The pregnant wife of Yigal Amir, the jailed assassin of prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, said Monday that she intended to tell Amir's future child that his father had "sacrificed himself for his people."
Larisa Trimbobler is in the last stages of pregnancy and is expected to give birth within the next few days. The Israel Prisons Service, noting that Amir is a security prisoner, announced Monday that it would deny Amir's requests that he be allowed to leave prison to attend the circumcision ceremony of his expected son, or be allowed to hold the ceremony within Rimonim prison, were he is currently incarcerated.
Amir, who strongly opposed the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, gunned down the then-prime minister after a Tel Aviv peace rally on November 4, 1995.
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Coinciding with the anniversary and with the immiment birth, Israeli ultra-nationalists launched a campaign this week in an attempt to win Amir's release from prison.
Trimbobler, speaking on Army Radio, noted that the gender of the fetus was a matter of medical confidentiality and said the controversy over a possible circumcision was manufactured by a hostile media.
Asked if she would tell the future child that her father was a murderer, she replied, "I will tell him that his father sacrificed himself for the sake of his people."
Trimbobler said the campaign to free Amir, which included a promotional film excerpts of which were widely broadcast on news programs, "proves that people are already no longer afraid" of advocating his release.
She said that for the 12 years since the assassination, Israelis had been subject to a government "brainwashing" campaign "the likes of which are familiar to people from the [former] Soviet Union."
"I am happy that people have gotten up their courage and come out against the brainwashing, and the attempt to rewrite history in the manner of [George] Orwell's '1984. There is an entire generation that has grown up in schools and has been educated with lies."
She declined to elaborate, saying that the assassination was taught bereft of its historical context.
For years, Amir battled for his right to marry and have children. He eventually married Trimbobler by proxy after IPS, backed by Attorney General Menachem Mazuz, forbade the ceremony from being held in prison.
Trimbobler was granted a conjugal visit last year, after Shin Bet chief Yuval Diskin ruled that this did not pose a security risk.
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