President Trump's trip to China brings the economic implications of America's war against Iran into sharper focus. The fact that the Taiwan Strait generated more news than the Strait of Hormuz during the recent news cycle, is a telling indicator.

Critics keep framing this as crass resource politics: oil, opening the Strait of Hormuz waterway, and keeping gas prices down for American consumers.

Granted, we all want the price at the pump to come down, and previous administrations have cried wolf about weapons of mass destruction in the Mideast before, but the naysayers are wrong on the facts about this oil and water paradigm as I call it.

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Dear Graduates:

It is now the middle of college graduation season, and we will not be making any commencement addresses.

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Derek Peterson, a professor of history and African studies and chair of the Faculty Senate at the University of Michigan, hit a nerve at the school's graduation ceremony earlier this month with his praise for the "pro-Palestinian activists who have ... opened our hearts to the injustice and inhumanity of Israel's war in Gaza."

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What is a refugee? The 1951 UN Refugee Convention says it is someone outside their country of nationality with a 'well-founded fear of being persecuted' for reasons of race, religion, nationality, social group membership, or political opinion. Yet beyond this legalistic criteria, all definitions include the sense that it is a temporary and undesirable status. The notion that refugees would wish to end their presumed displacement is taken as axiomatic. Yet this is not so for Palestinians, for whom the word "refugee" marks a critical part of their national identity.

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Just three weeks before he pulled off one of the greatest upsets in recent American political history, becoming the next mayor of New York City at age 34, Zohran Mamdani went for a jog in Prospect Park. He was participating in a 5K for Gaza, with all proceeds going to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) an organization charged with aiding Palestinian refugees.

The event received little attention in New York or elsewhere. It should have. In recent decades, UNRWA has become a de facto front for Hamas, used as a front to syphon humanitarian resources into Hamas's genocidal agenda.

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