- In the midst of the Six-Day War,
Israeli planes spotted the USS Liberty, a U.S. naval spy ship,
70 miles off the coast of Egyptian-controlled Gaza.
Hours later, the ship was under attack.
The Israeli and American governments say the event
was a tragic case of friendly fire.
Some survivors are skeptical, and have accused
both governments of a cover-up.
And that, unfortunately, is exactly the kind of language
that galvanizes conspiracy theorists.
So what really happened to the USS Liberty on that fateful day?
And how did this wartime tragedy become the foundation
of decades-long conspiracy theories?
To start, let's walk through the details of the incident,
and look at the points on which survivors
disagree with the official story.
In May 1967, with tensions rising across the Middle East,
the USS Liberty was sent to the Mediterranean
to intercept Egyptian radio transmissions.
By June 8th, Israel was on day four of the Six-Day War
and the crew aboard the Liberty found themselves
unwittingly in the midst of a war.
Israeli forces first spotted the Liberty at around 5:55 a.m.
But they weren't sure whom the boat belonged to,
so they left it alone.
According to the Israeli investigation,
the vessel was marked as a neutral ship,
and after a few hours without updates on its movements,
the ship was cleared from the board, and was forgotten
by the shift that came to replace them in the morning.
By 11:24 a.m., Israeli forces reported a huge explosion
at El Arish, a town on the coast of the Sinai peninsula
that was recently captured by Israel.
When they looked to the water for the attackers,
they spotted the Liberty.
But according to Israeli reports,
the Liberty didn't have any markings or flags raised.
In hindsight, it's obvious the Liberty
wasn't attacking anyone,
it had just a few 50 calibre machine guns,
basically peashooters for a ship,
but the Israelis didn't know that at the time.
They saw a foreign boat and grew suspicious.
At 1:48 p.m., Israel sent two waves
of fighter jets to attack the Liberty.
The first jets reached the ship
at 1:58 and began firing.
Immediately, the Liberty's crew tried to radio for help.
They couldn't reach anyone for 11 minutes,
some survivors believe Israel jammed their signals,
but Israel disputes this.
A second wave of fighter jets also attacked the ship,
this time with napalm.
The pilots noticed that the ship wasn't firing back,
and stopped attacking by 2:11 p.m.
They also saw Latin script on the side of the boat.
But the pilots didn't get a good look at the marking,
and thought it said "CTR 5".
In fact, the C was a G,
which is a designation of American spy ships.
This is a good point to stop and look
at one of the biggest disagreements
between the survivors and official government reports:
whether or not Israel really couldn't tell
that the Liberty was American.
Everyone agrees that there were multiple American flags
on the Liberty,
the first wave of the attack
knocked down the stern flagstaff,
but according to the Americans they raised another,
bigger flag after that.
What's also agreed upon is that the Liberty
was marked with Latin script, not Arabic,
but markings can be easily painted on as a decoy.
Keep in mind the jets were also flying 3,000 feet in the air
and as fast as 800 miles per hour,
so it's reasonable that they had difficulty
spotting the American markings.
After the fighter jets left,
Israel's torpedo boats entered the fray.
According to one official Israeli report,
the Israelis asked the foreign ship to identify itself.
Suffering some equipment failure,
the Liberty responded with a signal, AA,
which meant Identify yourself first.
This made them suspicious,
some Israeli commanders recognized this response
from a hostile Egyptian destroyer from years earlier.
On top of that, some crew aboard the Liberty,
unaware of their captains do not shoot order,
decided to start firing at Israeli torpedo boats
in self-defense at around 2:30.
The shots didn't do much, but the Israeli boats
interpreted this as an attack.
Identifying the Liberty as an Egyptian ship,
the El-Quseir, the captain of the Israeli boats
responded with five torpedoes.
Only one struck the Liberty,
but it caused significant damage.
At 2:47, less than an hour after the attack began,
Israeli officers ordered their boats to stop firing.
They started questioning the ship's nationality again,
and eventually learned
that they had attacked Americans.
They spotted lifeboats with American markings,
correctly identified the "GTR-5" marking,
and finally saw the American flag.
Israel then sent helicopters to help rescue the survivors,
but the captain of the Liberty rejected them and sent them away.
By the end of the day,
34 Americans died and 171 more were wounded.
The Israeli government quickly acknowledged the mistake.
Over the subsequent years, they paid the survivors,
the families of the deceased,
and the American government the equivalent
of nearly $68 million in today's value.
To confirm the facts,
Israel commissioned several military reports,
and on the American side,
Senate Foreign Relations Committee,
investigations by the CIA and the US Navy Court of Inquiry,
came to similar conclusions.
And yet some survivors
believe the American investigations were rushed.
They feel that justice has not been properly served
and have been calling for a more thorough congressional investigation for decades.
Unfortunately, all that skepticism has swung open the door
for anti-Semites who have co-opted the narrative online
in order to promote their own agenda.
These conspiracy theorists ignore the government reports
and capitalize on the disputed facts.
In order to propagate these messages,
they leverage doubt, mistrust in institutions,
and classic anti-Semitic tropes
which we'll get into in a minute.
When these people disregard
the official story of the USS Liberty,
they face a problem:
they can't agree on what Israel
was actually trying to accomplish.
Some conspiracy theorists claim that Israel tried to frame
Egypt and drag the U.S. into a war against the Arab states.
Others disagree, they say the whole incident
was orchestrated by Lyndon Johnson to somehow advance
his security goals in the Middle East
and possibly topple the Egyptian government.
Some people even think Israel
wanted to spark a Third World War.
- The real point here is that Israel can do anything,
including murdering 34 American service members
in cold blood and attempting to murder every single member
of the USS Liberty so as to justify a policy
which would have sucked American sons and daughters
into a third world war because Israel
does not have the integrity nor the courage or any kind
of honor whatsoever to go and attack its enemies itself.
- The conspiracy theories surrounding the USS Liberty,
with innocent Americans dying at the hands of Jews,
fantasies of Israel egging America into global warfare,
fit well into pre-existing anti-Semitic conspiracy theories,
specifically: blood libels and Jewish world domination.
The blood libel is a claim
that has gone on for hundreds of years,
which claims that Jews secretly kill non-Jews
to use their blood for nefarious purposes,
while the late 19th century book,
"The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" popularized the claim
that Jews are secretly orchestrating world domination.
This mixture of lingering questions
by the survivors and longstanding antisemitic tropes
creates potent soil for conspiracy theories.
And yet, there isn't any evidence
to support these theories about the Liberty.
They are the result of anti-Semites
taking advantage of questions
being asked by the survivors of this tragic accident.
Questioning our past is critical
to avoid repeating the mistakes of history.
At the same time, legitimate questions
are always in danger of being co-opted by bigots
who try to answer those questions with a mixture
of circumstantial evidence and false information.
In the case of the USS Liberty,
we can't let bigots take advantage of this tragedy
in order to further their own anti-Semitic agenda,
dishonoring the dead with their hatred
and unproven conspiracy theories.
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