally of the United States of America. They are Courageous, Bold, Loyal, and Smart and, unlike others that have shown their true colors in a moment of conflict and stress, Israel fights hard, and knows how to WIN!"

Sirhan knew the sentiment above to be true. Aided by the U.S., Israel would forever stand its ground, which was why “RFK must die. RFK must die. RFK must die.”