assassination
Over the years, medicine and science, specifically medical science, has done some strange things. We all know the purpose and importance of autopsies to determine the cause of death of a person, and even to learn from that cause of death, so death can possibly be avoided, but to me, it seems like going overboard when body parts are kept and put on display for years to come. At what point does it become morbid? When does it cross the line from a learning tool to a novelty item. I would offer that it becomes more of a novelty item when the parts being kept belong to past presidents or other celebrities. When a person donates their body to science and it is anonymously used as a learning tool, I don’t have issue with it, but a president killed in 1881, whose spine is still being put on display in 2000 and beyond, seems extreme to me.
Nevertheless, on May 21, 2000, the bones of President James Garfield’s spine are on display for a final day at the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Washington, DC. Autopsies are nothing new. Garfield’s spine was partially removed during in autopsy in 1881. I suppose it seemed important at the time to find out exactly how the assassin’s bullet killed him. The reality is that it was likely infection or some such thing that ultimately caused his death, but the location of the bullet was probably of interest to medical science. The exhibit that featured Garfield’s spine also featured other medical oddities from the museum’s archives. The British medical 
journal The Lancet published a story about the exhibit in May 2000. “Among many other medical curiosities, the display featured President Garfield’s spinal column that showed exactly where one out of two assassin’s bullets had passed through it on July 2, 1881. The first bullet grazed Garfield’s arm. The second bullet lodged below his pancreas.”
“Alexander Graham Bell, who was one of Garfield’s physicians at the time, tried to use an early version of a metal detector to find the second bullet, but failed. Historical accounts vary slightly as to the exact cause of Garfield’s death. Physicians may have given him treatments that hastened his demise, including the administering of quinine, morphine, brandy and calomel; he was also fed through the rectum (seriously!!). Others insist Garfield died from an already advanced case of heart disease that the trauma of the shooting exacerbated. Autopsy reports described how pressure from the festering pancreatic wound created a fatal aneurism. Regardless, Garfield succumbed to complications from his wounds 80 days after being shot.”
While Garfield’s spine seems an odd kind of museum exhibit, it was not the only presidential body part to have been an item of interest at the National Museum of Health and Medicine. In addition to the spine, the museum also owns some of Lincoln’s skull fragments and President Eisenhower’s gallstones. A museum in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, keeps a tumor removed from President Grover Cleveland. John F Also, Albert Einstein’s brain, which was sliced into many small pieces for study is still on display. Kennedy’s brain, which was removed during 
his autopsy after his assassination in 1963, disappeared and has never been found. One display that sliced the bodies of a number of deceased people for study, is a display called “Bodies” which my daughter, Corrie Petersen, a nurse, saw while in Las Vegas. I guess I can see these kinds of displays for medical students or professionals, but the bodies really should be anonymous, so they don’t become a touristy novelty.
Vigilantism has probably always existed, at least as long as laws have existed. It is the epitome of taking the law into your own hands. One vigilante group called themselves “The Bald Knobbers.” They were a group of vigilantes in the Ozark region of southwest Missouri, from 1885 to 1889. The group got its name from the grassy bald knob summits of the nearby Ozark Mountains. The hill where they first met, Snapp’s Bald, is located just north of Kirbyville, Missouri. The Bald Knobbers were a strange looking bunch. They were known to wear black horned hoods with white outlines of faces painted on them. It was a distinction that evolved during the rapid growth of the group into neighboring counties from its Taney County origins.
The Bald Knobbers had mostly sided with the Union in the Civil War, and they were opposed by the Anti-Bald Knobbers, who for the most part had sided with the Confederates. After the Civil War, the economy in Southwest Missouri was failing. Taxes were high. Lawlessness, disorder, and a general breakdown of society prevailed, especially in small towns and rural regions. The rising crime rate was the reason the group was formed. The area was in a deplorable state when Nathaniel N Kinney settled in Taney County, Missouri, in 1883. Outlaws and renegades ruled the land. Most of them were bushwhackers and guerillas that had rampaged through Missouri during the Civil War. Because law enforcement was at a minimum, the outlaws had free reign. To protect their own, clans elected and controlled the local sheriff, whose authority was to subpoena jury panels. If outlaws or their relatives didn’t sit on the juries, they bribed those who did. As many as forty murders occurred in Taney County between 1865 and 1885, but due to all the corruption, not a single suspect was convicted.
