Updates From The Epicenter

Hal Lindsey's latest video update is worth watching:

Hal Lindsey Report

Also - Joel Rosenberg has a new book which really could serve as a bookend to "Epicenter" which was a very revealing view into Russia's plans for the Middle East, along with a great deal of interesting and 'inside' information from his direct involvement in the region. 

Now we see this book (below), with an excerpt taken from his excerpt:

Israel At War

What intrigued me about Netanyahu was that he saw something few other leaders in Israel—or around the world—saw. He understood that while the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was painful and important and historic and thus truly worthy of being solved in a fair and just way, it was not the primary danger facing Israelis or the rest of the people in the modern Middle East. Rather, he could see that the prospect of Middle Eastern dictators acquiring and using nuclear weapons was the real danger, one that absolutely must be avoided at all costs. Thus, while Netanyahu believed sincere efforts needed to be made by Israeli and world leaders to find peace with the Palestinians, he believed far more attention needed to be paid dealing with Iraq and Iran.

Today Netanyahu stands at the epicenter of international attention at the most dangerous moment in the modern history of the Jewish state. In the absence of the U.S. and international community taking decisive measures to neutralize the rapidly growing Iranian nuclear threat, Netanyahu now faces the most difficult decision of his long and fascinating political and military career. Should he order the IDF into a full-scale, all-out war to neutralize the Iranian nuclear threat in the next few days, weeks, or months? Or should he delay, hoping the negotiations and sanctions against Iran will eventually work? Should he wait and hope that the U.S. will eventually take decisive action?

The risks of going to war are enormous. But as Netanyahu sees it, so are the risks of not going to war. What if Israel waits too long? What if Washington continues to hesitate and fails to take action in time to prevent Iran from getting the Bomb? What if the Israeli people wake up one morning to the news that those running Iran now have operational nuclear warheads and both the will and eagerness to use them to annihilate Israel and hasten the coming of the so-called Islamic messiah known as the Twelfth Imam or the Mahdi? Worse, what if one morning most of the Israeli people never wake up at all because the mullahs in Tehran have—without warning—launched a nuclear strike and wiped out most, if not all, of the Jewish State?

Netanyahu has been warning his country, the U.S., and the world of this very danger since the early 1990s. Now the hour of decision has arrived, and the stakes could not be higher. Only time will tell how he will handle this extraordinary test. I have written this book, in part, to assess the magnitude of the threat and the varied dimensions of this fateful decision. How did we get to this point? How do Netanyahu and his closest advisors perceive the enemy, the timetable, the risks, and the endgame? Who is Benjamin Netanyahu, anyway? How will the Israeli leader’s complicated relationship with President Obama affect his assessment of the road ahead? What other personal and historical factors are weighing on his mind as he navigates this crisis? What could be the unintended consequences of a decision to go to war? What’s more, how does the current crisis fit into historical trends in the Middle East, and how could this crisis set the stage for Bible prophecies to come to pass in the years ahead?

Speaking of PM Netanyahu:

Knesset Dissolves Itself, Paving Way For Election

This time, it really happened. The Knesset dissolved itself late Monday night, ahead of elections on January 22, 2013.The final reading of the bill to dissolve the Knesset passed with 100 in favor and none opposed, over five months after it passed a nearly identical bill in its first reading before opposition leader Shaul Mofaz (Likud) joined the coalition at 2 a.m.Although the final vote on the bill had not taken place by late Monday night, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu reassured the public at a faction meeting: “This time it’s final. We are going to elections.”