Assassins displace agency to nation and God, feeling no remorse

Evidence

Yigal Amir, who assassinated the Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, similarly claimed to be acting on a divine mandate, using the rabbinical pursuer’s decree as moral justification. The religious right was alarmed by the Oslo accords. The second Oslo Accord of 1995 mandated that parts of the West Bank would be transferred to Palestinian control. The right viewed this land as part of Israel’s biblical heritage and the giveaway as a betrayal. … For Amir the accords provided a moral imperative to assassinate Rabin, the betrayer. As Amir put it, “Maybe physically, I acted alone but what pulled the trigger was not only my finger but the finger of this whole nation which, for 2,000 years, yearned for this land and dreamed of it.” He further proclaimed that he acted for “all those thousands who had shed their blood for this country” (Greenberg, 1995). He, too, was doing God’s bidding. He felt no remorse over his perceived martyrdom: “I have no regrets. Everything I did was for the sake of God.” — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 355

Categorization

• XREF: Amir’s ‘not my finger but the finger of this whole nation’ is the textbook displacement-of-responsibility quote; resonates with anything on Eichmann/the banality of evil.
• CANDY: Amir’s line about the trigger being pulled by a 2,000-year-old nation’s finger is a compact, striking quote.
• DEEPTHINKING: The puzzle of two-sided divine authorization — each side certain God commands its killing — and how groups escape the contradiction by demonizing the other side as infidels, is a genuinely paradigm-level insight about religious violence.