Rising Anti-Semitism: Notes on a Debunked Conspiracy

Antisemitism is on the rise―in the Middle East, as well as in the United States. Aside from the institutionalized winking and nodding at antisemitic protests on college campuses and related harassment, violence broke out into the open recently when a terrorist shot and murdered two employees of the Israeli Embassy in DC while yelling “Free Palestine.” 

In light of this race-based hatred, it’s worth dismantling conspiratorial arguments when they arise. Even if the hydra of conspiratorial thinking can always generate new specious claims, bad arguments should be taken apart and deceptive reasoning exposed in order to limit the number of people who might be led astray. 

That brings us to Candace Owens. Ever since her acrimonious split from conservative news-commentary site The Daily Wire, she has gone down a path of making increasingly wild and baseless claims, many of which are antisemitic. One such attack was an hour-long video last December about the 1967 attack on the USS Liberty. 

During the Six-Day War, Israeli forces attacked a US ship off of Sinai, killing 34 and wounding many more, before ceasing the attack. It’s widely understood that Israel mistook the ship for an enemy vessel, and called off their attack as soon as they had realized their mistake. 

Owens, however, is promoting the idea that this was not an instance of friendly fire; she insists that it was intentional, that Israel knew it was an American vessel it was attacking. Owens presented this theory in a long-form interview with Phil Tourney, who was stationed on the Liberty in 1967. 

The account that Owens and Tourney present is false. It gets facts wrong. It omits basic context. Its own internal logic does not hang together. Tourney, eyewitness to the event, only recounts details that were known to the public by the close of 1967 and otherwise spends his time theorizing about decision-making that he had no insight into. Owens’ entire video is an exercise in preying on the ignorance of her audience. 

As this particular video is broadly representative of how media figures like Owens distort history in service of radical political projects (a hallmark of antisemitism) it is worth taking the time to walk through the specific errors and deceptions in this particular case because it will help us understand how figures like Owens use and abuse history.

The place to begin our review is the question of friendly fire. People who aren’t actually familiar with war grossly underestimate how common friendly fire is. 

Some American planes returning to Pearl Harbor were shot down by their own men at the end of the attack in WWII. In May 2002, an Arizona Cardinal named Pat Tillman left the NFL so he could enlist with the Marines. He was killed fewer than two years later near the Pakistani border by friendly fire. There are countless other examples from US history alone. For example, the Confederacy’s fate was all but sealed by the loss of Stonewall Jackson after the Battle of Chancellorsville when sentries of a North Carolina regiment mistook Jackson and his men for Union soldiers and fired upon them. Other men died while Jackson, wounded badly, lingered before dying of pneumonia complications a week later. 

These are individual cases, but statistics also corroborate how surprisingly common this horrific means of death is. The US Naval Institute’s Proceedings recounted how unsettled contemporary civilians were by 1991’s Desert Storm, comparing that very modern warfare’s friendly fire rate to a “supposed historical norm” of “only 2%.” But firearms, planes, and the rest of mechanized modern warfare can drive up this statistic, and Desert Storm was ultimately found to have an official friendly fire casualty rate of 17%. 

And all of these examples are from unified chains of command. The question of one nation fighting a war while also having to worry about the locations of every other country’s vessels and men anywhere nearby, including those not being reported through their own channels, is obviously a  messier problem. 

This matters because many people get sucked into Liberty conspiracy theories because they do not grasp how common friendly fire is. The mere incident itself—Israeli forces opening fire on an American ship—is so beyond their baseline for what’s normal that the event on its own is the first thing that “does not add up.” Peripheral details are marshalled after that fact to support that suspicion. 

Friendly fire is especially typical, we should note, in a wartime context: the Liberty incident happened on Day Four of the Six-Day War. But someone getting their version of events from Owens and Tourney would not know that. They never mention that this happened in the middle of a war at all. 

To repeat: This was a friendly fire incident that happened in the middle of a war. Owens and Tourney spent seventy minutes talking about it and never once brought up the war. This is the most basic context the event could possibly have, and their refusal to mention it is a strong indicator of how trustworthy they are. 

That lie of omission is joined with lies of insinuation: the entire presentation suggests that Tourney’s account is a just-breaking story rather than an account that the public had already received in its entirety the same year it happened. To take only one example, a history of the war was published in 1967, simply titled The Six Day War and co-written by Winston Churchill’s son (a diplomat) and grandson (a journalist). It covers every point of the incident that Tourney brings up. It mentions the date and place. It mentions the casualties (34 dead, 75 wounded, 821 hits in the vessel from ammunition). It mentions the way the whole world knew it was a spy (“sigint”) ship that America had in that part of the Mediterranean in order to eavesdrop. It mentions the way that the attack stopped when Israel realized their error. 

Moving now to another specific problem with the interview, Tourney repeatedly emphasizes the clarity of weather conditions and how the ship, with its flag, had clearly identified itself as American. 

This point has also been known since 1967. The Churchills’ book mentions the clear blue sky as well as the proper identification of the name on the ship and the “5 ft by 8 ft Stars and Stripes” being flown. The problem is that not all military identification is done by eyesight at close range. Making matters worse, the job of identification had fallen to Israel’s Navy—the branch of their armed services which, for obvious reasons, had been starved of funding and resources in favor of their Air Force and Army. 

