http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/LF04Ak01.html-snip-
Indeed, even after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's spokesman publicly thanked Washington for its efforts to "water down" a statement by the president of the United Nations Security Council issued early on Tuesday morning, hard-line neo-conservatives complained bitterly that Obama had betrayed its closest ally by not vetoing it.
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"If Obama decides it is in America's interest to make an example of Israel after the Gaza flotilla incident in order to win goodwill in Cairo, Beirut, Tehran and Ankara," warned Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute, "then he must also recognize that the leadership in Jerusalem is going to conclude that it cannot trust the United States to safeguard its security, and that therefore it must take matters into its own hands on any number of issues, not the least of which is Iran's nuclear program."
In effect, if the White House decides to come down hard on Israel now," he added in National Review Online, "it is the same as giving a green light for Israel to strike Iran."
That threat was echoed in a remarkable column published by the neo-conservative Wall Street Journal on Tuesday in which the author, Ronen Bergman of Israel's Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper, argued that the operation itself was "irresponsible" and evidence that a "siege mentality" - based on the belief that world opinion is irreversibly hostile to the Jewish state - had taken hold of the country and its governing elite.
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Similar talking points, however, were deployed by The Israel Project (TIP), another right-wing Zionist group that mobilized its members to write e-mails to lawmakers and media outlets in their area calling on them to stand by Israel. In the space of two hours on Tuesday afternoon, the Washington bureau of Inter Press Service received nearly 20 emails from TIP members in support of Israel's version of the incident.
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