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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   24877 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 30, 2023

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Remember the USS Liberty?

As much Israel discourse as there's been in the last 45 years, you never hear about the time the Israeli air force and navy attacked an American ship in broad daylight and killed 34 Americans, except from the most conspiratorially-minded places like /pol/ (and Brett Favre when he's being trolled by /pol/).

Why? This seems strange. One might think this is because it blends into the background of innumerable incidents that make up the Arab-Israeli conflict, and thus most people simply shrug and accept that, "yeah, shits really fucked over there," and leave it at that, but this involved Americans. You know, the people that matter. There's some dispute about what really happened and whether or not it was deliberate. It's not surprising that this would be controversial; it's surprising that this is not a real issue at all.

My tentative opinion is that it was a deliberate attack. The USS Liberty was a spy ship. It was not supposed to be as close to the coast as it was. Israel didn't want the State Department jeopardizing their OPSEC in the 6-day war, so they made sure the Americans had no eyes on the ground (or the water). It was probably the right decision tbh. US leadership decided that the incident wasn't worth making major foreign policy changes over, and so they went along with the Israeli cover-up.

We certainly hear a lot more about the USS Liberty than we do about that time the British bombed the French fleet after their surrender to Germany, killing over a thousand sailors, or the many times commercial airliners have been shot down, among other such incidents. What sort of conversation do you think we should be having? Should we break our alliance with Israel because they killed 34 of our sailors? We're allies with Germany and Japan after all, and they've killed about 10,000 times more Americans than that.

Isn’t the UK’s sinking of the French fleet pretty well-known in the UK (and presumably also France)? Not that the two situations are comparable anyway. Israel’s attack on the USS Liberty was supposedly an accident; the UK’s attack on the French fleet was open and deliberate. The US, responding to the former, made diplomatic protests but otherwise did nothing. Vichy France, responding to the latter, broke diplomatic ties with the UK and bombed Gibraltar. In addition, my understanding is that the resulting rise in French Anglophobia lingered on for years.

Edit: If we had responded to the attack on the USS Liberty by breaking off diplomatic ties with Israel and bombing the Israeli coast, I don’t think anyone today would be complaining about a conspiracy to cover the whole thing up.

Allyship? America sends billions to Israel each year, what does it get in return?

I have been warned before about saying things like 'I would like to call this cheap' - what is the proper law-abidin' way to suggest this is cheap? It's just kind of dumb. Germany and Japan were invaded and fire/nuclear-bombed into submission and had radical re-organizations of their governments and people forced on them by American troops at gunpoint and are still under American occupation to this day.

Because I anticipate if you respond you will attempt to miss the point, did America invade and fire/nuclear-bomb Israel into submission after it attacked the USS Liberty and radically reorganize their government and people and occupy them to this day?

But again, there have been plenty of friendly fire incidents involving the US and US allies. Israel admitted the attack and paid compensation a year after the incident to the families of those killed, and to those wounded, and then compensated the navy for damage to the ship in 1980. The US shot down an Iranian civilian airliner; Russia shot down a civilian 747 from New York with 270 people onboard, including a congressman. These didn’t lead to war. Israel admitted fault and paid compensation, which is how these things go.

The only reason there’s outrage is because it’s Israel. If it had been another ‘greatest ally’ like the UK, nobody would remember it. Unfortunately the families of the survivors who wanted more money were taken advantage of by essentially isolationist and/or antisemitic political campaigners in the US who promised to push their grievances, and here we are sixty years later.

except from the most conspiratorially-minded places like /pol/

/pol/ really enjoys bringing it up but it's not that obscure. Looking it up on Youtube I see a BBC documentary from 2002, an Al Jazeera documentary, a Jocko Willink Podcast discussion and some small high production value channels giving an animated breakdown.

Looking it up on Youtube I see a BBC documentary from 2002, an Al Jazeera documentary, a Jocko Willink Podcast discussion and some small high production value channels giving an animated breakdown.

And now compare it to response to the Iran hostage crisis, in which 50 people were held hostage, but eventually returned and not killed.

Obviously the media coverage is incomparable, but even that aside, Iran is still blockaded and starved. It is impossible to invest in Iran, it is impossible for Iranian companies to succeed globally.

And honestly, Iranians had incredibly good justification to be mad at Americans.

The ongoing sanctions on Iran might have something to do with their continued funding of terrorist groups.

Talk about apples and oranges. The Pueblo incident happened, and then it was over. The hostages were held for more than a year. Of course there is going to be vastly more coverage of the latter than to the former; eg, compare the coverage of "girl killed in fall" with "girl trapped in well," or "coal miners killed in mine accident" with "coal miners trapped in mine." Not to mention that the hostage crisis took place during an election year, while the incumbent was running for election.

Iran is still blockaded and starved.

