Alright y'all, welcome to the show.
Back to it, I mean to say.
It's anti-war radio.
And I'm Scott Horton.
On the line is Joe Meadors from the USS Liberty Veterans Association.
That's USSLibertyVeterans.org.
And he was a Navy signal man attacked by the Israelis back in 1967.
I guess he keeps trying to get shot at over there.
He went and took part in the flotilla last year and was brutally assaulted.
And now is going back to attempt to deliver, am I right Joe, love letters to the people of the Gaza Strip?
Welcome back to the show.
How are you?
Thanks a lot.
I'm doing great.
Yeah, there's some love letters going, but the most important thing is delivering the humanitarian supplies.
Okay, I guess that's what I get for reading the New York Times for my news.
They didn't mention what else is going.
What else is going?
Well, if it's anything like last year, it was the building supplies, medical supplies.
We had some water making, small water making plants and food and things like that.
All right now, what's the big deal about people getting on a boat and delivering things to other people?
Boats trade things all over the world all day, every day.
What's so special about this case?
Don't ask me.
Israelis just don't want the U.S. or anybody else to deliver supplies to Gaza by sea.
They've got something about not supplying Gaza with anything that they don't want them to have.
And now, so in doing this, I know you're not, I was kind of joking in the intro there.
I know you're certainly not trying to get shot at again by the Israeli Air Force or whoever they send after you.
You're trying to get these supplies to them.
But I mean, do you expect that they'll just seize your boats again and turn you away?
Or is the goal here is to try to build up enough publicity where they're basically forced by global politics to go ahead and let you all in?
Or how's this supposed to work?
The object is to get the supplies to Gaza and by doing so break the siege.
What the Israelis should do, they express concerns about their interest in preventing armaments to being delivered to some terrorist people in Gaza, that the way they should do that is to let the boats in and then look at them and investigate them when they're offloading instead of just taking all of the supplies and going to Ashdod and not delivering the supplies, any of the supplies to the Gaza Strip.
Well, Joel Lyon, spokesman and consul for media, Consulate General of Israel in New York, wrote a letter to the New York Times saying that this whole thing is just some terrible publicity stunt because everybody knows that there are plenty of avenues for delivering humanitarian aid to Gaza.
You just have to give it to the Israelis first and then they'll make sure that the Gazans get it.
Well, that's what they said last time when they kidnapped us and brought us into Ashdod.
But the fact is none of those supplies have made it in the past year yet.
So the facts on the ground prove that that gentleman is incorrect.
The Israelis don't want to deliver the supplies to Gaza.
Well, you know, just before I brought you on, I was telling the audience about the WikiLeaks that came out where the State Department functionaries are reporting back to base that, yeah, the Israelis say that their object is to keep the people of Gaza hungry but not starving.
And I thought maybe that was a bit contradictory, you know, compared to the official line out of, you know, the spokesman to the newspapers and so forth that they're just trying to keep weapons out.
Does that make a difference, you know, having their, you know, real motive revealed by the WikiLeaks in any legal capacity or in a political capacity where, you know, I don't know, say a European government or two have to change their position now when this quote comes out, that kind of thing?
Anything?
In the U.S., my experience over the past 44 years since the attack on the Liberty is that Israel can do no wrong.
So it doesn't matter what the Israelis say.
The U.S. government will allow them to do whatever they want to.
And the American people will just sit on their hands and let it happen.
You can look at the U.S.'s Liberty as a case in point where they were allowed to machine gun life rafts, jam our radios, and all that.
And the only thing that the U.S. did was to order rescue aircraft recalled so they could continue their attack unhampered by the threat of a Sixth Fleet intervention.
The U.S. government has never conducted an investigation despite decades-long effort by U.S. and Liberty survivors.
So that just tells me that the U.S. government and the people of the U.S. will let Israel do virtually, literally anything they want to with impunity.
I'm trying to remember which reporter it was that I talked to that said that the State Department had actually been very generous, I guess, as far as that goes, to the family of Farkan Dogan, I think was his name, the American citizen that was killed in the attack on the Mavi Mamara last year.
But they certainly never stuck up for him in the media.
They never gave a statement or, you know, did any kind of official reprimand or anything like that.
They'll, you know, apparently they'll do a little bit behind the scenes.
