SOUL FOOD:

One week and 40 years ago, history tells us, Sirhan Sirhan shot New York Sen. Robert F. Kennedy in Los Angeles on June 5, the evening of the California primary.

Kennedy, who had won, died the next morning at The Good Samaritan Hospital.

His death shattered the hopes and dreams of at least one generation. It seemed to usher in a thick-skinned and self-absorbed era for our nation.

For many who voted in this year’s primary, that’s ancient history, I understand.

Sadly, the demolition of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles where Kennedy was shot has almost guaranteed the incident will become more obscure with each passing year.

Recently, though, certain well-publicized remarks made by New York Sen. Hillary Clinton and, in particular, another prejudice-pushing (if not hate-mongering) e-mail I got resurrected this sad and historic moment for me.

What Clinton said was this: “My husband did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary somewhere in the middle of June, right? We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California. I don’t understand it.”

The “it” she mentioned was the rush some Democrats felt to have her out of the presidential primary race.

Given that the senator was defending her decision to prolong her campaign against Barack Obama for the Democratic nomination, the key to both references would appear to be the month of June, not the word “assassinated.” Yet many viewed Clinton’s allusion to Kennedy’s fate as highly ill-chosen.

Because Barack Obama, the first African-American candidate with a convincing shot at the White House, has been under Secret Service protection for more than a year, perhaps it was. But I’ll never believe Clinton meant the comment as so many construed it.

When I was taught the Ten Commandments, I was instructed the one that tells us not to bear false witness against our neighbor means more than it appears to at first glance. It also means, I was told, that we are not to attribute false or imagined motives to a person’s words or deeds.

(As for who is our neighbor, see The Parable of the Good Samaritan in Luke 10:25-37.)

Yet in our present society, presuming then vilifying a person’s motives is often as not embraced as a perfectly acceptable way to gain game advantage.

With sleight of word an accuser can stoop low yet appear to stand on moral ground higher than his opponent.

Republicans and Democrats quickly colored what she said as nothing short of hoping to win by assassination. Robert Kennedy Jr., to his credit, stuck by her.

“It is clear from the context that Hillary was invoking a familiar political circumstance to support her decision to stay in the race through June,” he said in a statement. “I think it is a mistake for people to take offense.”

I was sorry when Clinton apologized. I had expected her to stand firm. She could have stayed the course, saying exactly what Kennedy and spokesman Howard Wolfson did — that she “was talking about the length of the race and using the ’68 election as an example of how long the races in the past have gone…[and] used her husband’s race in the same vein.”

She could have told the nation no reasoned and honest soul would ever portray her observation as anything more. She would have gained my respect and admiration, if not my vote, if she had.

But she buckled.

Unlike Clinton’s words, the e-mail I received was one of those blatantly malignant messages of which I get far too many. This one pushed for law enforcement profiling of male Muslims between the ages of 17 and 40.

It claimed most acts of terrorism are committed by “Muslim male extremists mostly between [those ages].” Sirhan topped its list of examples.

The problem is Sirhan never was a Muslim. He was born a Palestinian Christian in Jerusalem in 1944 and raised in the Maronite Church.

His family was driven from their home, like many other Palestinian families, during the 1948-49 Jewish-Arab war. They lived for a time as refugees in Jordan.

In the U.S., Sirhan made several religious conversions, including becoming a Baptist and later a Seventh-day Adventist. He also dabbled in the occult. But he never converted to Islam.

As I’ve said before, not all Arabs are Muslims. Not all — not even close to most — Muslims are Arabs. Neither are most Muslims (nor most Arabs) likely to be terrorists, even if they are men within a certain age range.

In common to most of the incidents listed in the e-mail was hostility to our foreign policy. We need to know, I wrote to the sender, what our foreign policy is. And we need to understand it.

Then we either need to stand by it and be willing to suffer for it (as we have and will) because we are doing the right thing in the world or we need to vote in leaders who will change our foreign policy.

Forensics evidence presented at a March symposium in Connecticut, hosted by the Henry C. Lee Institute of Forensic Science, suggested Sirhan was not the one who, on the first anniversary of the Arab-Israeli War, did in fact fire the shots that killed Kennedy. But no one has denied he tried.

For thousands of years, his mother told him, Jerusalem had been home to her family. She never let him forget the Israelis took their land.

His father is said to have told reporters, “It is not fair to accuse my son without a full examination of Zionist atrocities against the Arabs … which received the support and blessings of Robert Kennedy.”

Sirhan told court-appointed psychiatrists that Robert Kennedy had sold out to the Jews.

We will have enemies in this world, whether for the sake of doing good or doing evil. And I grant you, in this messy, complex world it is at times hard to be certain which is which.

In this election year especially, let’s pray — and vote — that when our enemies scorn us, it is for the sake of our doing good.

MICHÈLE MARR is a freelance writer from Huntington Beach. She can be reached at michele@soulfoodfiles.com.