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