Israel's Attack on the USS Liberty, Revisited

[Arrian]

Ally, damnit, ally!



For what it's worth, the author of the article I linked to does discuss the Golan angle...

-Arrian

[lord of the mark]

Originally posted by DinoDoc
LotM: Is everyone who finds that the mistake scenario strains credulity anti-semetic? If not, what's with all the Zionist Conspiracy clap-trap?

Since, as I have been told repeated, anti-zionism is not antisemitism, how would Zionist conspiracy imply Antisemitism?

But lets get beyond that. I didnt mean that Arrian was Anti-zionist the way some folks are.

But for this to have been a deliberate attack, there would have to be massive cover-up, including multiple political positions in Israel = Rabin would have had to lie, and the Likud govts who had access to Israeli records and had every incentive to embarrass Rabin et al, would have had to lie, as well as lots of Israeli navy junior officers etc.

If not a Zionist conspiracy, a grand Israeli conspiracy, to be sure.

Still havent explained what conspiracy the Japanese pilot was part of.

[DinoDoc]

Originally posted by PLATO
It is hard to magine a military response as our "allie" was in the middle of a major war. A very hard position for us. Clearly, at the very least, a stern and meaingful warning should have been given as well as reparations demanded.

Warning? We've conquered large swaths of territory for less.

[Arrian]

Still havent explained what conspiracy the Japanese pilot was part of.

Irrelevant. That's one mistake. There was a chain of... mistakes... in the Liberty incident. Over and over.

-Arrian

[lord of the mark]

Originally posted by Arrian
Oh please His nationality is certainly potentially relevant. Whether it really impacted his analysis is unknown (unknowable), but come on now.

I rather doubt he has a deliberate bias. I'm saying that, when in doubt, he's probably going to choose "accident" over any other explanation. The alternative is horrifying.

-Arrian

If I was quoting him as an authority, "Michael Oren said it was a mistake, and hes a great historian" his potential bias would be relevant. If Im NOT quoting him as an authority, but merely pointing to evidence thats public record, or to analytic arguments that are public, those arguements stand and fall on their own. To point out a potential bias where the person is not being cited as an authority, but simply quoted for a argument that can be directly challenged, rather than address the argument is the definition of the ad hominem fallacy.

[lord of the mark]

Originally posted by Arrian


Irrelevant. That's one mistake. There was a chain of... mistakes... in the Liberty incident. Over and over.

-Arrian

And each individual mistake is comprehensible on its own. Sh*t happens in war. Italian journalists get killed. Afghan civilians die. Friendly villages are napalmed. American troops are killed in massive friendly fire incidents. Chains of mistakes happen and interact.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendly_fire#Friendly_fire_in_the_U.S._military

[Arrian]

The facts are what they are. How someone arranges them, discusses them, and ultimately what he concludes about the incident, however, is up to them.

That's what I'm saying. I'm saying Oren has every reason to see it as an accident. If you think that's an attack on his character, ok.

His article is well-written. He makes good points. The sequence of events still seems (to me, anyway) a tad fishy. At best, it was a series of mistakes by trigger-happy, incompetant Israelis. Those happen. We bombed a bunch of Canadians in Afganistan. But there is so much here that went wrong. It just seems like it would be difficult to **** up this badly, and thus seems fishy to me.

-Arrian

[PLATO]

Originally posted by DinoDoc
Warning? We've conquered large swaths of territory for less.

True, but then again...those weren't allies were they?

[lord of the mark]

Originally posted by Arrian
He makes good points. The sequence of events still seems (to me, anyway) a tad fishy. At best, it was a series of mistakes by trigger-happy, incompetant Israelis. Those happen. We bombed a bunch of Canadians in Afganistan. But there is so much here that went wrong. It just seems like it would be difficult to **** up this badly, and thus seems fishy to me.

-Arrian

It wasnt ONLY Israeli mistakes.

"Nonetheless, the Americans provided Israel with no information on the Liberty. The United States had also rejected Israel’s request for a formal naval liaison. On May 31, Avraham Harman, Israel’s ambassador to Washington, had warned Under Secretary of State Eugene V. Rostow that “if war breaks out, we would have no telephone number to call, no code for plane recognition, and no way to get in touch with the U.S. Sixth Fleet.”16"

[lord of the mark]

Originally posted by Arrian
It just seems like it would be difficult to **** up this badly,

You can say this after the IDF's performance in Lebanon, and the US performance in Iraq?

