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Debunking Candace Owens’ Lies About Israel Attacking the USS Liberty
Political activist Candace Owens in the spin room at the Fiserv Forum following the first Republican presidential primary debate in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on Aug. 23, 2023. Photo: Chris Dilts/Sipa USA via Reuters Connect
In a tragic event during the 1967 Six-Day War, the USS Liberty, a US Navy spy ship, came under attack from Israeli forces — resulting in the deaths of 34 American servicemen.
More than 50 years after it occurred, the USS Liberty incident continues to inspire a host of rabid anti-Israel conspiracy theories and to inflame the conversation surrounding the relationship between the United States and Israel.
From antisemitic commentator Candace Owens recently driving a surge of conspiracy theories about the incident on social media, to a campaign of billboards claiming that Israel intentionally bombed the ship, the USS Liberty has been used by those on both the right and the left as a brush to tarnish Israel’s reputation, and turn American public opinion against the Jewish State.
But what exactly happened to the USS Liberty? Was it a case of mistaken identity in the fog of war, or a deliberate strike by Israel against American servicemen? Is there any validity to the conspiracy theories surrounding the incident, or are they all the machinations of a hate-filled imagination?
The USS Liberty Incident
In mid-May 1967, as Egypt ramped up tensions with Israel, the Sixth Fleet of the United States Navy was ordered to the eastern Mediterranean in an attempt to break through the Egyptian blockade of the Straits of Tiran.
One of the ships attached to the Sixth Fleet was the USS Liberty, a spy vessel that, while formally under the command of the Sixth Fleet, was in practice under the control of the National Security Agency (NSA).
Although not an original member of the blockade-breaking naval convoy (which never came to fruition), the USS Liberty was ordered on May 30 to sail from Spain to a half mile outside Egyptian and Israeli territorial waters. The Liberty’s mission was likely to spy on the Egyptian military and its Soviet advisers.
On June 5, 1967, after increasing hostilities on its southern border, Israel pre-emptively struck Egypt. The Six-Day War had begun.
Four days later, on June 8, as the Israeli capture of the Sinai Peninsula and Gaza Strip from Egypt was nearly complete, the USS Liberty finally arrived at the waters off the coast of Sinai.
In the early morning hours, an Israeli plane spotted the USS Liberty. After some uncertainty regarding the identity of this vessel, it was determined by the Israeli Navy to be the USS Liberty, and was designated as a “neutral ship.”
However, at 11:00 A.M., as the shifts changed at the navy’s headquarters, the “neutral” designation was removed from the ship as part of protocol, as the information was five hours old and considered to be no longer relevant.
At 11:24 A.M., a large explosion occurred in the coastal Sinai city of El-Arish. While it is now known that the explosion was likely caused by an ammunition dump, it was assumed by the IDF that Egyptian naval forces had fired at the city (as had occurred in recent days).
From that point, the search was on for which Egyptian ship had fired on El-Arish.
At 1:41 P.M., an officer aboard an Israeli torpedo boat erroneously noted a ship sailing towards Egypt at 30 knots. Since this was faster than the Liberty’s maximum speed, it was assumed that this was the Egyptian vessel in question. This miscalculation would have grave results.
Israeli jets were dispatched to the area and, after not seeing an American flag or distinguishing marks on the vessel, the order was given to bomb the ship.
At 1:58 P.M., two waves of Israeli jets bombarded (including with napalm) the American spy ship over the next 14 minutes, killing nine service members.
At 2:44 P.M., three Israeli torpedo boats approached the ship. With smoke from the earlier aerial bombardment obscuring the ship, the boats requested that the vessel identify itself. The response from the USS Liberty (which could not see the Israeli identity of the boats through the smoke) was for the Israeli boats to identify themselves. As a similar exchange had occurred with an enemy Egyptian naval ship during the 1956 Sinai War, the Israeli naval officers assumed that this was an Egyptian ship acting in the same manner. After consulting their intelligence, the Israelis determined it was the Egyptian freighter El-Quseir.