  1. It is hardly starved, and 2) it has done some other shady stuff since then, no?

honestly, Iranians had incredibly good justification to be mad at Americans.

That is not really the point. The Iran incident involved an embassy. Americans had incredibly good justification to be mad at Japan after Pearl Harbor, but Japan's embassies and consulates were protected by US police after the attack.

That is not really the point. The Iran incident involved an embassy. Americans had incredibly good justification to be mad at Japan after Pearl Harbor, but Japan's embassies and consulates were protected by US police after the attack.

Was it the Iranian government that attacked the embassy? Because I'm pretty sure it was the Japanese government that attacked Peal Harbor.

Talk about apples and oranges.

No one is comparing Pearl Harbor to the embassy attack. The comparisons are between:

  1. Americans being upset at Pearl Harbor, and Iranians being upset at US policy re the Shah. Pearl Harbor was an act of the Japanese govt, and US policy the Shah the actions of the US govt.
  2. The response of the respective govts to threats to their enemy's embassy.

And, for the record, the Iranian govt ended up supporting the holding of the hostages and using them as bargaining chips.

Anyone remotely online (even in leftist circles, because of the pro-Palestinian angle) has heard about the USS Liberty more than they have heard about any other comparable attack that has ever occurred in the history of warfare.

you never hear about

Quite the opposite, I hear about it roughly six times a day. It's the most widely publicized attack on the US shipping since Pearl Harbor. Why? This seems strange, until you remember Joooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooos!

I'm going to take a bold stance: 4chan is valuable.

Sure, it has an obvious signal to noise ratio problem. But I would say not worse than reddit (which is a powerful indictment of the reddit algorithm as it doesn't clearly outperform having no algorithm at all).

On the various boards at various times you can find various distributions of quality. The /pol/ board is lower quality on average than most, but it has it's gems in the mud.

Thanks to the kind and helpful multicultural band of ridiculous edgelords on /pol/ I have repeatedly been informed about the USS Liberty incident.

Outside of that cabal of edgy 4chan posters, I don't think I have ever encountered this incident. Normies don't know.

This is the third time I've heard about it in the last few weeks just on this site. It's a completely outsized amount of attention for a 50+ year old friendly fire incident. At this point it's time to let bygones be bygones about deliberate atrocities, never mind an accidental bombing in the fog of war.

The conspiracy theories are nonsense, too. There is no plausible rationale that would justify Israel taking the insane risk of deliberately attacking the United States, and "jeopardizing their OPSEC" 4 days into a 6 day war that was already being decisively won by Israel certainly isn't one.

Best conspiracy theory I've heard is the Israelis knew the Russians were getting US Intel and didn't want to tell the US they knew for intelligence reasons. So they stopped the ship from collecting the Intel the Russians were nicking in a way that could be explained as non-intel related. This also suggests why the US would assist in covering up the reason for the attack.

They wanted to conceal that they were executing POWs and Liberty was a surveillance ship. Also, there is a possible false flag angle (remember the Lavon affair?).

This actually ties in well to that recent overkill conspiracy theory post. Surely the Israelis had to have known the US would figure out they did it, did Egypt even have any airforce left by that point in the war?

If Israel expected the US to figure out they were responsible, they would have to be absolutely confident in American subservience to them, that they would take such an attack lying down. But if they were absolutely confident in American subservience, why do they care if Americans hear about them killing some POWs? Wouldn’t it just be easier to count on American loyalty to look the other way on POW executions, as opposed to relying on Americans to look the other way on sinking their own ship?

Any way you slice it sinking a US warship is more likely to piss off the USA than executing Egyptian POWs. So doing the former to cover up the latter is nonsensical. Classic overkill conspiracy theory

It’s not necessarily overkill. If the Israelis were confident that A) committing deliberate war crimes would piss off the Americans and cause them to drop their support, and B) attacking an American spy ship would be chalked up as an accident due to fog of war, resulting in no real change to the status quo, they—or more realistically, a single officer—could have decided the risk was worth it.

Afaik most of the survivors think that's what happened. You can suggest a better motive if you want, but these counterfactuals don't prove that they really thought it was an egyptian ship.

Most of the survivors were grunts with no understanding of geopolitics, why should their opinion carry any weight as to the cause of the incident?

Killing potentially 50+ US sailors to cover up something that countless US allies (and the US itself, if we’re just considering torture of prisoners) did regularly throughout the 20th century just doesn’t make sense.

Id be willing to wager that there are a lot of "grunts" who have a better grasp of geopolitics than the median State Department official.

After all its his ass that's on the line.

I agree it isn't as clear cut as obviously being an accident, given some credible Americans who say otherwise and claim to have heard the intercepts, however that explanation does not make sense. Attacking your own allies ship to cover you are executing POWs is going to be a much bigger deal and much more likely to lose their support. In other words if the US government covered for the Israelis deliberately killing their own sailors and intelligence operatives to make them look good, they would certainly have covered up Israelis executing POWs.