Its also hard to believe how well things went for Israel on the ground in '67. Sometimes you get a run of good luck, and sometimes a run of bad luck. In this instance what was in part a run of good luck, has made us overestimate the Israelis.

[DinoDoc]

Does Israel tell us where their intelligence assets are?

[Arrian]

Though it would've been better had the US done those things, the attack is still 100% on Israel, sorry. The ship was in international waters, was marked, and looked nothing like a warship.

-Arrian

[Donegeal]

We NEVER landed on the moon!

Bush organised 9-11 for oil!!

I just saw BIGFOOT walking down my street!

[MOBIUS]

Seriously LotM must be in the pay of Israeli right-wing extremists or something the way he barefacedly parades this guy Michael Oren like he is some kind of impartial observer hoping no one actually digs deep enough to realise what a scumbag this guy really is...

I posted this last time, but he is obviously hoping people here either haven't seen it, or have forgotten since the last thread about it:

Who is Michael Oren?

For example, it would be important to know whether the author of the article, Michael Oren, who was harshly critical of my chapter on the Israeli military's role in the attack on the Liberty, has any ties to Israel himself. I am a totally independent writer and have no ties to either Israel or any organization involved with the USS Liberty.

Oren, however, is a reserve officer and war veteran of the Israeli Defense Forces as well as a former advisor to the government of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin -- who was Army chief of staff at the time the Liberty was attacked. He now works for a small right wing, pro-Benjamin Netanyahu Israeli think tank in Jerusalem, the Shalem Center. It is run by its founder, Yoram Hazony, one of former Prime Minister Netanyahu's closest aides (he also ghost wrote a book by him). During the race for prime minister, the political party of Ehud Barak even accused the center of illegally funneling money to Netanyahu -- a charge denied by the center. The Israeli Education Ministry has called the center "a research institute whose leanings are extreme right-wing and even fascistic."

The principal mission of the center, where Mr. Oren is a senior fellow, is the cause of extreme Jewish nationalism -- Israel for the Jews -- i.e. apartheid. That is hardly surprising given that the center's intellectual guru, Yoram Hazony, is an admitted admirer of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane. He is the racist, fanatic founder of the violent Jewish Defense League in the U.S. and the rabid anti-Arab Kach movement in Israel, which is now outlawed there and listed as a terrorist group in the U.S. In 1984 Kahane was elected to the Israeli Knesset on a platform calling for the expulsion of Arabs from Israel.

Typical of the comments uttered by Hazony's demagogic idol: "I want the Israeli Arabs out of here because I don't want to kill them every week, as they multiply and demonstrate"; "They are germs that are poisoning us. They will not leave us be until they have raped all our women and murdered all our men"; and "I recognize the submachine gun's right to speak and the knife's right to speak."

Soon after hearing one of the rabbi's fiery, bigoted speeches, Hazony began quoting him in political debates. Eventually he wrote a fawning obituary about his slain hero in the Jerusalem Post. "We were mesmerized," he said. "We listened in astonishment, and finally in shame, when we began to realize that he was right." He then expressed "gratitude to someone who changed our lives, thrilled and entertained us, helped us grow up into strong, Jewish men and women. Many of us found other ways of doing what he asked." One of those ways was by opening his Shalem Center, where Oren, a close associate of Hazony, works, writes, and studies. So much for Oren's "independence."

Thus it was not surprising that Oren's article on the Liberty was published by The New Republic -- long the U.S. propaganda arm of the Israeli far right -- they also published Hazony's book in which he espouses his extremist views. Among these is erasing references in Israeli history books, Soviet style, to many of the most unsavory aspects of Israel's past and instead emphasizing its glories. This may be why Oren, in his article, seems to have deliberately forgotten about the Israeli war crimes that I write about in Body of Secrets.

Another of your 'heroes' LotM, like your settler friends...?

[MOBIUS]

Originally posted by lord of the mark

Its also hard to believe how well things went for Israel on the ground in '67. Sometimes you get a run of good luck

Yes, it's called an unprovoked pre-emptive strike.