Greetings from the French Hill: Zero Hour Fastly Approaching?

-ynet is reporting that President Chirac is backpeddling again. Even-though France is finally agreeing to send the number of troops that they originally alloted, Chirac is now saying the number of UN troops agreed upon to send to southern Lebanon is "excessive". You have to read it to believe it. Once again, it must be mentioned that France was the "leader" in negotiating for a immediate "cease-fire" between Israel and Hezbollah. THEY were the ones that championed the number of 15,000 UN troops.

"My feeling is that the figure that was given at the beginning of 15,000...Is a figure that is completely excessive," he told a joint news conference with German Chancellor Angela Merkel. "I don't know who mentioned this figure but it doesn't really make sense. So what is the right number, 4,000, 5,000 or 6,000, I don't know."(Reuters)

READ THE REST...
-The Jewish Press has 2 great articles this week.

The Time Is Now -- Israel And The West On The Brink
By: Phyllis Chesler, Ph.D.
Wednesday, August 23, 2006

Our beloved Israel is engaged in an existential fight for survival. From the moment of its birth in 1948, Israel has been under constant siege. This latest war, however, feels different. It comes upon Israel after decades of non-stop terrorist attacks, large-scale military battles, and endless international boycotts and condemnation.

Israel has been relentlessly demonized and successfully isolated by lethal propaganda. World-class illiterates and leading academics have loudly agreed that Israel is a “Nazi, apartheid” state that deserves disdain and death or have shamefully looked the other way as Jewish blood flowed and the noose tightened, perhaps secretly hoping that a second Holocaust – this one for the Jews of Israel – might somehow spare the West from experiencing its own much larger Holocaust at Islamist hands.

I first wrote in these pages in 2004 and again in 2006 that the beginnings of a second Holocaust were already discernable. A handful of others also envisioned this. Only recently have some Jewish-American leaders begun to entertain this idea [...]

Now, for the first time, Israelis, Jews, and their many supporters are beginning to contemplate the unbearable – namely, that the siege against Israel might never end, that our Islamist enemies (and their supporters in the Western media and academy) will never stop until they wear us down completely, drive us into the sea, or annihilate us with nuclear weaponry.
[...]
Today, for the first time, Israelis and Jews are beginning to think the unthinkable. How long must Israel continue to do the heavy lifting in America’s civilizational war against Iran and Syria and indeed against Islamist jihad? At what point will Israel need to consider exercising its nuclear option against Iran?
[...]
Just this month a London hairdresser refused to cut “the hair of a Jew” (a woman who had frequented the salon for a decade) and 20 Jewish shops were vandalized in Rome. Anti-Jewish, anti-Zionist, and anti-American marches (not to mention terrorist attacks against trains and buses and plots against airlines) continue unabated in every major European capital. Placards read: “Europe is the Cancer. Islam is the Answer”; “Europe You Will Pay, Your 9/11 Is on Its Way”; and “Be Prepared for the Real Holocaust.”

And it’s not just Europe: Dislike, if not open hatred, for Israel, coupled with the belief in an evil Zionist lobby, is rampant on American campuses, within certain quarters of the American State Department, and among the progressive and mainstream media. This month in Washington, D.C., ten-year-old Arab-American girls chanted pro-Hizbullah slogans.
[...]
If the world does not stop the jihadists in Israel, if it chooses to sacrifice the Jews once again, it will, soon enough, find itself bombed back to the seventh century and living under Islamic religious law. Several Iranian dissident friends have begged me to explain to them why America has not already stopped Iran. As one distraught dissident put it, the mullahs have already murdered vast numbers of their own countrymen and will stop at nothing to return to a Caliphate. “And the Jews?” he asks. “How can they, of all people, hesitate?”
If not now, when? If not us, who? The time is now.

The War Israel Chose To Lose
By: Steven Plaut
Wednesday, August 23, 2006

It was a war Israel was more afraid of winning than of losing.

It was a war whose battlefield strategy was based on posturing – on acting as if Israel were conducting an actual all-out war.

It was a war in which Israel attempted to defeat the enemy by not defeating him.

It was a war of the make-pretend.
[....]

-Hadassa Ben-Itto, asks why Jews are remaining silent again as anti-semitic propoganda reaches feverish heights

In the welter of criticism directed at the war in Lebanon, one question has not been asked: why has there been nothing about the intolerable hate propaganda swamping the Arab-Muslim world, led – again – by The Protocols of the Elders of Zion?

-Read former White House Spokesperson, Ari Fleisher's letter to former President Jimmy Carter after his interview with Der Spiegal in which Carter called Israel's attack on Lebanon unjustified and immoral.

-This article cautions bloggers to remember to check the quotes and facts that are reported to ensure that they are accurate.

-Finally, after CBS' Mike Wallace "interview" with Iranian President Ahminidinejad, The Spectator's Philip Klein shows what it would look like had Mike Wallace interviewed Adolf Hitler in 1938

In an effort to change the course of history, the U.S. government sent Mike Wallace back in time to interview Adolf Hitler before the 1938 Munich Conference. The theory was that if the legendary, hard-hitting, pit bull journalist Wallace were to expose the true Hitler in a newsreel to be shown in movie theaters throughout the world, it could tilt the balance of world opinion against appeasement, and save millions of lives. The following are excerpts from the newsreel.