Peloni: Zineb Riboua explains how Iran’s attempt to use the Strait of Hormuz as leverage has backfired after the Xi–Trump summit showed U.S.–China alignment on keeping the waterway open and preventing Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons.  Whereas the relationship between China and Iran has been characterized as being an alliance, I have argued previously that the their connection was merely that of partners, where shared interests were the limit of any commitment by China for Iran.  Iran’s refusal to negotiate with the US, tied to its weaponizing of the Strait of Hormuz, to its whimsical attack on the Gulf Arab nations, have all undermined China’s interests in Iran, even as Iran foolishly ignored its growing isolation from its former partner.  The enforcement of US sanctions on China’s Teapot refineries was always the ultimate leverage which Trump held over the Chinese-Iranian relationship, and having now enacted this crucial measure, there can be little support for Iran coming from China.

The Strait of Hormuz Is Not Iran’s to Close

Zineb Riboua| Beyond the Ideological | May 14, 2026

Pres. Trump meets with Pres Xi at Beijing Summit. Screengrab via X

The situation is obviously dynamic, but from reading today’s statements, here is my takeaway.

When Iran sealed the Strait of Hormuz, its genius strategists believed they held a winning hand. They expected two things: a global energy shock to force Washington into negotiations and the Gulf states to blame the disruption on US belligerence. Today, as President Trump sat across from Xi Jinping in Beijing, the first statements emerging from that summit began to reveal how thoroughly Tehran had misjudged the situation.

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Janet Levy

Listen to Amy Mekelberg from the RAIR Foundation (6 minutes)

Sharia-compliant enclaves exist throughout Texas, Michigan, Florida, Minnesota, New Jersey, California, Tennessee, Phoenix, and at least five other states.

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Translated by Peloni

Part 2 can be found HERE

I come from a family of immigrants, half of them illegal immigrants for they broke the British Mandate over Palestine:  My mother arrived through the illegal “Aliyah Bet” immigration from Europe, from the DP (Displaced Persons) Camps after the Second World War. My father arrived to the State of Israel exactly two years after Israel’s rebirth.

My father’s father fought the Nazis in General Anders’ Polish Army, and at the end of the war found himself in Italy, from where he joined his brother in New York. The two brothers lived in Manhattan, one with his wife in Upper East Side and the other with his second wife (the first was murdered during the Holocaust) in Upper West Side, this until the end of their lives.

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Ahmad Sharawi |May 14, 2026

Photo by Alexander Grey on Unsplash

A man walks into a Dubai currency exchange, intending to send money to Iran. He hands over $50,000 in cash, and provides a name and a location. Hours later, the money reaches a beneficiary in Tehran. No bank processes the transfer, no wire crosses a border, and no regulator signs off, yet the system worked as intended.

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by Gerald A. Honigman

While ARABISM is unquestionably permitted to stake claim to over six million square miles of real estate by virtue of its violent conquests of mostly non-Arab people’s ancestral homelands, the one damning thing it lacks in the Arab-Israeli conflict is legitimate corroborating evidence that its claimants were/are anything more than late coming invaders, settlers, and colonizers of another ancient historical people’s ancestral homeland, the Jews.

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Peloni: Erin Molan talks with Judge Roy Altman on his book, “Israel on Trial” which uses a court room type analysis to put the numerous attacks raised against Israel to the test of law.  Very interesting.

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Peloni:  Am Yisrael Chai!

The propaganda effort to disassociate Jews from Israel and Jerusalem is absurd. International Law, the Bible, Quran (5:21 and 17:104) and history recognize the rights of the Jewish People to Israel. So did President Trump.

Leonard Grunstein | May 14, 2026

Jerusalem, 21 December 2025.  Photo by Hebrew hyphen – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikipedia

Beginning Thursday night and all day Friday, May 15, 2026, we will be celebrating Yom Yerushalayim-Jerusalem Day, the anniversary of the liberation and reunification of Jerusalem. This year is the 59th anniversary; but our connection to Jerusalem stretches back well over 3,000 years ago, including to the time when Biblical King David declared Jerusalem the capital of Israel.

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Peloni:  What China needs from Iran is stability in the region so as to exercise its influence while also having free access to Iran’s cheap oil.  What China has been receiving for its vast investment in Iran has been something very far from this.

Mariam Gregorio 

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi met with his Iranian counterpart, Seyyed Abbas Araghchi, in Beijing. Screengrab via Youtube

China has played Vahidi for the fool he is. Vahidi thought he was clever when he blocked the strait; he was outsmarted by Trump. The US has stopped all traffic in and out of the strait, in particular tankers with Iranian oil. As a consequence, the flow of Iran’s crude oil to China came to a halt. Vahidi lost his revenue stream; China was buying 90% of Iran’s oil at a discounted rate. Iran’s economy is in free fall; as a consequence, the currency is worthless toilet paper: 1 USD equals approximately 1.8 million Iranian Rials.

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J. Micah Hancock | All Israel News | Published: May 14, 2026

David Ben-Gurion (First Prime Minister of Israel) publicly pronouncing the Declaration of the State of Israel, May 14 1948, Tel Aviv, Israel, beneath a large portrait of Theodor Herzl.  Photo by Rudi Weissenstein – Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Public Domain, Wikipedia

May 14, 1948, is considered the birthday of the modern State of Israel. On that day, as the British Mandate officially expired, David Ben-Gurion stood in the Tel Aviv Museum Hall and read out the Jewish State’s Declaration of Independence, in a speech broadcast over the radio.