To me that is one of the biggest holes in the deliberate attack theory. There really isn't much nastiness they could have been doing that America would have cared about more than dead Americans and attack on their ship.

They must have hoped to pass it off as an Egyptian attack, I guess.

Not plausible. The Egyptian air force was wiped out in the opening engagement of the war, and the Israelis informed the Americans that they had attacked the ship just two hours after the attack took place.

Against an American Intelligence ship? The one they were concerned was intercepting their communications? If they can intercept your comms about torturing/executing POWs they can probably intercept your communications from your pilots saying Hey, this is a US ship (as indeed it was claimed happened, for evidence that it was a planned attack). And after passing over the ship multiple times so they can see what planes are being used?

The Israelis (if it was deliberate) must have been aware that the US would almost certainly be able to identify the culprits. The only thing that then makes sense is that they were pretty confident the US would not abandon them/attack them over it. But at that point intercepted comms about POWs should also not really be a concern.

None of the theories of why they would attack deliberately really hold up in my opinion. Which doesn't mean they didn't, just that whatever reason there was in that scenario might be lost to time. There are enough other discrepancies that do undermine the "obviously it was a simple mistake" narrative, to at least not make it certain.

The ship could have blown up and killed everyone on board instantly along with any evidence of intercepted communications.

But they didn't try to shoot down the US plane that did intercept communications either. Sinking the ship wasn't enough on its own. Which the Israelis should have known. It's a huge, huge risk. And there doesn't seem to be anything worth that risk they got out of it, that we know of.

Why were they executing POWs? How many?

They couldn't spare troops to guard them and wanted them to go on the offensive. Don't know how many.

At this point it's time to let bygones be bygones about deliberate atrocities, never mind an accidental bombing in the fog of war.

I agree we should do the former, but insisting on framing it as the latter makes it a bit hard. Surely the dead deserve for the truth to come out?

What truth? It’s a murky conjecture at best, lacking a clear motive. And the nationalistic pride baiting around it is so transparent. Why did they do it? I guess they just wanted to prove the greatest country on earth is a little bitch, sammy. Now what are you gonna do about it when you grow up?

I suggest you remember the maine instead.

I suggest you remember the maine instead.

The spontaneous coal combustion?

Are there still people who think spain perfidiously blew up the maine?

What truth?

The one in the documents that are still classified at the very least? If it's time to move on from the ship getting bombed, it's time to move on from these secrets as well.

Joooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooos

Let's not do this, please.

I agree that some sort of "the juice" pun would have been better form but he's not wrong.

Quite the opposite, I hear about it roughly six times a day.

You need to start hanging out with other people than Nick Fuentes.

It's the most widely publicized attack on the US shipping since Pearl Harbor. Why?

Then why did I first hear about it from weird dissident spaces, and not tons upon tons of documentaries, and references from war movies like I did with Pearl Harbor?

This seems strange, until you remember Joooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooos!

Or because unlike Pearl Harbor this was done by a supposed ally rather than a self-declared enemy?

There was a similar situation to USS Liberty, but that time Japan sunk a US naval vessel during peacetime. The difference between the famous "sneak attack" and USS Panay Incident of 1937 is that Japan, like Israel, took responsibility and paid reparations.

USS Panay Incident is likewise not much known.

IMO the USS Stark incident is a better comparison: a US frigate was hit by Iraqi Exocet missiles, killling 37 sailors during the Iran-Iraq war in 1987. While there was some diplomacy (and some accounts that it was deliberate), it wasn't viewed as a casus belli, although Iraq did end up paying reparations for it as part of a larger deal involving the whole Gulf War.

As opposed to the year later, where Operation Praying Mantis saw the US sink half of Iran's navy after USS Samuel B. Roberts hit an Iranian mine (somehow without loss of life), and almost fired on a Soviet ship that claimed to be in the area to "take pictures for history." A month later, USS Vincennes managed to shoot down a commercial Iranian airliner.

Honestly, I think the lesson is that fog of war is very real and it's quite likely that someone ordered the attack, and someone was aware it was an American ship. But these were quite likely different parties, quite possibly far apart, and making decisions hastily often leads to oversights.

Id just like to take a moment to appreciate USS Samuel B Roberts living up to both of her namesakes by embracing Leroy Jenkins as her spirit animal. One can only hope that after hitting the mine her captain's response was "at least we have chicken".

You need to start hanging out with other people than Nick Fuentes.

Never heard of her.

Remember the USS Liberty?

Yes, and the response (as always) is what do you remember?

...and what makes you think it matters?

What I remember is that Americans have the power to bury the killing of their countrymen when politically advantageous. And that sovereign is he who makes the exception.