Nat Kinney was about to change all that. Kinney feared no man. He stood six feet six and weighed more than 300 pounds. On September 22, 1883, after yet another murder Kinney began to consider forming a law-and-order league patterned after other vigilante groups that were popular during that time. The final straw came when a biased jury acquitted yet another murderer, Kinney called together 12 county leaders who met in secret. They decided to form a committee to fight the lawlessness and elect officials who would enforce the law, and the Bald Knobbers group was born. The Bald Knobbers began with “good intentions,” but soon, the violence displayed by the vigilante group gained national attention, becoming more publicized than the actual fight for law and order.
It seemed that a lot of people wanted to get better control of the lawless situation in the area, so the organization grew rapidly, and by the time of their meeting on April 5, 1885, two hundred people showed up at a meeting on Snapp’s Bald, a hilltop south of Forsyth, Missouri. Kinney was an excellent speaker and was unanimously elected as their leader. Kinney accepted and swore his followers to secrecy. Then, he instructed them to recruit new members to carry out the group’s ultimate goal of taking control of a wildly out of control situation. Within days, they were ready. The Bald Knobbers began to show their force when over 100 of them broke open the door of the Taney County jail and kidnapped brothers, Frank and Tubal Taylor. The Taylor brothers were well known criminals in the area and were known for their viciousness. They were jailed for wounding a storekeeper during an argument over credit for a pair of boots. Unfortunately for the Taylor brothers, the local store owner, John Dickenson, happened to be a Bald Knobber. The group broke the two out of jail. Then the mob hauled the brothers south of Forsyth and hanged them. They were not going to have a corrupt trial this time.
Some of the Bald Knobbers felt that the groups own violence was appalling, and so they dropped out of the group after the attack. Nevertheless, the Bald Knobbers continued to grow, and before long, the group had between 500 and 1,000 members. Kinney’s group began to further “correct” the lawlessness by making night rides to scare such “lowlifes” as drunks, gamblers, or “loose” women into changing their ways. They also frightened wife beaters, couples “living in sin,” and men who failed to support their families. They had really gone overboard in their “correcting” of the people. The group actually took on the feel of a dictator, even trying to rule over those whose “crimes” were hurting no one. At this point, the Bald Knobbers split into two factions…those who followed or supported Kinney and those who thought him a tyrant and wished he was dead.
The violence brought about by the group increased as they flogged or branded suspected thieves, arsonists, and robbers. Their punishments no longer fit the crimes, as they would hang or beat a man to death for assault, disturbing the peace, or destroying property. Then things went from bad to worse when, emboldened by their power, some Bald Knobbers began to use their position for greedy and selfish purposes as they went after men who owed them money or owned land they wanted. They “settled” feuds over fence lines and property deeds, whipped men for disrupting services in their churches, or for supporting the wrong candidate in the election. They were quickly becoming the dictators of the area.
However, the harshest punishment was saved for those who spoke out against them. Some victims who resisted the Bald Knobbers simply disappeared. Later, several turned up in the woods, beaten to death. Those who lived to tell claimed that Kinney’s followers killed more than thirty men and at least four women. It is thought, however, that a better estimate, thought to be more realistic places the number between fifteen and eighteen. No matter, because the killing of anyone without a trial, unless it is in self-defense or the defense of another, is morally wrong. I understand how people can feel that justice isn’t being carried out, but when we take the law into our own hands, we are no different than the criminals we are trying to punish.
As the Bald Knobbers grew in numbers and their violent acts escalated, resentment grew, a a small group formed to fight against the Bald Knobbers. They called themselves the Anti-Bald Knobbers. The vigilantes were able to block every effort to mitigate the situation. The courthouse was burned down when a judge called for a state audit to ferret corruption among the county’s officeholders. Finally, twenty Bald Knobbers were arrested, 
but most received light sentences ranging from fines to short prison terms. However, four were sentenced to death. On August 20, 1888, Nat Kinney was shot and killed by Billy Miles, a member of the Anti-Bald Knobbers, in a planned assassination. Though Miles was tried for Kinney’s murder, he was found not guilty based on self-defense and so ended a brutal reign of vigilante terror.
Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was fatally shot after attending a peace rally in Tel Aviv’s Kings Square, Israel on November 4, 1995. He succumbed to his injuries during surgery at Ichilov Hospital in Tel Aviv. The assassination occurred as Rabin was leaving the rally. The killer was Yigal Amir, who was against the Oslo Accords. The rally, held at Kings of Israel Square (now Rabin Square), supported the peace agreement. As Rabin descended the city hall steps towards his car, Amir fired three shots with a semi-automatic pistol. Two bullets struck Rabin, while the third slightly wounded Yoram Rubin, Rabin’s bodyguard. Rabin was rushed to Ichilov Hospital but passed away curing surgery, due to blood loss and lung damage.
Yigal Amir, a 27-year-old Jewish law student, was linked to the far-right Jewish group Eyal. He was arrested by Israeli police at the scene of the shooting and subsequently confessed to the assassination. During his arraignment, he explained that he killed Prime Minister Rabin because the prime minister wanted “to give our country to the Arabs.” Amir was apprehended on the spot and later sentenced to life in prison.
Yitzhak Rabin, who was born in Jerusalem, played a pivotal role in the Arab-Israeli War of 1948 and was the chief-of-staff for Israel’s armed forces during the Six-Day War in 1967. Following his tenure as Israel’s ambassador to the United States, he joined the Labour Party and was elected prime minister in 1974. During his term, he led negotiations resulting in the 1974 ceasefire with Syria and the 1975 military disengagement agreement with Egypt. Rabin resigned from his position in 1977 due to a scandal related to maintaining bank 
accounts in the United States, contrary to Israeli law. He later served as the defense minister of his country from 1984 to 1990.
Then, in 1992, Rabin was the leader of the Labour Party, taking them to an electoral victory. Once again, he became the Prime Minister of Israel. The following year, he signed the landmark Israeli-Palestinian Declaration of Principles alongside Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, and in 1994, they reached a formal peace agreement. In October of that year, Rabin, Arafat, and Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Tragically, Rabin was assassinated in 1995. Shimon Peres, who was serving as Israel’s Foreign Minister at the time, was appointed Acting Prime Minister after an emergency cabinet meeting. It was such an unnecessary attack.
Whether Robert Lincoln’s presence at or near a presidential assassination had anything to do with bringing it to pass or not, is irrelevant…he began to think his presence was relevant. Robert Todd Lincoln was Abraham Lincoln’s son, and while he wasn’t present at his father’s assassination, he was close. He was at the White House, and upon hearing of the assassination, he rushed to be with his parents. The president was moved to the Petersen House after the shooting, where Robert attended his father’s deathbed…and so began a series of strange coincidences in which Robert Todd Lincoln was either present or nearby when three presidential assassinations occurred. It isn’t surprising that Robert Lincoln began to think that maybe he was a “jinx” or “bad luck” if he was at a presidential event, but of course that was not the case. It was just what he believed.
Robert was at the Sixth Street Train Station in Washington DC, at President James A Garfield’s invitation, when the President Garfield was shot by Charles J Guiteau on July 2, 1881. In fact, Robert was an eyewitness to the event. He was actually serving as Garfield’s Secretary of War at the time. President Garfield, the 20th president of the United States, was shot at the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad Station in Washington DC at 9:30 am on Saturday, July 2, 1881. He actually lived two and a half months before passing away in Elberon, New Jersey, on September 19, 1881.
Then, on September 6, 1901, at President William McKinley’s invitation, Robert Lincoln was at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. For Robert, it happened again. The president was shot by Leon Czolgosz and though Robert was not an eyewitness to the event, he was just outside the building where the shooting occurred. Robert Lincoln saw these coincidences, and it really began to bother him, even though there was 
really no rational connection. The concern for Robert Lincoln was so great that he is said to have refused a later presidential invitation with the comment, “No, I’m not going, and they’d better not ask me, because there is a certain fatality about presidential functions when I am present.” While I don’t think his presence had anything to do with the assassinations, I think that Robert Lincoln suffered great distress from the things he witnessed or almost witnessed. That really must have been an absolutely horrible feeling for him.
Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin had just finished speaking at a factory in Moscow, when Fanya Kaplan, a member of the Social Revolutionary party shot him twice. Lenin, the leader of the Bolsheviks was seriously wounded, but survived the attack. The attempted assassination basically set off a “gang war” of sorts, although to a much larger degree…a Civil War, really. That war, known as Red Terror, set off a wave of reprisals by the Bolsheviks against the Social Revolutionaries and other political opponents. As Russia fell deeper into civil war, thousands of people were executed. This had been coming since 1887, but would not fully materialize until the assassination of Petrograd Cheka leader Moisei Uritsky and the attempted assassination of Vladimir Lenin.
Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov was born on April 22, 1870, in Simbirsk, Russian Empire. After his brother was executed in 1887 for plotting to assassinate Czar Alexander III, Ulyanov became interested in the revolutionary cause, also adopting the pseudonym…Lenin. He decided to study law and upon completion, took up practice in Petrograd, which is now Saint Petersburg. In Petrograd, Lenin began to associate with people from the revolutionary Marxist circles. Soon, he was organizing a Marxist group in the capital to enlist workers to the Marxist cause. He called the new group, “Union for the Struggle for the Liberation of the Working Class.” Following the December 1895, arrest of Lenin and the other leaders of the Union, Lenin was jailed for a year. Upon his release, he was exiled to Siberia for a term of three years.
After his term in jail, and the subsequent exile, Lenin went to Western Europe in 1900, where he continued his revolutionary activity. In 1902, while in Western Europe that he published a pamphlet titled “What Is to Be Done?,” which argued that only a disciplined party of professional revolutionaries could bring socialism to Russia. Of course, most of us know that Lenin was working in the shadows to get back into the Russian Marxist system. In 1903, he met with other Russian Marxists in London and established the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party (RSDWP), but while he tried really hard, there was discord from the start. There remained a split between Lenin’s Bolsheviks (Majoritarians), who advocated militarism, and the Mensheviks (Minoritarians), who advocated a democratic movement toward socialism. There is a saying, about a house divided…it just can’t stand. These two groups increasingly opposed each other within the framework of the RSDWP, and Lenin made the split official at a 1912 conference of the Bolshevik Party.
After the outbreak of the Russian Revolution of 1905, Lenin made his move, and returned to Russia. The revolution, which consisted mainly of strikes throughout the Russian empire, came to an end when Nicholas II promised reforms, including the adoption of a Russian constitution and the establishment of an elected legislature. Then, when order had been restored, as often happens in government, the czar nullified most of these reforms. That forced Lenin to go into exile again in 1907.
Lenin was opposed to World War I, which began in 1914, calling it “an imperialistic conflict” and called on “working-class” soldiers to turn their guns on the capitalist leaders who “sent them down into the murderous trenches.” Lenin was pushing for a socialist agenda by appealing to the middle-income people who felt like they should be given a handout by the government to supplement their income. Little did they know that socialism is never the best solution. War is always hard on the countries involved, but World War I was an unprecedented disaster for Russia. The Russian casualties were greater than those sustained by any other nation in any previous war. The war also left the economy hopelessly disrupted by the costly war effort. By March of 1917, things had gotten so bad that riots and strikes broke out in Petrograd over the scarcity of food. To make matters worse, army troops who had lost confidence in the leadership joined the strikers, and on March 15 Nicholas II was forced to abdicate, which brought to an end centuries of czarist rule. Following the February Revolution, so named because of Russia’s use of the Julian calendar, power was shared between the ineffectual Provincial Government and the soviets, or “councils” of soldiers’ and workers’ committees.
