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The Middle East For Dummies: 5,000 Years In Less Than 500 Words
1. THE MIDDLE EAST FOR DUMMIES: 5,000 YEARS IN LESS THAN 500 WORDS
To understand current events in the Middle East you need to know its history. In a
140-character world, that’s challenging but here goes:
Usually dubbed “the cradle of civilization,” the Middle East is also “the cradle of
warfare.”
(“Cradle of Warfare,” incidentally, would make a great name for an Xbox game.)
Anyway, for most of the past 5,000 years, the region once known as Mesopotamia
has been a combat zone. The Babylonians, the Hittites, the Phoenicians, the
Egyptians, the Assyrians, the Sumerians, the Ottomans and about a dozen other
empires all went out of their way to make a Mess-o-Potamia.
Each empire slaughtered its way to power. Surprisingly, none of them knew a thing
about petroleum reserves.
Today’s Twittersphere might not realize it, but religious conflicts used to be
relatively rare in the region.
Long before Jesus Christ or the prophet Muhammad, Mesopotamia was up to its ass
in alligators – or possibly crocodiles - trying to drain the swamps of the Tigris and
Euphrates rivers. People simply didn’t have the time to go all “Westboro Baptist
Church” on their neighbors.
(This was so long ago that the definition of a weapon of mass destruction was, “two
guys with sticks.” It would be thousands of years later before Dick Cheney would
re-define that term as “three or more guys with sticks.”)
Anyway, the ancient people of Israel weren’t exactly regional pacifists here, either.
According to the Book of Joshua, they schlepped out of Egypt and into the land of
Canaan where, apparently, the Canaanites hadn’t gotten the tweets about giving up
their real estate holdings to a bunch of marching trumpet players.
All we really do know is that when the walls of Jericho came tumbling down, the
Israelites were the first people to ever use the expression “Shofar, so good.”
Things then took a turn for the worse when the western world got involved.
In 1098, knights of the first crusade hacked and bludgeoned to death the entire
population of Jerusalem. This proved to be so popular back home in Europe that six
more crusades followed. Then in the 15th
century, Europeans discovered an entirely
new population to slaughter. These new people had a seemingly limitless supply of