At the same time, a service member on the USS Liberty disobeyed the captain’s orders and opened fire on the Israeli torpedo boats. Now convinced that it was an enemy ship attacking them, the torpedo boats opened fire on the USS Liberty. Five torpedoes were fired at the ship and one made contact, killing an additional 25 servicemen.
At 3:30 P.M., the ship was positively identified as the USS Liberty. In the immediate aftermath of this incident, Israel accepted blame for firing on the Liberty and opened official investigations into what had occurred.
Since June 8, 1967, there have been three official Israeli investigations and 11 official American investigations (including by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the CIA, the US Navy, and Congress) into the matter. All investigations have determined that this was a tragic case of mistaken identity.
Israel has paid millions of dollars to the United States, families of those killed in the attack, and those service members who were wounded during the attack, as restitution for this friendly fire incident.
The Conspiracy Theories
Despite Israel’s almost immediate acceptance of blame and investigation of the incident (which was determined to be a tragic case of friendly fire), many in the American government felt that Israel was covering up what truly happened. It was only after several official American investigations that Israel was absolved of intentionally firing upon the USS Liberty.
However, some still refuse to believe the official narrative, stating that Israel intentionally attacked the American spy ship. Due to the top-secret nature of this incident, it took many years before most of the critical evidence regarding the USS Liberty was allowed to be released to the public. These decades of concealed evidence allowed for a wide variety of theories about why Israel intentionally bombed the Liberty to percolate within American and Israeli societies.
While the campaign to find Israel guilty of intentionally bombing the USS Liberty is largely driven by some former veterans who served on the vessel, this incident has also been co-opted by those seeking to harm Israel-United States relations and besmirch the Jewish State.
As one analyst put it, the skepticism of these veterans regarding the official narrative has “swung open the door for antisemites.”
Although many are certain that the American and Israeli governments are lying about Israel intentionally bombing the USS Liberty, there is no consensus among these theorists as to why Israel would bomb the US spy ship.
Here are just some of the theories that have been put forward about the bombing of the USS Liberty since 1967:
- Israel wanted to frame Egypt for the attack on the USS Liberty in order to draw the United States into joining its war against Egypt, Syria, and Jordan.
- American President Lyndon B. Johnson wanted to use the incident as a false-flag operation in order to advance his strategic goals for the Middle East, which included the toppling of the Egyptian government.
- Israel wanted to draw the United States into a third world war.
- Israel bombed the Liberty as the spy ship had picked up evidence of Israel killing Egyptian POWs.
- Israel bombed the Liberty because the American vessel had picked up the IDF’s plans to conquer the Golan Heights from Syria, which the United States was opposed to.
- Israel bombed the USS Liberty because the ship had picked up evidence of preparations at Israel’s nuclear reactor in Dimona.
These conspiracy theories, however, do not pass muster when confronted with the now-available evidence and a rational look at the context in which the USS Liberty incident occurred.
The Case Against the USS Liberty Conspiracy Theories
The following are some of the key points and pieces of evidence that cast doubt on the conspiracy theories surrounding the USS Liberty incident, and substantiate the findings that this was a case of friendly fire and not an intentional Israeli attack on an American naval ship:
- It is unclear if the American flag on the USS Liberty was visible to the Israelis. The winds were quiet on June 8, meaning the ship’s flag was drooped. For planes flying overhead at high speeds, it would have been non-discernible.
- The United States had informed Israel that no US ships were in the vicinity off the coast of Sinai. The USS Liberty actually had orders to move further out to sea but, due to communications issues, they did not arrive until a day later.
- Recordings captured during, and immediately after, the bombing of the USS Liberty show that Israel’s biggest fear was that it had accidentally attacked a Soviet ship, not an American one.