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Peloni:  Mike Doran joins guest host Tamir Morag, diplomatic correspondent for Israel’s Channel 14, to discuss the viable options going forward in Iran as well as the shifting alliances which are forming around current events, and the import of Azerbaijan in the region.

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Summary:

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Peloni:  A rather significant turn of events as the CIA unveils an internal document plot while both the president and the director of the CIA are out of the country.  Is there a brewing civil war emerging in the US Intel agencies?

Rebeka Zeljko | National Correspondent | Daily Caller |  May 13, 2026

Two intelligence community officials confirmed to the Daily Caller that CIA officials took documents from the JFK and MKUltra files that were being reviewed by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard for declassification.

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Two stories that do much to shed light on the cruel nature of the British Mandate and the crimes committed against young Zionists are the cases of 16-year-old Alexander Rubowitz and Yaacov Eliav.

Moshe Phillips | May 12, 2026

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Peloni

Rabbi Pesach Wolicki talks with Dr. David Wurmser about who has the greater bargaining position going into the US-China Summit.  See below for details.

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Peloni: The pejorative term ‘West Bank’ has been modeled around a false assertion that there is no association between these lands and either the Jewish State of Israel or the Jewish People when in fact the lands indicated by this malicious term are integral to the Jewish state, the Jewish people and their respective histories. A point which should be understood in all of this is the fact that prior to the Hashemite Kingdom having illegally seized the lands in Judea and Samaria during its illegal invasion in the 1948 War of Independence, what is now termed as “the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan” was actually known as ” the Hashemite Kingdom of Transjordan”.  Notably, it was only due to the illicit Hashemite conquest of the lands of Judea and Samaria from Israel which forced the Hashemites to rename their kingdom from “Transjordan” to “Jordan”.  The motivation for this renaming the entire country was hinged upon the truth which was revealed each time the “Kingdom of Transjordan” was spoken.  Indeed, the word Transjordan was taken from a long recognized cartographic description exclusively referencing the region of land on the far side, trans Jordan, ie East side of the Jordan river.  Hence, the name of the country Transjordan was evidence of both the fact that the Hashemites had no claim to the lands of Judea and Samaria, as well as the fabricated nature of renaming these conquered lands as the “West Bank”.  So apparent was the false connection between Jordan and its ill-gotten gains during the 1948 War that nearly no one on the international field recognized Jordan’s use of the term ‘West Bank’.  That is, until Israel liberated the indigenous lands of its forefathers in 1967, and a manufactured campaign was launched to imply that these lands held no connection to the Jews or the state of Israel, when the opposite was actually true going back three millennia.  So, as Hugh Fitzgerald explains below, these lands were ‘Judea and Samaria’ for 3,000 Years, but ‘West Bank’ for 19.

By Hugh Fitzgerald | May 10, 202

Judea-Samaria-8-Khirbet-Tibna-to-Artabe by Bukvoed, Creative Commons Attribution 4.0

The place name “West Bank,” although universally used today, appeared out of thin air. More on this relatively recent invention can be found here: “A 19-Year Name vs. 3,000 Years of History: Judea vs. ‘West Bank,’” by Micha Danzig, Algemeiner, May 7, 2026:

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Date for new elections to be determined by Knesset House Committee in coming days

All Israel News Staff | Published: May 13, 2026

Screengrab via Youtube

Coalition Chairman Ofir Katz of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party submitted a bill to dissolve the 25th Knesset on Wednesday evening, which was signed by all the leaders of the coalition parties.

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Is it time for federal civil rights intervention?

David Greenfield | May 12, 2026

BREAKING: Masked Islamists are assaulting Jewish children outside of a synagogue in NYC.

Where are the NYPD?

Why are there not mass arrests? pic.twitter.com/YToT57oAnY

— Eyal Yakoby (@EYakoby) May 12, 2026

The sight of Muslim mobs waving terrorist flags and attacking synagogues, once seen as extreme and verbally condemned by Democrat officials, has now become normalized.

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Update 2:  Coalition submits bill to dissolve Knesset and trigger elections within 5 months

Update: Likud attempts to control the terms of the dissolution of the govt.

Peloni:  The consequences of these developments have been threatening the stability of the Netanyahu govt since its formation, and can in fact presage serious reshaping of the political spectrum.  One thing is certain, though, the Left will pay the price which the Haredi parties are demanding so as to retake power, even if the Right wing govt does not.  Herein lies the truth of all this.

PM Netanyahu said to favor regular elections set to take place at the end of October

All Israel News Staff | Published: May 13, 2026

US Ambassador Mike Huckabee meets with Rabbi Dov Landau. Screenshot via Youtube

Ultra-Orthodox (Haredi) leaders on Tuesday called to dissolve the Knesset and schedule slightly earlier elections, citing the coalition’s failure to legislate a new IDF draft law that would ensure broad exemptions from military service for yeshiva students.

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By Pamela Geller | May 13, 2026

President Trump upon landing in China. Screenshot via Youtube

It will be Trump’s second meeting with President Xi in the US president’s second term.  The first was on October 30 last year at the APEC summit in South Korea. This is the first state visit to China by a U.S. president since Trump’s 2017 meeting (White House).

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