In fact, the Churchills even mention some of the conspiracy theories that had already started coalescing around the incident. One theory was that the CIA was so unhappy with the Egyptian government (falsely) accusing the US of backing Israel that the CIA tasked Israel with the attack to make it clear that they couldn’t possibly be waging the war together. Another theory was that Israel got defensive about the eavesdropping and so—in the middle of a three-front war with her neighbors—decided to also open fire upon her strongest and mightiest ally over the issue. 

Indeed, Owens and Tourney are emphatic that this attack was intentional. Yet they never spell out the motivation beyond calling America an “occupied nation” and accusing the country of actually being “Israel first.” The conspiracy theorists here actually are not even as rigorous about their own conspiracy theories as are the actual historians!

Elsewhere Owens has called the incident a “false flag” operation. This indicates that they buy into the pre-existing conspiracy theory (although they can’t be bothered to spell out the details, let alone build the argument for them) that Israel wanted to sink the USS Liberty and (somehow) blame Egypt, so that America would intervene in the war on the side of Israel. 

Of course, they have no way of knowing that Israel had such a goal in mind. This is just speculation. It’s speculation that ignores how, late on Day Four of a war that only lasted six days, Israel had already sealed the outcome with their operations destroying the Egyptian air force (in an operation similar to their recent surgical bombardment of Iran’s military and nuclear apparatus). It’s speculation that also ignores the eventual calling-off of the attack. 

Finally, Tourney does make several allegations that contradict the “official version” of events. Apart from the pathos involved in the experience and in his storytelling, his and Owens’s conspiracy theory hinges on these contradictory points. But it’s at the end of Tourney’s account, amidst his alternative version of events, that his story falls apart under the stress of its own accusations. 

He says that after the attack, “We then waited 17 hours for help. I guess they hoped that we would sink that night. Help was only 40 minutes away from us, but they left us out alone to die.” 

This is a damning accusation. It also is not at all what happened. Israel, having realized their mistake, offered to help. “The reply is reported to have been a curt one,” wrote the Churchills. “NEGATIVE” is written in the ship’s logbook, which is visible on the National Archives website. 

In fact, Tourney himself seems to contradict his own claim. After first claiming they waited 17 hours for aid, one hour later in the interview he relates how they sailed “to Malta, a thousand miles away. We went from that torpedo hit 1,000 miles away with a 40 by 40 foot hole in the ship, hoping we wouldn’t sink.” It is hard to imagine a ship that has been sitting for 17 hours with damage so severe then taking the additional time to travel a thousand miles.

So too the key moment when the Israelis realized their mistake. “They continued shooting and killing my mates,” Tourney says. “They left and we thought that it was over, but it wasn’t. IDF helicopters were sent with troops armed and ready to board our ship and finish us off. Then they just left. I guess the gig was up when the mighty IDF could not sink our defenseless ship…”

Strip away the bathos of the narrative and you realize that it’s Tourney’s, not the official story, that does not add up. If the Israelis, still armed to the teeth, wanted to drag America into a war by annihilating their ship and pinning it on Egypt, why stop the attack? 

It’s because, here in the real world, that’s the moment that the Israelis realized they’d made a mistake. The official story explains that. Tourney has nothing to offer but some nonsensical passive aggression. 

Tourney and Owens cover a lot of ground, but everything further afield is easy to write off. By the time these two pivot to then-President Lyndon Johnson’s love of the Jewish people, and AIPAC, and the Kennedy assassination, it’s not even surprising. So too Tourney’s insistence that LBJ made a disparaging remark about “a few dead sailors”—a remark which he, in the Mediterranean, was clearly in no position to hear firsthand and which he has no interest in sharing his source for. 

The only serious allegation concerning something personally witnessed by Tourney is his claim that he and his mates were threatened with death (his words) if they didn’t keep their mouths shut. But even this claim doesn’t add up: Once one understands how very public this incident was from the very beginning, one can’t help asking what, exactly, they had seen that warranted that kind of a threat? Nothing Tourney claims to have witnessed was previously unknown. He never even purports to highlight something as particularly out of step with the official account. And if that’s the case, then what could have prompted death threats? 

Thus the entire interview with Tourney is little more than an act of preying upon ignorance. Owens is counting on her audience to not realize how common friendly fire actually is. They presumably believe that the mere fact that one ally opened fire on another is so extraordinary and hard to swallow that no innocent story of events could really account for it. And their ignorance of this particular incident means that Owens can take a set of details that has been thoroughly in the public view since 1967, give them an emotionally fraught presentation, fail to even mention that it took place in the middle of a war, and use it to galvanize people to hate Israel. 

Owens and Tourney offer the audience nothing new in the way of facts. Their comments are heavy on allegations they can’t have known and wild claims that they give the audience no reason to believe. Combined with their pattern of omission and dishonesty, they have given knowledgeable observers ample reason to distrust them as unreliable and false. 

The conspiracy theory hydra might not die—but specific, laborious rebuttals are helpful in keeping as many people as possible from being led astray by their lies.