- One of the CIA documents includes the claim that the NSA picked up a discussion between an Israeli pilot and his commander ordering him to fire, knowing that it is an American ship. However, this claim is hearsay by the US ambassador to Lebanon and no recording has ever been produced.
- Similarly, in 1991, two Washington Post journalists claimed an American was in the Israeli war room when the decision was made to bomb the USS Liberty, knowing that it was an American ship. The American in question, Seth Mintz, wrote a response to the newspaper, saying he was misquoted and that he believed it to be a case of “mistaken identity.”
- Israel was already more than halfway through the war and had almost totally defeated the Egyptians by June 8. There was no need to attempt to trick the Americans into joining the war so late in the game.
- The Liberty only arrived off the coast of the Sinai Peninsula on June 8, making it unlikely to have possessed any secret Israeli recordings from days prior.
- Declassified documents show that Israel never concealed its plan to conquer the Golan Heights from the United States, disproving the conspiracy theory about the bombing as an attempt to hide the attack plan.
- If Israel had always intended to bomb the Liberty, it could have done so when the ship was first observed at 5:55 A.M. by an Israeli reconnaissance plane. There was no rationale for waiting 8 hours to attack the vessel during the day.
- Friendly fire incidents are common during war. During the Six-Day War alone, at least 50 IDF soldiers were killed in friendly fire incidents, including one that occurred a day before the USS Liberty incident.
While the case of the USS Liberty is used by those on both the left and the right to subvert the relationship between Israel and the United States and to question the integrity of the Jewish State, it is clear that this incident was a tragic case of friendly fire between two allies caused by error, miscommunication, and the fog of war.
The author is a contributor to HonestReporting, a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.
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Israeli Minister of Culture Urges FIFA to Remove Senior PA Official for Inciting Terrorism Against Israel
Palestinian Football Association head Jibril Rajoub speaks during a press conference regarding the cancellation of the soccer match between Argentina and Israel, in the West Bank city of Ramallah, Sunday, June 6, 2018. Photo: Flash90.
Israel’s Minister of Culture and Sports Miki Zohar called on Tuesday for FIFA, the international governing body of soccer, to remove Jibril Rajoub as president of the Palestine Football Association (PFA) for inciting, justifying, and supporting violence against Israel.
Zohar wrote in a letter to FIFA President Gianni Infantino that Rajoub’s alleged incitement to violence is a “blatant infringement of the core values that international sports aim to promote — values of peace, unity, and mutual respect.” He urged Infantino and the FIFA Executive Committee to act swiftly and expel Rajoub from his senior position.
“There is no place for individuals who incite or support terrorism and violence within sports institutions,” he added. “His continued membership in senior roles within the sports world undermines public trust and sends a dangerous message — that the platform of sports can be exploited for political agendas and the promotion of hatred and violence … It is our collective responsibility to ensure that sports remain a unifying force that brings people together, rather than a stage for incitement and terror. I trust in your leadership and in FIFA’s commitment to upholding the integrity of international sports, and I am confident that you will act to safeguard its moral future.”
Zohar noted in his letter that following the Hamas-led deadly terrorist attack in southern Israel on Oct, 7, 2023 — in which 1,200 people were murdered and over 250 were kidnapped – Rajoub “publicly justified these acts of terror, stating that they were a ‘natural response to the occupation.’”
“He has repeated this appalling justification on several occasions,” Zohar added. He additionally pointed out that on Sunday, Rajoub made a guest appearance on television and “openly called for continued violent attacks against innocent Israeli civilians. He even encouraged the Palestinian Authority to take responsibility for overseeing such acts.”
“Tragically, within 24 hours of Mr. Rajoub’s statement, multiple terrorist attacks were carried out in Israel, resulting in the deaths of three innocent civilians: a 70-year-old woman, a 73-year-old woman, and a 35-year-old man,” Zohar explained.
