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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25191 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 13, 2026

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I will never understand Joo-posters' obsession with the USS Liberty.

I was recently listening to an interview with one of the survivors who was there.

After the ship was hit by a torpedo plane (I think), the ship sunk. Dozens of Americans abandoned ship. The Israeli planes then strifed the Americans in the water with machine gun fire from their aircraft - presumably to kill everyone and keep the story contained.

I always wondered, do people think this is a fake story? Or is it just not a big deal?

The Israeli planes then strafed the Americans in the water with machine gun fire from their aircraft - presumably to kill everyone and keep the story contained.

Or they believed they were firing on enemy personnel from an enemy vessel they had just sunk. Not exactly very sporting or within the norms of modern western nations, but not that crazy.

Mistaken identity/friendly fire incidents happen all the time, the US has a somewhat infamous reputation for blue on blue incidents with allied nations.

Or they believed they were firing on enemy personnel from an enemy vessel they had just sunk. Not exactly very sporting or within the norms of modern western nations, but not that crazy.

Not that crazy? Shooting at shipwrecked sailors is a clear violation of the Geneva Convention; it's literally a war crime!

From the Second Geneva Convention, Chapter II, Article 12:

Members of the armed forces and other persons mentioned in the following Article, who are at sea and who are wounded, sick or shipwrecked, shall be respected and protected in all circumstances, it being understood that the term "shipwreck" means shipwreck from any cause and includes forced landings at sea by or from aircraft.

Such persons shall be treated humanely and cared for by the Parties to the conflict in whose power they may be, without any adverse distinction founded on sex, race, nationality, religion, political opinions, or any other similar criteria. Any attempts upon their lives, or violence to their persons, shall be strictly prohibited; in particular, they shall not be murdered or exterminated, subjected to torture or to biological experiments; they shall not willfully be left without medical assistance and care, nor shall conditions exposing them to contagion or infection be created.

You know what they say, it's only a war crime if you lose the war.

The whole concept of "honor" has been so lost that even those who profess to defend it are constantly in the act of denigrating it.

I always wondered, do people think this is a fake story? Or is it just not a big deal?

Well, it happened 60 years ago, agonize over it now makes as much sense now as being still really angry about Gulf of Tonkin incident.

The USS Liberty is the case in point example for zionist influence in American politics. If zionist influence had vained or stopped being a relevant factor then yes, bringing it up constantly would be a little off. But zionist influence has only grown.

To that extent JIDF posters can only pretend to not understand the context or attempt to denigrate those who do.

Yet on the other hand people especially on the US right still regularly invoke the memory of the 1979 Iranian hostage taking of US diplomats. How important an event seems to remember greatly depends on how well it meshes with the narrative you are weaving.

(Also, isn't the consensus nowadays that the Gulf of Tonkin Incident was a US intelligence fabrication, almost up there with Sender Gleiwitz?)

How important an event seems to remember greatly depends on how well it meshes with the narrative you are weaving.

It also depends on whether the country involved knew what they were doing. The Israelis thought that they had located a vessel belonging to the Egyptian military, with whom they were in a state of active warfare. The Iranians knew that they were targeting diplomatic personnel.

It furthermore depends on whether they apologised for their actions. The Israeli government, upon realising their mistake, apologised to the United States and subsequently paid a total of, adjusting for inflation, over $80 million. Has Iran ever acknowledged wrongdoing in the matter?

Well the linked write-up explains that Israel killed 34 American soldiers, the president and his advisors and most of the surviving crewmen all believed it was on purpose, and Israel then conspired with American Jews in government to threaten the president not to talk about it, while conspiring with Jewish journalists to quash the story, all this done through their consulate. Decades later they balked at ever paying restitution to the families, even with American pressure. To top it off, the event has a symbolically resonant name: the Attack on USS Liberty. And this happened in 1967, which was not the height of the lobby’s power.

Well the linked write-up explains that Israel killed 34 American soldiers, the president and his advisors and most of the surviving crewmen all believed it was on purpose

I'm not familiar with this incident in any great detail, but what would the Israelis possibly hope to gain from a deliberate attack on a US warship, in the middle of a major war?

If Israeli influence was so strong over the US that they could effectively puppet the government and its armed forces, why even strike the ship at all?

Why not just use all that shadowy influence to covertly achieve whatever goal they were trying to achieve instead?

I'm struggling to come up with an explanation for Israel being malicious rather than simply mistaken that doesn't sound like;

"No, Muttley, we can't win fairly! We are villains! Ergo, we have to cheat!"

According to our then-president, it was to prevent the ship from spying. It’s possible the Liberty had obtained comms about the slaughter of surrendering Egyptian soldiers.