German authorities allowed Lenin and his lieutenants to secretly cross Germany en route from Switzerland to Sweden in a sealed railway car, after the outbreak of the February Revolution. The hope was that the return of the anti-war Socialists to Russia would undermine the Russian war effort, which had been continued under the Provincial Government. Lenin began to push for the overthrow of the Provincial Government by the soviets, an act for which he was condemned as a “German agent” by the government’s leaders. Forced to escape to Finland in July, his call for “peace, land, and bread” met with increasing popular support, and the Bolsheviks won a majority in the Petrograd soviet. Then, in October, Lenin secretly returned to Petrograd, and on November 7th the Bolshevik-led Red Guards took down the Provisional Government and proclaimed soviet rule.
Following the coup, Lenin became the virtual dictator of the world’s first Marxist state. His government made peace with Germany, nationalized industry, and distributed land but beginning in 1918, it all began to fall apart. The nation sank into a devastating civil war against czarist forces. In 1920, the czarists were defeated, and in 
1922 the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was established. Upon Lenin’s death in early 1924, his body was embalmed and placed in a mausoleum near the Moscow Kremlin. Petrograd was renamed Leningrad in his honor. After a struggle of succession, fellow revolutionary Joseph Stalin succeeded Lenin as leader of the Soviet Union. The Lenin years were finally over.
It’s not often that a young man “pulls strings” in order to go to war. Most men would rather not go to war, and some will even try to “pull strings” to get out of going. John F Kennedy, who had some health problems, and an old back injury from his college football days, was turned down for the Navy, but his dad managed to pull some strings for his son, who really wanted to go into the navy. Young was desperate, and like most parents, his father wanted to help fulfill that dream. So in 1941, Kennedy’s politically connected father, Joseph Kennedy used his influence to get his sin, John “Jack” into the service. Of course, Joseph might have been thinking ahead to future political maneuvers when he pushed for a military career for his son. Once in the Navy, Kennedy volunteered for PT (motorized torpedo) boat duty in the Pacific in 1942.
“Jack” Kennedy quickly worked to move himself up in rank, and soon he was Lieutenant John F. Kennedy. July 1943 found Lieutenant Kennedy and the crew of PT 109 in combat near the Solomon Islands. People often think that being in the Navy or the Air Force is somehow safer than the Army or Marines, but the reality is that any position in a war 
can prove to be dangerous. On August 2, 1943, the middle of the night, Kennedy’s boat was rammed by a Japanese destroyer and caught fire. In the ensuing explosion, several of Kennedy’s shipmates were blown overboard into a sea of burning oil. With no regard for his own life, Kennedy dove in to rescue three of the crew and in the process swallowed some of the toxic mixture. Kennedy always blamed his chronic stomach problems on that incident. The ordeal was not quickly over, and for 12 hours, Kennedy and his men clung to the wrecked hull. Finally, he ordered them to abandon ship. Kennedy and the other good swimmers placed the injured on a makeshift raft. They took turns pushing and towing the raft four miles to safety on a nearby island.
Their ordeal still wasn’t over. For six days, Kennedy and his crew waited on the island for rescue. There was little to eat on the island, but the men survived by drinking coconut milk and rainwater until native islanders discovered the sailors and offered food and shelter. While they waited, Kennedy tried every night to signal other US Navy ships in the area. In addition, Kennedy scrawled a message on a coconut husk and gestured to the islanders to take it to a nearby PT base at Rendova. Finally, on August 8, a Navy patrol boat picked up the survivors of PT-109.
The men were taken to the hospital to recuperate, and on June 12, 1944, while Kennedy was in the hospital recuperating from back surgery, he received the Navy and Marine Corps medal for “courage, endurance, and 
excellent leadership [that] contributed to the saving of several lives and was in keeping with the highest traditions of the United States Naval Service.”
Of course, the rest is history. John F Kennedy went on to become the 35th President of the United States, and on November 22, 1963, Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. His vice president, Lyndon B Johnson, assumed the presidency upon Kennedy’s death.
John Wilkes Booth was an actor, and as such, he had an expectation of applause following a performance. That is just what he thought the assassination of President Lincoln was. No, he didn’t think it was fake. He knew he was murdering the President of the United States, but he somehow thought people would consider it one of his greatest performances…the crowning moment of his stage career. It never occurred to him that the people who had loved him as an actor would suddenly turn against him.