Rajoub was fined and temporarily suspended by FIFA’s Disciplinary Committee in 2018 for inciting hatred and violence. He received the suspension after he called on soccer fans to burn jerseys of the Argentinian Football Association as well as pictures of Argentinian soccer player Lionel Messi ahead of a soccer match between Argentina and Israel. The Argentinians ultimately pulled out of the soccer game.
Since the start of the ongoing Israel-Hamas war, the PFA has repeatedly called for FIFA to suspend Israel from all international soccer matches because of its military actions in the Gaza Strip, which target Hamas terrorists who orchestrated the Oct. 7 massacre in Israel. FIFA is expected to make an announcement regarding the matter in May. A number of international soccer organizations have voiced support for the PFA’s efforts to have Israel suspended from FIFA, including the Asian Football Confederation and the Norwegian Football Association (NFF).
“The Norwegian FA is not indifferent to the disproportionate attacks Israel has subjected the civilian population of Gaza to over time … The NFF is actively advocating for FIFA to address the Palestinian FA’s proposal for sanctions against Israel,” NFF President Lise Klaveness said in December. “We are also closer to the region and the Palestinian Football Association than most other European associations. For over 10 years we have worked on the ground in the region and the Palestinian West Bank to train female football coaches and create football activities for children in schools and refugee camps.”
Kaveness also denied reports that Norway has refused to compete against Israel.
“Israel is currently part of UEFA’s competitions. We are following the situation closely, and follow the policies set by FIFA, UEFA, and the Norwegian authorities,” Kaveness added. “This means our national team will play against Israel — in March away on a neutral pitch, and in October at home at Ullevaal Stadium. Everyone now has a clear responsibility to protect and respect the football matches and the players on both teams.”
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Jewish, Anti-Hate Groups Express Concern Over Meta’s New Fact-Checking Policy: ‘All of Society Will Suffer’
Meta logo is seen in this illustration taken August 22, 2022. Photo: Reuters
Jewish groups and a slew of other organizations said this week they are extremely worried about how Meta’s new community-driven, fact-checking system will worsen online antisemitism, hate speech, and disinformation, and increase the targeting of Jewish communities and individuals.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced on Tuesday that starting in the United States, the social media giant is ending its third-party fact-checking program and replacing it with a Community Notes model, like the one on Wikipedia and Elon Musk’s X. Zuckerberg said Meta —which owns Facebook, Instagram, and Threads — made the move in an effort to enhance free expression on its platforms.
“We will allow more speech by lifting restrictions on some topics that are part of mainstream discourse and focusing our enforcement on illegal and high-severity violations” Meta announced. “We’ve seen this approach work on X — where they empower their community to decide when posts are potentially misleading and need more context, and people across a diverse range of perspectives decide what sort of context is helpful for other users to see. We think this could be a better way of achieving our original intention of providing people with information about what they’re seeing — and one that’s less prone to bias.”
Meta added that besides “high-severity violations” — such as terrorism, child sexual exploitation, drugs, fraud, and scams — it will not take action to enforce its policies unless someone reports an issue, to avoid “too much content being censored that shouldn’t have been.” Meta will also be “getting rid of a number of restrictions on topics like immigration, gender identity, and gender.”
Hate speech and antisemitism will no longer be automatically flagged by Meta, and the company will not proactively remove such content unless a user reports the issue. However, even after receiving a report, there is no guarantee that Meta will delete the harmful content or that the report will be reviewed.
Yfat Barak-Cheney, executive director of the World Jewish Congress Technology and Human Rights Institute (TecHRI), said Meta’s new community notes system for fact-checking “must be approached with great caution.”
“Platforms like X and Wikipedia, which employ similar user-driven concepts, have demonstrated how easily misinformation and disinformation can be manipulated, and putting the onus on the vulnerable communities to report and correct information online,” she noted in a statement. “In an online environment already marked by hostility, we are deeply concerned that the reduction of protections and clear guidelines will open the floodgates to content that fuels real-world threats, including violent acts targeting Jewish communities and individuals.”
