“The school’s president, Andrew Rehfeld, rejected Ohio attorney general’s claims that Reform institution was violating donors’ wishes by closing Cincinnati program”

Posted on April 16, 2026 by ArchitectGuy

EJEWISH PHILANTHROPY
HUC ‘deeply disappointed’ by suit to block closure of Ohio seminary, as new school looks to step in
Jay Deitcher
April 16, 2026

The Reform movement’s Hebrew Union College said on Wednesday that it was “deeply disappointed” by the Ohio Attorney General’s office’s decision to file a lawsuit to block the institution’s plans to shutter its Cincinnati rabbinical programs, rejecting the claims against the school. In his first comments since the lawsuit was filed last week, Andrew Rehfeld, the president of HUC, told the college’s stakeholders that the institution has been open about its plans to close the Cincinnati rabbinical program since they were first announced in 2022. The Ohio campus will ordain its final rabbinical class next month, though it plans to continue hosting some programs there, including its library and archives…Last Friday, Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost filed a lawsuit against HUC, alleging that the school was subverting the wishes of donors. READ MORE

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“Critics of the Administration have predictably dismissed the move as a desperate, last ditch effort on the part of the White House to regain leverage over Tehran. In truth, the strategy is anything but spontaneous”

Posted on April 15, 2026 by ArchitectGuy

FORBES
Trump’s Hormuz Blockade Has Been Planned For Years
Ilan Berman
April 15, 2026

…A decade-and-a-half ago, while on a visit to U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) in Tampa, Florida, I had a candid exchange with a senior military official deeply focused on the Iranian “file.” Even back then, the regime’s energy weapon loomed large in American strategic thinking. CENTCOM’s nightmare scenario, he told me, was not a complete closure of the Strait but a deliberate “narrowing” of it. Through tactics like minelaying, naval drills and the harassment of transiting vessels, Tehran could constrict the flow of oil through the Strait enough to cause a spike in global oil prices without ever presenting Washington with a clear casus belli. The planned countermove, however, was equally revealing. If Iran ever interfered with the Strait in a meaningful way, the official told me, the waterway would “remain closed – by us.” Such a response would accomplish two critical objectives: it would rob the Iranian regime of its most vital source of hard currency, and it would quickly turn every country relying on Gulf oil into a stakeholder in the containment of the Iranian regime. The logic was elegant. America had the ability to turn Iran’s greatest geographic advantage into a dangerous vulnerability. And that’s precisely what is happening now. READ MORE

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“Why so many, on both the left and the right, keep getting Trump wrong”

Posted on April 14, 2026 by ArchitectGuy

TABLET MAG
Seven Myths About the Iran War
Michael Doran
April 14, 2026

Donald Trump’s actions in the Middle East continually surprise the foreign-policy establishment and the media elite. According to commentators on both the right and the left, the reason is that Trump is a megalomaniac—or, as Jon Stewart and former U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan recently agreed on The Daily Show, perhaps addicted to cocaine. Yet while Trump has repeatedly defied the Beltway consensus on Iran and its allies over the past year and a half, none of the dire consequences that influential commentators predicted have come to pass. World War III hasn’t erupted. The global economy hasn’t collapsed. Instead, the Iranian leadership is dead or decapitated, its nuclear weapons program is buried beneath mountains of rubble, and most of its navy lies at the bottom of the sea. While the loss of 13 U.S. servicemen is a serious matter, it is hardly the thousands of dead and wounded that were routinely predicted as the consequence of any major U.S. action. Israel still exists. So do Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Kuwait, along with their oil reserves. READ MORE

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“Direct US-brokered talks between Israeli and Lebanese representatives set to take place in Washington this week”

Posted on April 13, 2026 by ArchitectGuy

MIDDLE EAST FORUM
Israel Won’t Stop in Lebanon Until Hezbollah Is Crushed
Jonathan Spyer
April 13, 2026

Direct US-brokered talks between Israeli and Lebanese representatives are set to take place in Washington this week. The Israeli delegation will be headed by Yehiel Leiter, Jerusalem’s ambassador to the US. Lebanon will be represented by Nada Hamadeh, the Lebanese ambassador to Washington. The US State Department will host the negotiations. In his statement on Thursday announcing the talks, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu framed their purpose as ‘‌disarming Hezbollah and establishing peaceful ‌relations between ⁠Israel and ⁠Lebanon’. Lebanese prime minister Nawaf Salam, for his part, expressed his hope that Beirut should become a ‘demilitarised city’. Even as the talks were announced, Lebanese Hezbollah’s attacks on Israeli population centres and Israel’s wide-ranging ground and air offensive against the terror group continued. READ MORE

