Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu on Wednesday rejected claims by Bar-Ilan professor Mordechai Kedar that convicted assassin Yigal Amir was not responsible for the murder of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.
“The Prime Minister condemns the nonsense said in regard to Yigal Amir, the murderer of Yitzhak Rabin,” the Prime Minister’s Office said in a statement Wednesday.
Netanyahu’s condemnation came following comments by Mordechai Kedar, a prominent scholar on Arab culture, who claimed at a pro-Netanyahu rally Tuesday evening that Rabin had been the victim of a political conspiracy, and that Amir was not the actual assassin.
"Rabin’s murderer was a man with the initials Y.R. – not Yitzhak Rabin. Y.R. The person behind this was, apparently, a leading politician who wanted to eliminate Yitzhak Rabin because he wanted to ditch the Oslo Accords.”
The Left had then turned the assassination into a political weapon against the Right for something “Yigal Amir might not have done”.
“Why is he sitting in solitary confinement? So that he won’t tell people the truth,” continued Kedar, before calling for a “real investigation” into Rabin’s assassination.
While the State of Israel’s Shamgar Commission, and the trial of Yigal Amir both found the then-25-year-old Bar-Ilan University law student responsible for the killing, numerous conspiracy theories have been promoted over the years suggesting that Amir may not have been the actual murderer.