“Meta has made important strides in recent years to make its platforms safer, and it is critical that this work continues,” she added. “Rolling back these efforts risks undoing hard-won progress at a time when vigilance against online hate and antisemitism is needed more than ever.”
“It is mind blowing how one of the most profitable companies in the world, operating with such sophisticated technology, is taking significant steps back in terms of addressing antisemitism, hate, misinformation, and protecting vulnerable & marginalized groups online,” said ADL CEO and National Director Jonathan Greenblatt. “The only winner here is Meta’s bottom line and as a result, all of society will suffer.”
“Meta must significantly reform their average user reporting process unless they intend to completely abdicate their responsibility to address antisemitism and hate at a time when it is surging online and offline,” the ADL Center for Technology and Society added. “If all of this is the direction Meta is heading in 2025, it is a bad sign of what is to come for Jews and all marginalized people on their platforms.”
Others outside of the Jewish community also expressed concern about the changes that Zuckerberg announced on Tuesday.
Cyberwell, a nonprofit organization that tackles online antisemitism, said in a released statement on X that the new Meta Community Notes system is “a systematic lowering of the bar on how Meta intends to enforce their Community Standards against hate speech and harassment online.” It also criticized Meta for now giving itself “less accountability” for hate speech that can now spread easier on its platforms. It said the move will result in “more hate speech, more politicized content, more silos, and less effective responses from the platforms.”
“Given the mounting evidence of how hate speech, incendiary content, and harassment lead to real-world harm including hate crimes, terror attacks, and child suicide, CyberWell is deeply concerned at the purposeful deterioration of Trust & Safety best practices at Meta,” the organization said. “For the Jewish community this announcement means that Meta is making it easier for antisemitism to flourish online. It will likely lead to an uptick in hate-posting, harassment, and even a migration of white supremacists and extreme racists onto Meta’s platforms, much like the period immediately following the Twitter acquisition.”
“This is not a victory for free speech — it’s an exchange of human bias in a small, contained group of fact-checkers for human bias at scale through Community Notes,” CyberWell added. “The only way to prevent censorship and data manipulation by any government or corporation would be to institute legal requirements and reforms on Big Tech that enforce social media reform and transparency requirements.”
“The new era for Meta is one in which it has decided to let liars, snake oil salesman, fraudsters, hate actors, propagandists for autocrats like Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and Ayatollah Khamenei unleash a tidal wide of disinformation many times the size of anything we’ve seen to date,” he added. “This is going to increase the spread and visibility of unchallenged lies, it’s going to worsen the spread of hate. It’s going to create more risk to our communities, our democracy, public health, and to our kids.”
Rose Burley, co-founder and executive director of the nonprofit organization the Center for Information Resilience, said the change will “undoubtedly” result in much more disinformation spreading on Meta’s platforms. “Meta, by doing this, are retreating from fact, they are retreating from truth,” he argued. “And by switching to a Community Notes model, they are effectively trying to capture a tidal wave in a bucket, and it’s not going to work … By getting rid of the fact-checkers, what you’re doing is taking away a safeguarding and you’re sending a message to users and to the wider community that truth and facts just don’t really matter anymore.”
The post Jewish, Anti-Hate Groups Express Concern Over Meta’s New Fact-Checking Policy: ‘All of Society Will Suffer’ first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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US Education Department Launches Probe Into Sarah Lawrence College Over Antisemitism Complaint
Illustrative: A pro-Hamas demonstrator uses a megaphone at Columbia University, on the one-year anniversary of Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack, amid the ongoing Israel-Hamas conflict, in New York City, US, Oct. 7, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Mike Segar
The US Department of Education has opened a civil rights investigation into Sarah Lawrence College to determine whether it failed to correct an allegedly hostile environment caused by antisemitism.