But the last thing in the world they would ever do would be, apparently, Joe, to denounce the Israelis for murdering an unarmed American citizen.
And they're saying, you know, this kid was shot four times point blank in the head.
That's exactly right.
Autopsy shows that he was.
And the latest word that I've heard about the State Department's response is that they just, it's a lack of response.
Oh, yeah.
They've never said anything publicly that I know of to even hint that Israel should be criticized for killing an American citizen.
Yeah.
Well, you know, you brought up the Liberty there, and I guess I should let you stick on that point for little bit, if you could.
I think you already referred to the most shocking part of it.
Not that the Israelis, you know, strafed and bombed and attacked this American naval ship that you were on, but that Lyndon Johnson ordered the planes coming to your rescue to fly back to their carrier to turn around and not defend your ship from this attack.
That's exactly right.
And that's the thing that upsets USS Liberty survivors and our families most.
We could care less that the Israelis attacked us or how or why they did it.
Our concern is with the U.S. government and why they allowed it to happen.
In all likelihood, the torpedo attack would not have happened, and those 25 men wouldn't have been killed by the torpedo if the rescue aircraft had been allowed to continue.
If the Israeli aircraft had detected the incoming flight of aircraft from the Sixth Fleet, they in all likelihood would have called off the attack.
Now, help me out, because I wasn't born yet in 1967, so, or 68 for that matter, so can you tell me what was the response in the media then?
I mean, did this ever make any part of Time Magazine or the nightly news with Walter Cronkite or anything?
It was on the cover of Life Magazine, I think, and it was on the front page, I believe, of the New York Times, but very quickly it went into the back pages and virtually no press since then.
So it kind of made news as an event that happened, but there was no continuing reaction to it to report on, it sounds like.
It was just, hey, guess what, it rained today in North Texas kind of a thing.
That's something like that.
It's amazing, it's absolutely amazing, and, you know, whether, even if you went with the Israeli, you know, version of events that it was a big accident that they were just trying to strafe the life or ass of Egyptian sailors, they thought, still, it's amazing that it could just be swept under the rug and ignored for so long.
Well, if the Israeli version was correct, I'm sure that they would be falling all over themselves to conduct an investigation and prove that it was.
The fact that they haven't really stonewalled an investigation for all these years just shows an extra indication that they know that the attack was deliberate, their intent was to kill all the survivors and take the ship and blame it on the Egyptians, probably, but it just goes to show that the attack was, in fact, deliberate.
All right, everybody, hold it right there and wait.
At the end of this break, we'll be back with Joe Meadors, survivor of the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty, and he's headed back to Gaza to break that blockade.
All right, Shell, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and I'm talking with Joe Meadors.
He survived the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty back in 1967 and the Israeli attack on the Mavi Mamara and the Gaza Flotilla last year, and now he's going back.
He's in Corpus Christi right now, and when are you heading out, Joe?
We head out Saturday for Athens, where we'll pick up the ship that we'll be on, and then sometime next week we'll be leaving for Gaza.
And the ship is called the Audacity of Hope.
Who came up with that one?
That's from the Obama's book, the title of Obama's book, but I'm not on that, but I'm on a different one.
Yeah?
That's a different group.
How many different ships are going?
Don't know exactly.
Won't know until we get there, but I imagine somewhere around a dozen.
Well, you know, I saw this in the New York Times that was worthy of note.
It says to explain why she was joining the flotilla, Hedy Epstein, the 86-year-old daughter of Holocaust survivors, said, the American Jewish community and Israel both say they speak for all Jews.
They don't speak for me.
They don't speak for the Jews in this country who are going to be on the U.S. boat and many others standing behind us.
And I think that's such an important point because the Israeli government's lobby in this country has done such a good job of trying to make it seem as though any criticism of the Israeli state is somehow based on racism or prejudice against Jews when really, I mean, all the Jews I know hate Israel.
You know what I mean?
It's ridiculous.
And I think finally it's becoming more and more difficult for them to get away with that narrative, even on cable TV news.
I think it's becoming more and more clear that it's just a mean old right-wing government over there.
They're not good on any issue.
They've been occupying the Palestinians for longer than the Soviets occupied Eastern Europe at this point, and it's just got to come to a stop.
It's as simple as that.
Well, that's right.
You can look at the reception Netanyahu got in Congress.