AXIOS Rubio to host Israeli, Lebanese ambassadors for talks amid ceasefire effort Secretary of State Marco Rubio will host on Tuesday a meeting between the Israeli and Lebanese ambassadors in Washington, D.C., to launch direct negotiations between the countries. The talks, which will take place amid fighting between Israel and Hezbollah and a wide-ranging Israeli ground invasion in southern Lebanon, are going to focus on the possibility of a ceasefire and on longer term disarming of Hezbollah, along with a peace deal between the countries, sources say. This is going to be the most high-level direct meeting between Israel and Lebanon since 1993.

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“The mullahs believed they held all the cards when the ceasefire was called. But no permanent stoppage was possible without meeting U.S. demands”

Posted on April 13, 2026 by ArchitectGuy

FREE PRESS
How Iran Wasted the Ceasefire
Eli Lake
April 12, 2026

The cliché about the Islamic Republic of Iran is that it has never won a war, but never lost a negotiation. Over the weekend in Pakistan, that diplomatic winning streak ran into a brick wall named J.D. Vance. Despite coming into the talks demanding everything from war reparations to military control of the Strait of Hormuz, the Iranian delegation left Islamabad with nothing. “They have chosen not to accept our terms,” the vice president told reporters in Islamabad on Saturday before departing for Washington. “I think that’s bad news for Iran much more than it’s bad news for the United States of America.” Vance’s message was backed up by President Donald Trump, who told reporters over the weekend, “Whether we make a deal or not makes no difference to me. And the reason is because we’ve won.” READ MORE

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“The allies dismantled Iran’s military infrastructure, but left untouched the narrative engine designed to end wars by breaking democracies from within”

Posted on April 11, 2026 by ArchitectGuy

FUTURE OF JEWISH
Iran’s deadliest weapon was never on the target list
Guy Goldstein
April 10, 2026

The allied campaign against the Islamic Republic of Iran mapped air defenses, missile batteries, nuclear facilities, and command nodes. It has been called a success by all of those kinetic metrics by many experts, and has been rightfully called so. It degraded all of them. However, the campaign failed to map, target, or even classify as a military capability the 50-plus IRGC-funded content production studios whose output, 40 days into the war, did more damage to the allied war effort than every missile Iran has launched combined…Iran’s supreme leader said publicly that media is more effective than missiles, planes, and drones. The allies knew all of this and built their campaign anyway without a single cognitive target on the list, because military doctrine still treats the cognitive domain as secondary. READ MORE

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“At least we now know Josh Shapiro is not a double agent for Israel. He is just a double-crosser”

Posted on April 10, 2026 by ArchitectGuy

NEW ZIONIST TIMES
Josh Shapiro’s Israel Doublecross
Bob Goldberg
April 10, 2026

…For years, the political left whispered that Shapiro’s “moral clarity” on the Jewish state was a sign of dual loyalty. They need not have worried. His recent pivot—decrying the 2026 war against the Iranian clerical state as the “wrong war” and demanding an immediate exit—proves that when the political winds shift, Shapiro is perfectly capable of abandoning a democratic ally to satisfy the faculty-lounge wing of his party…Furthermore, Shapiro and his ilk have retreated to the pedantic argument that one simply cannot wage a war while battling high inflation—a claim that is as historically illiterate as it is cowardly. If Shapiro had been advising Lincoln during the Civil War or FDR during World War II, he would have demanded a surrender at the first sight of a rising Consumer Price Index. READ MORE

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Segal: “If Iran maintains the ceasefire while Israel continues to strike Lebanon, then it is a sign that the terror proxy has been thrown to the wolves”

Posted on April 9, 2026 by ArchitectGuy

FREE PRESS
This Ceasefire Could Mark the Death of Iran’s Axis of Resistance
Amit Segal
April 9, 2026