The inquiry by the department’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) was precipitated by a complaint filed by Hillels of Westchester in March 2024. Among other things, the complaint alleged that only Jews who are “openly anti-Israel” are safe on campus and that those who express pro-Israel opinions are subject to browbeating, intimidation, and discrimination throughout the campus and in the school’s diversity office.
“In the face of systemic antisemitism at Sarah Lawrence College, spanning many years, our goal has always been — and remains — a safe, equitable environment for Jewish students,” Hillels of Westchester executive director Rachel Klein said in a statement announcing the news. “We hope this investigation initiates a meaningful culture shift at SLC [Sarah Lawrence College] to improve the campus and environment. We would welcome the opportunity to partner with the SLC administration in creating a safer school for Jewish students, and all gryphons.”
The complaint also alleged that anti-Zionist students at Sarah Lawrence threatened to kill Jews or kill themselves in front of them; that diversity officers assigned as advisers to the Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) club are in charge of processing complaints of antisemitism; and that those same diversity officers promote anti-Zionist events which undermine Israel’s existence.
The school’s alleged disregard for the welfare of Jewish students was revealed in the days and weeks after the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, the complaint says. No sooner had the tragedy occurred than a diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB) official at the college called on students to ignore Jewish suffering by attending on Oct. 9 “Hour of Solidarity with Palestine,” an event co-sponsored by SJP. While promoting the event, the official invited Jewish students and Hillel members via email to attend it — a gesture, the complaint says, that the SLC Jewish community found “offensive and dehumanizing.” They soon discovered that in addition to being a DEI administrator, the official was SJP’s adviser, in which capacity she functioned acting its advocate and liaison.
The official also allegedly refused to investigate anti-Zionist students accused of antisemitic harassment. When Sammy Tweedy, a Jewish student who had been in Israel on Oct. 7, reported to the official that an anti-Zionist student threatened to beat him up and said he had “the blood of Gaza on your hands” and should have been murdered by Hamas, the official would only agree to filing a no-contact order against the student.
“The hostile environment experienced by Jewish students at Sarah Lawrence College has been among the worst we’ve seen,” Hillel International chief executive officer Adam Lehman said in a statement. “Antisemitism on the SLC campus has been exacerbated by the administration’s continued refusal to take more aggressive steps to promote the safety and inclusion of its Jewish and Israeli students, faculty, and staff. We hope this investigation serves as a much needed wakeup call for the college’s leadership to take immediate action to honor the basic civil rights of its Jewish and Israeli students.”
A representative for the college told JTA that it was reviewing the Education Department’s requests for information and committed to fostering an inclusive environment.
“We are in the process of reviewing OCR’s request for data in connection with its investigation, and the college remains committed to fostering an inclusive and respectful campus community,” the school official said, adding that they considered Hillels of Westchester to be “an outside organization not affiliated with the college.”
OCR’s investigation of Sarah Lawrence College comes on the heels of many settlements it has negotiated with other higher education institutions since Hamas’s Oct. 7 invasion of Israel.
Rutgers University recently agreed to one to start off the new year after the agency developed “compliance concerns” with school officials’ handling of several antisemitic incidents, including someone’s calling for violence against an Israeli students, the graffitiing of a Jewish student’s door with a swastika, and a series of threats made against the predominantly Jewish Alpha Epsilon Pi (AEPi) fraternity.
Temple University in Philadelphia also settled a civil rights complaint with OCR in December, agreeing to address what OCR described as several reports of discrimination and harassment, including “incidents of antisemitic, anti-Muslim, and anti-Palestinian conduct.”
As part of the resolution of the case, Temple University agreed, for example, to enact “remedial” policies for past, inadequately managed investigations of discrimination and to apprise OCR of every discrimination complaint it receives until the conclusion of the 2025-2026 academic year. The university will also conduct a “climate” survey to measure students’ opinions on the severity of discrimination on campus, the results of which will be used to “create an action plan” which OCR did not define but insisted on its being “subject to OCR approval.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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