• resipsaloquitur@lemmy.world
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    3 hours ago

    Oooookay, we are totally dealing with pre-October 7th Israel. The one that knowingly attacked a US ship in 1967: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Liberty_incident

    At the time of the attack, the USS Liberty was flying the American flag and its identification was clearly indicated in large white letters and numerals on its hull. … Experience demonstrates that both the flag and the identification number of the vessel were readily visible from the air … Accordingly, there is every reason to believe that the USS Liberty was identified, or at least her nationality determined, by Israeli aircraft approximately one hour before the attack. … The subsequent attack by the torpedo boats, substantially after the vessel was or should have been identified by Israeli military forces, manifests the same reckless disregard for human life.[55][56]

    The US had to cover up the attack and still supports Israel to the hilt.

    “It was significant that, in contrast to his secretary of state, President Johnson fully accepted the Israeli version of the tragic incident.” He notes that Johnson himself included only one small paragraph about the Liberty in his autobiography,[57] in which he accepted the Israeli explanation, minimized the affair and distorted the number of dead and wounded, by lowering them from 34 to 10 and 171 to 100, respectively. Lenczowski further states: “It seems Johnson was more interested in avoiding a possible confrontation with the Soviet Union, … than in restraining Israel.”

    • PugJesus@piefed.social
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      3 hours ago

      Yeah. It’s horrific. And the reluctance to confront Israel only gotten worse since then. Especially since AIPAC gaining a death grip on domestic US politics in the 1980s (it had been around since the 50s, but didn’t control discourse on Israel quite so totally), and then intensifying again with the heightened Islamophobia and evangelical millenarianism of the “War on Terror” in the 2000s.