The Middle East in a nutshell! (Hey! All those nuts had to come from somewhere!)

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 of
Potamia.
Each empire slaughtered its way to power. Surprisingly, none of them knew a
thing about OPEC or petroleum reserves.
Today’s Twittersphere might not know it, but religious conflicts used to be
relatively rare there, too.
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 or more 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.”)

2. 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 15
th
century, Europeans discovered an
entirely new population to slaughter. These new people had a seemingly limitless
supply of Aztec and Inca gold bars stashed in pyramid-shaped ATM machines
AND they had tacos!
The Ottoman Empire stepped into the Middle East void, taking Constantinople
and Baghdad and ruling for almost 600 years before Super Panavision
cinematography led to “Lawrence of Arabia” and temporarily moved the region’s
battlefields into air-conditioned theatres everywhere.
In the meantime, new empires, (British Petroleum, Royal Dutch Shell and
Standard Oil), took over and ran things until someone inadvertently sent a photo
of three Iraqi lacrosse players to Dick Cheney who proceeded to start the latest
Middle Eastern war.
That’s it. 5,000 years of history in just 496 words.
Now, lets Mecca deal! I’ll stop Tehran through history if someone else will write

3. the next article: Afghanistan For Dummies!
Tom Lloyd
2811 Ruleme Street
Apt. 806
Eustis, FL 32726
Chipshot410@yahoo.com
352-272-0949
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