I mean, virtually every member of Congress was there at his speech when he gave it to the House and Senate, and they all stood up and applauded him like he was a football hero.
But you go back to Israel, and he gets severely criticized by people who aren't in his party.
So he comes to this country, and he gets the impression that everybody's behind him, and the only people behind him are the loudmouths who get all the press.
Yeah.
And I think maybe along with some of the economic issues and the foreign policy in general, the issue of America's relationship with Israel is starting more and more to become an us versus them sort of issue, where it's the American people are basically reasonable, according to the polls on this issue, and yet the bipartisan state up in D.C. is completely wrong.
And more and more, I think there's more and more bases for a new political realignment and a new convergence along some of these issues that really divide the political class from the rest of the country, you know, who I think mostly agree with you.
And you look at the fact that the U.S. government doesn't like the elected government in Gaza.
Well, normally when that situation happens, the U.S. government takes steps to persuade the populace, the electorate in a particular country, to rise up and elect a different form of government, a different government to represent them.
But what has the U.S. government done in Gaza to persuade the Gazans to elect a different government?
They've done absolutely nothing.
Right.
In fact, well, I mean, they tried to arm up Fatah to overthrow them, and that just backfired.
And you're right, though, I guess since then, I don't know.
What do you think's behind that?
Is that the Israeli government's policy that they prefer that Hamas rule Gaza that way they can just keep it under blockade?
It appears to be.
I mean, the only way that the only policies they're taking now are the ones that that exacerbate the situation rather than diminish it.
And if I might, I'd like to make one clarification.
I'm going as a private citizen, as a U.S. liberty survivor.
I'm not associated in this regard with the Liberty Veterans Association.
And the website I'm going with is the FreePalestineMovement.org.
FreePalestineMovement.org.
Yeah.
Okay, good.
Yeah.
Thanks for that clarification.
And now, so what exactly is your interest in this?
You just still got a chip on your shoulder about 1967?
Or you've really become, you know, learned in the Palestinians' plight, and it matters a lot to you?
What's going on?
Actually, I'm very fortunate that I was raised in Saudi Arabia.
So I've spoken to Palestinians virtually all my life and had the opportunity to listen to firsthand accounts of them being kicked out of their houses and off their lands.
So this is something I grew up with all my life.
And now, since I'm retired, I haven't had to actually do something about it.
So while the liberty is kind of ironic that somebody who lived in Saudi Arabia would be on the liberty when it was attacked, that just kind of underscores the relationship between the Israelis and the Palestinians.
And I've had the opportunity to go.
I knew about this flotilla for a couple years, and they invited me to go last time.
So I jumped at the opportunity.
And now, for the audience's sake, a lot of people, you know, don't get to pay attention to foreign policy very much.
They're working all day and trying to put food on their family and so forth.
Maybe you could sort of give them a picture of what life is like in the Gaza Strip.
Well, there's 45% unemployment for the people who are in the working age.
They have brackish water.
They don't have adequate medical care.
They can't travel as any American can.
They don't have adequate housing.
Their housing can be torn down virtually at the whim of the Israelis.
And all in all, it's not a place where anybody would want to live.
It's one of the most densely populated areas in the country.
And the 1.6 million people are being punished for the acts of perhaps a few dozen extremists, maybe a few hundred extremists.
It's like somebody shot, if somebody were to shoot and kill somebody in your town, and they would punish the entire town for that act, regardless of if they were involved in the actual crime.
Right.
And again, here we are after not just the quote from Ehud Olmert's right-hand man a few years back, but even after the State Department cables have been revealed that prove in their own words, the Israelis say that they're trying to keep the people, that is the men, the women, the children, the elderly of Gaza, quote, hungry.
This is not about keeping weapons out.
That could certainly be done in other ways.
Absolutely.
And if they would just let there be, if they would recognize the results of the election that they mandated in the first place, then it would be perfectly fine for the Hamas to have weapons because they'd be the state.
And if they don't like it, then encourage them to change.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, listen, I'm sorry we're all out of time, but I really appreciate your time.
Best of luck to you.
Take good care of Ray McGovern for me while you're over there too.
We need everybody back safe.
Thanks a lot.
Good luck, Joe.
That's Joe Meadors, everybody.
Survive the attack on liberty.
He's bringing food to the Gazans.