At the very least, he expected to be greeted with applause and support by those sympathetic to the Confederacy. Instead, he found, much to his shock and great dismay, that he was a hounded man, and few wanted to associate with him. Oh, the loyalists to the Confederacy did their duty by him, but with great reluctance. He first encountered this reaction when he and David Herold, who was an American pharmacist’s assistant and Wilkes accomplice in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, stumbled upon a man in the dark, while searching for the home of Colonel Cox. The man, a local named Oswell Swann, reluctantly agreed to guide then to the Cox home, but only if he received payment for his services. He considered it just reward for the risk he was taking. Afterward, Swann collected his fee and vanished into the night, leaving the fugitives to the “hospitality” of Colonel Cox. That “hospitality” consisted of a few supplies, including whiskey, and a servant to lead the men to a hiding place in the woods. Cox certainly didn’t want these men to be found in his house.
Cox informed Booth that he was to “remain hidden in the woods until contacted.” Then Cox sent for Thomas Jones, a Confederate agent with experience in smuggling spies and information across the Potomac River into Virginia. Jones agreed to get them out and guide them across the Potomac, for a fee, but when he visited the fugitives in the woods, where they hid in a pine thicket, he told them it would be several days before he could do so. The manhunt for Booth and Herold was massive. Federal troops combed the area, searching properties and interrogating citizens over whether they had seen two men traveling together. Booth was very distressed, because instead of receiving the expected support and appreciation of the south, Booth found himself confined to a pine thicket!! Jones provided the men with newspapers, from which Booth discovered that he was widely considered a villainous murderer, rather than the Confederate hero he had expected to be. He wrote about his “horrible” fate, and the “injustice” of it all, in a diary he kept in an appointment book.
Federal authorities had most of the conspirators who had planned to kidnap Abraham Lincoln in custody by April 20, 1865. Several were not party to the assassination, but because they were involved in the kidnapping plans, they were held anyway. Three men were still not in custody…Booth, Herold, and John Surratt remained at large. The War Department put out wanted poster, released in Washington on April 20, offering a $50,000 reward for Booth, and $25,000 apiece for Herold and Surratt. By then, Surratt was hiding out in Canada, even though he knew that his mother was being held in federal custody. Coward that he was, Surratt was making plans to flee to Europe. Booth and Herold continued to cower in a pine thicket, relatively helpless. They didn’t dare leave, because they would be seen and immediately arrested. A dejected Booth spent his time drinking whiskey and scribbling in his makeshift diary over the unfairness of his reception. He believed his action had made him a martyr to the Confederate cause.
When the fugitives finally attempted to cross the Potomac, on about April 21, Jones’s guidance consisted of verbal instructions directing them to a waiting boat. These men had no boating experience, and the night was windy. The tides and swift current didn’t help matters either. Nor did the gunboats in the area. Booth whined into his diary, “last night being chased by gunboats till I was forced to return wet, cold, and starving.” Needless to say, the crossing was a failure, but Booth’s overly dramatic entry exaggerated what may have been an encounter with USS Juniper, positioned in the river near their point of crossing. Juniper’s log did not include a report of chasing anything that night. Booth likely spotted the gunboat, and in a panic, returned to the Maryland shore. Booth’s fugitive days ended when he was caught on April 26, 1865, near Port Royal, Virginia. As Booth and his co-conspirator, David Herold, cowered inside a barn, the soldiers demanded that they surrender. John Wilkes Booth died in agonizing fashion at the hands of Union soldiers in Port Royal, Virginia, 
two weeks after he assassinated Abraham Lincoln. When the Union soldiers demanded their surrender, Herold complied. But Booth refused. He didn’t leave the barn until one of the soldiers set it on fire. As he tried to sneak out in the shadows and flame, a shot cracked through the silent night…and found its mark. Booth briefly held on to life, but in the end, the bullet would be his demise…in true disgraced style.
Since time began, people have hoped for peace, and ended up in a battle. While “world peace” will likely never be an option, at least not in this world, governments continue to try, and those who oppose peace continue to do their best to sabotage the plans for peace. Israel has often been at the center of the battle for peace, which makes no logical sense. The other Arab nations have long been after the land, small as it is, that belongs to Israel. I never understood how they could covet the small piece of land that Israel had. The reality is that the Arab nations simply don’t want Israel to exist at all.