This is important to remember because you guys have a tendency to pretend to be moved by principles and not interests. One that even fools your own selves at times.

It's also a good reminder that Israel and the USA are distinct entities with different interests that don't always coincide. Something both Arabs, Evangelicals and Neonazis ought to be reminded of.

And it is also a great example of how tabooing inconvenient truths is boneheaded because it makes great propaganda for your political ennemies.

Really it's a very teachable moment about the chaos of war and the pragmatic nature of politics in many forms.

What I remember is that Americans have the power to bury the killing of their countrymen when politically advantageous. And that sovereign is he who makes the exception.

Well, yes? And Poland has not declared war on Ukraine when their anti-air missile killed people in Poland (Przewodów).

Context matters and acting like AI from computer game is not optimal in real world. Large part of being sovereign is being sovereign and not behold to simplistic suboptimal rules.

Note also how Israel responded.

Well, yes? And Poland has not declared war on Ukraine when their anti-air missile killed people in Poland (Przewodów).

Context matters

Are you claiming Israel sunk the ship accidentally, the way the Ukrainian missile ended up in Poland?

It’s much less clear that it wasn’t accidental than /pol/ types suggest.

AFAIK yes it was an accidental attack after misidentification, but I never really investigated this deeply.

But it was not sunk, right?

But it was not sunk, right?

Yeah I got that one wrong.

Yes, obviously. Israel mistook it for an Egyptian vessel.

Edit: Also the ship wasn't sunk.

'But Sir, It’s an American Ship.'

'Never Mind, Hit Her!'

https://www.usslibertyveterans.blog/but-sir-its-an-american-ship-never-mind-hit-her-when-israel-attacked-uss-liberty-annotated/

As far as I can tell - and I'm not confident in this because I've only just done some googling - the following is true:

  • The quote you give is a verbal report of an alleged NSA transcript
  • Actual documents related to the attack are now fully declassified
  • The alleged quoted transcript does not seem to actually exist anywhere
  • IDF records show that the pilots reported seeing no flag but (following the attack) did see the GTR-5 letters on the ship.

I could be mistaken on any or all of these points, I'm not claiming deep knowledge. But that's what seems to be the case to me after some cursory research. So my reaction to that quote is I don't think it was ever actually uttered.

Israel killed a bunch of american soldiers and mainstream conservatives still mindlessly repeat about how Israel is "our greatest ally" despite the fact that it's not in NATO and hasn't sent troops to Korea/Vietnam/Afghanistan/Iraq unlike actual US allies. It should matter, but it clearly doesn't matter to you or them.

Conservatives don't hold a monopoly on supporting "our greatest ally" this is the Uniparty at work.

At my day job as a very small cog in the military industrial complex machine we're not permitted to use hardware or software from our greatest ally for security reasons.

I mean, who is the US’ “greatest ally”? I’m sure you can find minor countries that haven’t specifically gone against US interests but among the major or more powerful nations all the candidates (the UK, France, Canada) all have done things highly contrary/opposed to the position of the US government of the day in relatively recent history (since WW2, at least).

Well, AFAIK Japan is considered to be "the greatest ally" of the US, but not in terms of 'the most loyal' but rather 'the most valuable' taking into account its geostrategic position and power projection capabilities. Probably "being loyal" isn't even a good measure in the international relations.

Maybe Australia? Poland? I don't know who specifically is the greatest ally, but it's clear who isn't.

Wait, you think that Israel should be putting troops in Afghanistan/Iraq? Even Bush wasn't that dumb.

Nope, my point is that actual allies who fought on the same side as US and have common defence obligations are obviously greater allies than Israel.

conservatives still mindlessly repeat

But

There are literally millions of people on either side of every major conflict, and finding that one of them is doing something wrong or thoughtless proves nothing and adds nothing to the conversation. We want to engage with the best ideas on either side of any issue, not the worst.

Post about specific groups, not general groups, wherever possible. General groups include things like gun rights activists, pro-choice groups, and environmentalists. Specific groups include things like The NRA, Planned Parenthood, and the Sierra Club. Posting about general groups is often not falsifiable, and can lead to straw man arguments and non-representative samples.

So please don't drop low-effort group smears.

OP said "mainstream conservatives", mindlessly repeat it, not conservatives as a whole. And, indeed, part of being in the mainstream is that you believe the standard line. Mainstream liberals think "corporations bad." Mainstream conservatives think "regulations bad." If they didn’t think those things, they wouldn't be mainstream! That they do so "mindlessly" is the problematic part of OP's claim, though even that is probably true of huge chunks of the mainstream.

Tomatoh, Tamatah.

I don't mean that all conservatives do it, but that it's mostly conservatives doing that and that it's a mindless cliche.

Why would I want to smear all conservatives? I'm not a leftwinger.

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