Bar Ilan University canceled Dr. Mordechai Kedar’s participation in a conference to be held in the United States next week, about 12 hours after Kedar’s stirring speech Tuesday night during a support rally for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Petah Tikva, where the Professor of Islamic Studies claimed that Yitzhak Rabin’s murderer was not Yigal Amir, Ynet reported.
Dr. Mordechai Kedar, an expert in Israeli Arab culture who lectures as a permanent member of the faculty at Bar-Ilan University, argued at the rally that Yigal Amir is apparently not the person who killed Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin back in November 1995.
Kedar suggested the real killer was a man whose initials are Y.R. – but not Yitzhak Rabin. He later refused to retract or apologize for the shocking revelation, and told News 12: “I guarantee, if they ask me for an apology, I would resign.”
When asked if he believes Yigal Amir, who was convicted in 1996 of the Rabin murder, should be rehabilitated, Kedar replied simply, “Yes.” But when asked who the real killer was, the religious-Zionist professor said, “No comment.”
The Petah Tikva support rally was run under the slogan: “Netanyahu, you will never walk alone.” However, PM Netanyahu, who at the time was accused by the left-leaning media of complicity in the Rabin murder, issued a clipped comment saying: “Prime Minister Netanyahu condemns the vain statement regarding Yigal Amir, the murderer of the late Yitzhak Rabin.”
You smear me once…
Asked why he thought Amir confessed to a crime he didn’t commit, Kedar said, “If you were interrogated for a month, from dawn to dawn, without an attorney, you’d confess to murdering [biblical first murder victim] Abel, too.”
“Amir has lived in isolation, and we don’t know what he thinks because he has no one to say it to,” Kedar added, asking, “Why is he in isolation? Why can’t we reach him? Every prisoner is accessible; there’s a procedure, a form in which you explain why you want to meet them – for everyone else. Why not him?”
Kedar criticized harshly the decision to classify part of the Rabin murder investigation documents as highly confidential and not reveal them to the public: “The mere fact that a document is classified as highly confidential, for no reason other than the fact that it shows something that does not fit the agenda – that’s not a reason to make it highly confidential. It means that someone wants to hide it.”
The veteran scholar told News 12 he wasn’t disturbed by the numerous negative reactions his comments provoked: “I wasn’t scared – today there’s more openness to asking questions that wouldn’t have been possible 10 years ago. I am a free man and I have the right to express my opinion. The university can stand behind it or shake it off. I don’t represent the university.”
Kedar claimed at the rally that a senior politician who wanted to sabotage the Oslo Accords was likely behind the murder. He said he had been convinced by a lecture he had heard from Nachum Shahaf, a Bar Ilan physicist who has made an extensive case against two supreme court justices, Dorit Beinish and Edna Arbel, whom he blames for the cover-up of the real facts in the Rabin murder investigation.
“I think that after seeing what he (Shahaf) can show you, you, too, would have some doubts about the official version,” Kedar told News 12.
At the rally, Kedar said: “Twenty-four years ago, the late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s murder took place, and the attempt to hide what happened then continues to this day. The accusations against the right continue to this day.
“How do I know it’s a cover-up? For 25 years I served in the IDF Intelligence Corps. I’ve seen tens of thousands of documents that were classified Top Secret. Why Top Secret? To secure sources, to avoid burning a source – to this end even unimportant documents are classified Top Secret,” Kedar explained, and told his audience: “Ladies and gentlemen – much of the investigation into Rabin’s murder remains classified highly confidential to this day.”
At which point, Kedar pulled out and showed the audience a document, declaring: “This is one of them, which came into my possession in a completely legal way.”
At the end of his remarks, Kedar urged re-opening the Rabin Murder case: “I am calling from up here to remove the false Top Secret classification from those documents that do not fit in with the theory that the right murdered Rabin. For 24 years, the right and Bar Ilan University are being smeared for what Yigal Amir may not have done. He is in prison in solitary confinement, why in solitary confinement? So he won’t tell the truth to anyone.”
Kedar concluded: “Ladies and gentlemen, hence – the real investigation into Rabin’s murder.”