In 1995, a rally was being held in support of the Oslo Accords at the Kings of Israel Square in Tel Aviv. A number of people had warned Yitzhak Rabin, the fifth prime minister of Israel, that his life could be in danger, but he would not back down. The Oslo Accords was a pair of agreements between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). The Oslo I Accord was signed in Washington DC, in 1993. The Oslo II Accord was signed in Taba, Egypt, in 1995. The problem with these agreements is that the battle between these two groups goes so much deeper than just who owns the land. These nations are related and have been in a feud since the time of Jacob and Esau in Biblical days. Nevertheless, nations have tried to bring about peace between the two nations ever since the battle began.
On November 4, 1995 (12 Marcheshvan 5756 on the Hebrew calendar) at 9:30pm, at the end of the rally. An Israeli ultranationalist named Yigal Amir, who radically opposed Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s peace initiative, and particularly the signing of the Oslo Accords, took it upon himself, to assassinate Yitzhak Rabin. The Likud leader and future prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, told Rabin’s government that withdrawing from any “Jewish” land was heresy, which I would have to agree with, because the land had been given to them by God. They believed that Rabin was probably too secular and too far removed from the Biblical Jewish tradition and Jewish values, but assassination is never the answer.
Conservative rabbis associated with the settlers’ movement prohibited territorial concessions to the Palestinians and forbade soldiers in the Israel Defense Forces from evacuating Jewish settlers under the accords. Some rabbis proclaimed “din rodef” based on a traditional Jewish law of self-defense, against Rabin personally, arguing that the Oslo Accords would endanger Jewish lives. The whole situation, which was “designed” to bring “peace,” took on a completely different tone…chaos. While I would never condone violence or assassination, I 
don’t think Israel should ever be forced to give up parts of its land, and unfortunately, any peace agreement with the Palestinians always includes taking Israeli land, when Arab land is already far, far bigger. During the trial, Amir admitted to the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and claimed that he was justified in doing so, saying that Amir he was “satisfied” and was acting on the “orders of God.” Following the trial, Amir was sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of Rabin.
People are free to call it whatever they want to, but I prefer to follow the Biblical version, in which Joseph was warned in a dream, to move his son, Jesus to Egypt, because the Pharaoh was looking for Him so he could kill Him. Joseph heeded the warning. and the family moved immediately…like in the middle of the night, while those who were a danger to him were sleeping. Thankfully Joseph heeded that dream. Just imagine our world if he had not.
There have been other people who have had dream warnings, or prophetic dreams, whether a warning or a great blessing that was coming their way. I believe that our dreams can be a matter of God talking to us. President Abraham Lincoln was one of those people who had a prophetic dream, and it has been well documented through the years, for those of us who have chosen to listen. President Lincoln had his dream on April 4, 1865, and the dream was so troubling that he actually told it to a number of people including his wife, Mary Todd Lincoln and his former law partner, Ward Hill Lamon on April 11, 1865.
According to Lamon’s recollection, President Abraham Lincoln dreams on this night in 1865 “of ‘the subdued sobs of mourners’ and a corpse lying on a catafalque in the White House East Room.” In the dream, Lincoln asked a soldier standing guard “Who is dead in the White House?” to which the soldier replied, “the President. He was killed by an assassin.” Lincoln woke up at that point. On April 11, he told Lamon that the dream had “strangely annoyed” him ever since. Ten days after having the dream, Lincoln was shot dead by an assassin while attending the theater. Abraham Lincoln was shot by John Wilkes Booth while attending a play at Ford’s Theater in Washington DC on April 14, 1865. His assassination was the only successful leg in a conspiracy that also intended on capturing or killing Vice President Andrew Johnson and Secretary of State William Seward.