…Iranian negotiator Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf has already declared negotiations “unreasonable” under the current conditions. Furthermore, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps have claimed that shipping in the Strait of Hormuz has been halted and will not resume until Israel’s attacks in Lebanon cease. Israel does not seem intent on ending its campaign, so the question becomes: Who will break first? The answer is about far more than interpretation of the ceasefire agreement; it is a fundamental question of whose strategy survived Operation Roaring Lion. If Iran breaks and leaves its proxy at the mercy of Israel, then the Axis of Resistance has officially broken. The Iranian guarantee becomes as worthless as their currency, and its proxies will have to chart their own courses, if not disintegrate altogether. Conversely, if Israel concedes, then it has surrendered its post-October 7 security doctrine: Never allow threats to build up on the borders. In the post-Roaring Lion world, only one doctrine can survive. READ MORE

JNS IDF launches largest strike on Hezbollah since start of ‘Roaring Lion’ The Israel Defense Forces on Wednesday carried out its largest coordinated strikes against Hezbollah terror targets in Lebanon since the start of “Operation Roaring Lion,” hitting about 100 sites across multiple areas simultaneously within 10 minutes. The large-scale wave of attacks targeted Hezbollah headquarters, military infrastructure and command-and-control centers in Beirut, the Beqaa Valley and Southern Lebanon, according to the Israeli army. The targets included intelligence command centers and central headquarters used to direct and plan attacks against IDF troops and Israeli civilians; infrastructure tied to Hezbollah’s rocket and naval units; and assets belonging to the Radwan Force and the Aerial (127) Unit. 

ISRAEL HAYOM Lebanon will determine the fate of the campaign On the Iranian front, Israel did everything it could, and the achievements are significant, even if not decisive. But on Israel’s northern border, it looks as though we are heading toward a historic missed opportunity. Instead of forcibly freeing the Lebanese state from Iranian control, including by targeting its leaders, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu folded under pressure from the US administration, yielded to Iran and entered negotiations with Beirut’s puppet regime.

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“While the cabinet has kept the decision low-profile, the scale of the approval, jumping by 34 outposts at once, represents an unprecedented acceleration of settlement activity in the region”

Posted on April 9, 2026 by ArchitectGuy

i24NEWS
Israeli cabinet quietly authorizes 34 new settlements in swift move
Inon Shalom Yttach
April 9, 2026

The Israeli cabinet has quietly greenlit the construction of 34 new settlements across the West Bank. The authorization marks the largest single approval of outposts in a single step, nearly doubling the recent total from 69 to 103. What makes this expansion particularly significant is the location of the approved sites. Several are situated deep within Palestinian enclaves in the northern West Bank, while others are located in remote, rugged areas where the IDF currently maintains almost no permanent presence. Establishing civilian outposts in these “unreachable” points creates a massive new security and logistical burden for the military, which is already stretched thin. This “one-step” surge reflects a major shift in government policy, moving away from incremental approvals toward a sweeping consolidation of the Israeli presence in the most isolated regions of the territory. READ MORE

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“While basking in the protection offered by America’s military capability so they can fund their bulging, barely-functioning welfare programs, when asked for support, these putative allies run for cover”

Posted on April 9, 2026 by ArchitectGuy

GATESTONE
With Friends Like These: America and Its Fake Allies
Nils A. Haug
April 4, 2026

Some of America’s friends, purported Western allies, have shown their true colors at last. Regrettably, without shame, they have proven to be nothing but parasites. While basking in the protection offered by America’s military capability so they can fund their bulging, barely-functioning welfare programs, and taking advantage of America’s powerful economy with preferential tariffs in their favor, when asked for support, these putative allies run for cover. In naming and shaming these “fair-weather” friends – Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Ireland, Luxembourg, Greece and the United Kingdom, among others, the last might be a good place to start. Somehow, somewhere along the line, leading politicians of the UK, Prime Minister Keir Starmer specifically, seem to have overlooked a bit of history. During World War II, Great Britain would have been destroyed by Germany but for one crucial factor – the military and economic might of the United States. READ MORE

JPOST Spain is failing the West and weakening Europe’s diplomatic hand Spain, under Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, has chosen a shameful role in the confrontation between the West and the Iranian regime. In recent weeks, Madrid blocked US use of the jointly operated Rota and Moron bases for strikes connected to the Iran campaign, later closed its airspace to American military aircraft involved in that effort, and this week announced it would reopen its embassy in Tehran. At the same time, Spain intensified its pressure on Israel and called for the European Union to suspend its association agreement with the Jewish state.

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