Liberty threatened, then and now
MAY 10, 2025
As a teenager in the late 1970s, I read about Israel’s “Six-Day War” in 1967. The account I read was sympathetic toward Israel, respecting the audacity of its sneak attack on the Egyptian and Syrian air forces and its Blitzkrieg in the Sinai. But it also mentioned the Israeli attack on a U.S. Navy ship, the USS Liberty, a signals intelligence ship that was monitoring the war in international waters. The Israeli air and sea attack killed 34 crew members aboard the Liberty and wounded another 173. The ship, heavily damaged, never sailed again and was later sold as scrap.
The Israeli government claimed the attack was unintentional and a mistake. There’s plenty of evidence to suggest the story is far more complicated. Yet I was thinking this morning about how the Trump administrations’s strenuous attempt to criminalize critical speech vis-à-vis Israel is yet another assault on liberty. Once again, the ship of liberty is endangered in the U.S., yet the U.S. government is content to look the other way, or even to collaborate with the attackers.
Let me be clear: Those Americans who criticize Israel for its actions in Gaza are exercising their liberty. We are free to speak, and indeed we should speak freely on crimes against humanity, for that is what ethnic cleansing in Gaza is: a crime against humanity.
Yet the U.S. government, which essentially agreed to look the other way in response to Israel’s attack on the USS Liberty in 1967, is now looking the other way as free speech in America is suppressed, or even twisting denunciations of Israel’s war crimes in Gaza as anti-Semitic hate speech.
Liberty is something precious, and we as Americans are supposed to admire and applaud Patrick Henry and his sentiment from 250 years ago: “Give me liberty or give me death!”
If we as Americans have the right to criticize our own government, which we do, we certainly have the right to criticize foreign governments, including, of course, Israel. Yet, judging by U.S. mainstream media coverage and the words of government spokespeople, American citizens actually have less scope to criticize Israel than any other country, including their own.
Liberty attacked and abridged is liberty denied. How long before liberty itself in America, rocketed and strafed and torpedoed, is decommissioned and sold for scrap, just as the USS Liberty was?
Addendum: There are many books and videos about Israel’s attack on the USS Libertyand what was *really* behind it. I’m not an expert on the subject, but the official story of a regrettable “mistake” is decidedly fishy. Wikipedia does a decent job of summarizing a complex subject. Here’s an excerpt to ponder:
Some intelligence and military officials dispute Israel’s explanation.[79] Dean Rusk, U.S. Secretary of State at the time of the incident, wrote:
I was never satisfied with the Israeli explanation. Their sustained attack to disable and sink Liberty precluded an assault by accident or some trigger-happy local commander. Through diplomatic channels we refused to accept their explanations. I didn’t believe them then, and I don’t believe them to this day. The attack was outrageous.[80]
Bracing Views 
An excellent analogy.
I think the attack occurred in early June and each anniversary survivors gather at Arlington National Cemetery to commemorate the event, their number dwindling.
As we now see, nothing is ever off the table for Israel. The attack on the Liberty was only the start of getting away with things, but whatever Israel does is never labeled terror. Israel can count on an unlimited amount of American Zionist money to back whatever it does. The most shameful moment for America in my lifetime was when President Biden proudly proclaimed himself a Zionist and without hesitation said, “We stand with Israel”, then went on to prove himself a Zionist robot as the horror in Gaza unfolded, liberty and justice forgotten, Biden the largest lifetime recipient of pro-Israel PAC money of all American politicians.
Then to top out awful, President Trump openly acknowledges the multi-million-dollar contributions of the Adelsons and awarded Miriam the Medal of Freedom in his first term.
We are at bottom, the country infested with Zionists constantly working to support ethnic cleansing gleeful to have Trump, who is obsessed with money, in place to act in accord with the money they can offer.
It is a good thing that just this week enough in Congress realized the extent to which protection of Israel in violation of freedom of speech has reached and defeated two bills intended to further the idea that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism. I hope that an ocean of Palestinian blood has been a factor in this.
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“Yet, judging by U.S. mainstream media coverage and the words of government spokespeople, American citizens actually have less scope to criticize Israel than any other country, including their own.” Two comments:
1. I am amazed and sickened by the Israelis’/Zionists’ takeover of our society. One analogy I use is that of a virus infecting and re-writing the DNA of its host cell. We see this in Obama’s entering into an MOU with the genocide entity for $38 billion in military aid over ten years ending in 2028, this not counting the hundreds of millions included in the annual National Defense Authorization Act. Why the hell are we doing this?
And it was Miriam Adelson’s various pet projects on campus surveillance, profiling, and intimidation, all tied to Israeli intelligence and to DHS and ICE, that fingered all those students here in the U.S., quashing freedom of speech and academic freedom.
Further evidence of this smackdown on our rights and institutions is found in H.R.1007, the “Antisemitism Awareness Act of 2025,” a product of the Israeli Ministry of Diaspora Affairs (aka the Harbara strategy), AIPAC, and the ADL (among others). Its main provision calls for adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism, which legal authorities, knowledgeable academics, and even Holocaust scholars have criticized for being vague to the point of unusable; for conflating criticism of Zionism, a political movement, with the antisemitism of Judaism, a religion; and threatening freedom of speech and academic freedom of inquiry and debate. As of May 5th, there are 73 co-sponsors in the House, 46 Republicans and 27 Democrats. (As George Carlin has said, “The word ‘bipartisan’ usually means some larger-than-usual deception is being carried out.”)
Of course the list is nearly infinite. In brief, the supremacist Zionist ideology sees all life and culture not its own as inferior and subservient to, and exploitable and disposable for, its own cause.
2. “Keep in mind, the news media are not independent; they are a sort of bulletin board and public relations firm for the ruling class-the people who run things. Those who decide what news you will or will not hear are paid by, and tolerated purely at the whim of, those who hold economic power. If the parent corporation doesn’t want you to know something, it won’t be on the news. Period. Or, at the very least, it will be slanted to suit them, and then rarely followed up.” – Surprisingly, not from Noam Chomsky, but (again) from George Carlin
Some years ago I was researching the USS Liberty incident and came across some very good and very informative websites and videos (can’t recall the specific ones just yet). It was very clear this was anintentional attack, in part based on radio intercepts between Israeli pilots and their headquarters on the ground, who directed them to attack. One reason for this was that the USS Liberty intercepted multiple communications revealing Israeli plans to capture the Golan Heights, contrary to Israel’s assurances to the US that the operation would be limited to Egypt. This revelation could have jeopardized Israel’s strategy and invited international pressure and condemnation.
Further, the crew of the Liberty displayed a huge American flag, unmistakably visible, which the Israeli pilots and torpedo boat crews were told to ignore. US Navy fighters were in the air, well within range of the Liberty to respond, but were told by the White House not to proceed.
So what’s a further 34 dead and 173 wounded heaped upon the pyramids of human beings killed, maimed, starved, and tortured by the Zionists?
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That quote from Carlin is money. Spot on.
Yes, there was a reason the Liberty was attacked, and it wasn’t mistaken identity.
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