Interestingly, Lincoln supposedly later insisted to Lamon that the body on display was not his own…so he, himself did not view the dream as a warning of his own death. Some historians have discounted Lamon’s account, which was first published in the 1880s, nearly 20 years after the assassination. Nevertheless, Lamon claimed to have reconstructed the incident based on notes he made in 1865. I suppose the historians believe that since neither he nor Mary Lincoln mentioned the dream right after the president’s murder, it must not have been true. I believe that it was true, and that they were in such shock, that it never occurred to them to bring it up. Still, it is well known that Lincoln was a dreamer and was apparently quite interested in the meaning of dreams and what they have to say about future events both positive and negative. Proof of his curiosity lies in an 1863 letter to his wife, who at the time was in Philadelphia with their 10-year-old son, Tad. Lincoln writes that Mary had better “put Tad’s pistol away” as he “had an ugly dream about him.” Moreover, members of Lincoln’s cabinet recalled that, on the morning of his assassination, the president told them he’d dreamed of sailing across an unknown body of water at great speed. He also apparently revealed that he’d had the same dream repeatedly on previous occasions, before “nearly every great and important event of the War.”
The Secret Service was formed as a result of that assassination, but just imagine if they had all heeded the dream warning and placed a better guard around President Lincoln. If those he told of the dream, had considered the possibility of missing the play, or posted guards around the president, how different could have been the outcome. The world will never know, because one of our greatest presidents was gone before he could finish his second term in office. Lincoln was a very popular president. In his run against Democrat, George B 
McClellan, Lincoln carried all but three states (Kentucky, New Jersey, and Delaware), and won 55 percent of the vote. He won 212 electoral votes to McClellan’s 21, which goes to show that most of the people approved of his anti-slavery policies, as opposed to the Democrats, who wanted to keep slavery, and who fought against the slaves and minority races…and still do, even to this day.
I have always known that I was stubborn, and “bull headed” and if you ask my sisters, they will very much agree with me on that fact, but I seriously doubt if they would ever call me stubborn if I were compared to President Theodore Roosevelt. I don’t think many people are as stubborn as Roosevelt was. Roosevelt didn’t run for his initial term in office, but rather became president of the United States because William McKinley was assassinated while Roosevelt was serving as vice president. He did run for and win a second term in the election of 1904, during which he promised not to run for a third term thereafter. A man of his word to a point, Roosevelt stuck to that promise through the 1908 election, but then he decided to run for President again in 1912, first losing the Republican primary to the incumbent William Taft and then running at the head of a brand-new party, the Progressive “Bull Moose” Party. It is a strange name for a political party, but I think it might have been appropriate for Roosevelt.
When Roosevelt decided to run for president again in 1912, a saloon owner named John Schrank became obsessed with him, and after having a nightmare that convinced Schrank that Roosevelt was responsible for McKinley’s assassination. That fueled his obsession, and on October 14, 1912, he walked up to Roosevelt as he exited a Milwaukee hotel on route to a campaign event and fired a .38-caliber revolver right into his chest. For most people, this would be the end of the story, but this is where Roosevelt really earned the name attached to the political party of which he was a member.
Unfortunately, Schrank was not a bad shot, and the bullet hit its mark. Fortunately, the path of the bullet was not an easy one. After passing through Roosevelt’s glasses case and 50 pages worth of notes in his breast pocket, which slowed it down considerably the bullet hit Roosevelt’s chest. The items in its way likely slowed the bullet enough to save Roosevelt’s life. Then, in typical “bull headed” fashion, the former president coughed into his hands to check for blood, and upon finding none, continued on to the Milwaukee Auditorium, where he delivered an 84-minute speech that began with the following lines, “Friends, I shall ask you to be as quiet as possible. I don’t know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot; but it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose. But fortunately, I had my manuscript, so you see I was going to make a long speech, and there is a bullet – there is where the bullet went through – and it probably saved me from it going into my heart. The bullet is in me now, so that I cannot make a very long speech, but I will try my best.”
The bullet stayed lodged in his ribs throughout the rest of his unsuccessful campaign, and until his passing in 
1919. While Roosevelt lost his race, his determination did show the kind of fortitude it takes to be president of this country. Being the leader of the free world, is not something that can be handled easily. The President of the United States must be an anointed position, and it is not one that just anyone can handle. In many ways, the best presidents are a type of “bull moose.” They have to be to take the pounding they have to take, and then keep coming back for more.
