>>63856620
Yeah. The simple / dumb answer is that it was a case of mistaken identity from war-crazy Israelis using 1960s technology. The actual incident is not that unusual if you're at all familiar with how dumb war is, and not much worse than friendly fire incidents by U.S. forces in various wars. Or the Israelis bombing their own troops. Also a British ship during the Suez Crisis. Admittedly it doesn't happen at sea that often but some of our warplanes actually attacked some of our own ships during the Vietnam War and shot them up. Read about the attack on the Hobart, Boston and Edson in June 1968. We also shot down one of our F/A-18s last December in the Red Sea.

I don't actually care if people don't like Israel -- it's like whatever who fucking cares -- but I think the real reason for this Liberty stuff is that there are some of them who are motivated out of dislike of Jews more than Israel per se, and rely on cynicism and bad faith, and they play up the Liberty as a dastardly attack by the Jews, because they think that will appeal to American nationalists. They don't actually care if it's true or not, the point is to cultivate negative feelings about the Jews.