Stuff nobody taught me about the Middle East

Be clear that I don't purport any of this stuff below but am extremely interested that it matters vehemently if not violently to many people.

Stuff nobody taught me which explains a lot. Apparently the Temple Mount in Jerusalem was the place where Good Ole God gathered up the dirt to make Adam. David had a throne there. Abraham offered his son Isaac up to sacrifice to GOG there. Jesus threw the money changers out of the Second Temple there. On his winged horse Lightning (Al-Baraq), Muhammad took off from there for his trip thru all the times and heavens. As he left, he accidentally tipped over a glass of water and returned before the spilling water hit the table. After Mecca & Medina, the Temple Mount is the third most sacred place to Islamists.

There was the First Temple(Solomon's) and the Second Temple there. The Western Wailing Wall is the remains of the Second Temple. There is a mosque there Al Asqa. And a shrine for pilgrims not mosque called the Dome of the Rock, the oldest Islam building from 691 CE built where the Second Temple was. It was here in Sept 2000 where Sharon strode in his bully, unholy way with 1000 guards and set off the 2nd Intifada or eruption by the enraged & offended Palestinians.

Also Jesus is supposed to return there & the Islam 2nd Comer Mahdi is to return there. Mahdi is the 2nd-Comer for Islam -- ring a bell?? Muqtada al-Sadr & the Mahdi Army in Iraq!!. If it said Sadr and the 2nd-Coming-of-Jesus Army, we might get a clue of what means what to whom.

One can see how everyone's theological nuts are in a knot about the Temple Mount, currently controlled by an Islamic 'authority' tho physically within Israel. I have the awful feeling that very few Americans who deal in the Middle East know what toes or cloven hooves are being stepped upon at all.[bxA]

Another piece of the tangled history of the area totally unknown to me is that many Arabs and certainly the Arab Street cannot understand how if there were a genocidal horror on the scale of the Holocaust, how come Germany didn't get punished for such genocide but rather got billions in a Marshall Plan? (I'm not agreeing with anything yes or no here, just reporting.) Only 19 (nineteen) murderers were condemned in the Nuremberg Trials. The Arab world can't figure out how come Palestine had to pay for Germany's sins? (Gruesome European Racism of course -- shove the Jewish people off to the seeming middle of nowhere, supposedly out of sight out of mind.)

People who we consider mad like Ahmadinejad are just saying what so many Arabs think which is that the Holocaust couldn't have actually happened because if something so horrific did happen, Europe would have punished Germany for it. This logic never occurred to me, but you can imagine The Arab Street feeling this way. The Arab-American I was reading said you could 'drain the Middle East Abscess by giving the Palestinians the West Bank & Gaza. The Israelis the pre-1967 borders. And Bavaria.' (This notion of Bavaria blew my mind. Of course actual *justice* would have given the Diaspora a hunk of Germany not of Palestine.)

All these tidbits made me glimpse the turmoil more gutfully.
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I gleaned this material from Lawrence Joseph.
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