About noon, as the Liberty was again in sight of El Arish, and while the massacres were taking place, an army commander there reported that a ship was shelling them from the sea. But that was impossible. The only ship in the vicinity was the Liberty, and she was eavesdropping, not shooting. As any observer would have recognised, the ship was a tired old second world war vessel crawling with antennae, and unthreatening to anyone - unless it was their secrets, not their lives, they wanted to protect.

But it could have obtained other valuable information:

This and other war crimes were just some of the secrets Israel had sought to conceal since the start of the conflict. An essential element in the Israeli battle plan seemed to have been to hide much of the war behind a carefully constructed curtain of lies: lies about the Egyptian threat, lies about who started the war, lies to the US president, lies to the UN Security Council, lies to the press, lies to the public. Thus, as the American naval historian Dr Richard K Smith noted, "any instrument which sought to penetrate this smoke screen so carefully thrown around the normal 'fog of war' would have to be frustrated". Into this sea of deception and slaughter sailed the USS Liberty, an enormous spy factory loaded with the latest eavesdropping gear.

—

If Israeli influence was so strong over the US

They do not have much influence within the meritocratic military that they largely do not serve in. They have power in politics and media, where money buys influence.

rather than simply mistaken

According to the crew, this was impossible. The flag was clearly visible, and they even had a passing Israeli pilot wave to them overhead.

According to the crew, this was impossible.

The crew aren't in a position to make that judgement, I've read far too many accounts of seemingly very dumb friendly fire incidents, particularly involving airstrikes, to believe that it is impossible to screw up this badly. During WW2, a little over 20 years before this incident, Allied planes mixed up what country they were attacking and bombed Switzerland something like 70 times. War is a confusing mess and shit does indeed happen.

The flag was clearly visible, and they even had a passing Israeli pilot wave to them overhead.

Yes, if I was planning to blow up an allied nations spy ship as part of a cover-up, I would make sure to have my planes fly low and slow so that everyone on board can see whose air force the plane belongs to, for good measure I'd also transmit to them and ask in plain, unambiguous language to tell me that they have positively identified the American ship that we are going to bomb in order to cover up our nefarious wrongdoings. After all, even if my foolproof plan of sinking the ship and doing a few strafing runs on the survivors in the water fails, the famously hostile-to-life mediterranean sea will take care of the rest.

This and other war crimes were just some of the secrets Israel had sought to conceal since the start of the conflict. An essential element in the Israeli battle plan seemed to have been to hide much of the war behind a carefully constructed curtain of lies: lies about the Egyptian threat, lies about who started the war, lies to the US president, lies to the UN Security Council, lies to the press, lies to the public. Thus, as the American naval historian Dr Richard K Smith noted, "any instrument which sought to penetrate this smoke screen so carefully thrown around the normal 'fog of war' would have to be frustrated". Into this sea of deception and slaughter sailed the USS Liberty, an enormous spy factory loaded with the latest eavesdropping gear.

There is absolutely nothing that the USS Liberty could have recorded that is more dangerous to the state of Israel, or those in power in Israel, than deliberately bombing a US warship. This is the cold war, the US does not care about the rights and wrongs of the war Israel is currently fighting, who started it or who is massacring who. The Soviets are backing the Arabs, so the US is going to back the Israelis to try and counter-balance the strategically significant middle east.

Israel killed 34 American soldiers, the president and his advisors and most of the surviving crewmen all believed it was on purpose, and Israel then conspired with American Jews in government to threaten the president not to talk about it, while conspiring with Jewish journalists to quash the story, all this done through their consulate.

If you can do this, you aren't afraid of a grainy 1960s recording of intercepted radio messages from a war zone. You just aren't.

You are disagreeing with the NSA director (“It couldn't be anything else but deliberate”), the CIA board of inquiry ("no doubt that the Israelis knew exactly what they were doing"), the 18th chief of Naval Operations from 1967 to 1970 and 7th chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 1970 to 1974, and the President before he was threatened. I imagine all of these people have heard accounts of dumb air strikes, but they didn’t file this under “shit happens”. In WWII the allies flew more than one million sorties over Germany, so 70 dropping in Switzerland is a pretty low amount.

if I was planning to blow up an allied nations spy ship as part of a cover-up

If you have decided to give orders to blow up an American spy ship (and America was not quite allied with Israel at the time), you would not be the grunts tasked with identifying ships over international waters. Those are totally different men.

There is absolutely nothing that the USS Liberty could have recorded that is more dangerous to the state of Israel, or those in power in Israel, than deliberately bombing a US warship

I don’t think there’s any way to know that. And it depends if they knew how much power they had in the American Jewish community. Evidently they had enough power to threaten the President’s career and reputation and alter news stories on the incident while stifling the influence of the main intelligence branches. Their question is “can I get away with this?” or “can I plausibly deny this?”

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