things we are learning

One more week of school, and then the little darlings get a well-deserved vacation. (Come to think of it, so does their schoolmarm!)
I was tidying the bulletin board this morning and came across this newspaper clipping. When I tacked it up it in September, my enthusiasm for learning about the Middle East was just beginning to gain momentum. I wanted to have this clipping handy in case it waned! The Hull Home-school Academy is not lacking enthusiasm in our studies quite yet, but I still like what Andy Rooney has to say, so I will post it in its entirety for my online audience.

Lost in the Middle East

It has always seemed to me that school ends too soon. There is so much to learn that we should all be going to class every day of our lives. I was starting to learn when I was drafted at the end of my junior year in college. I spent the next four years in the Army in World War II and never even thought of going back to college. The war was an education college could not have given me.
Right now I need a refresher course in Middle East geography and politics. Too often I can't understand stories in the news. I don't know where things are happening or whom they're happening to.
The word Hezbollah is only a few months old to me but it keeps appearing in print, spelled in various ways. No matter how they spell it, I really don't know what it is or who they are. The faction known as Hezbollah seems to be at war with the Israelis although they claim to have agreed to a truce. Most Americans are on the side of the Israelis because they have Jewish friends. They have never met anyone claiming to be a member of Hezbollah. Are they called "Hezbollians"?
Americans should all know more about Islam because it's the world's fastest growing religion, and we're all going have to deal with the people who believe in it. It's not going to be easy. There isn't even much agreement on how we spell what we call the believers. Are they Muslim or Moslem, Mohammedan or Muhammedan? Why "Islam"?
I know where France and Germany are, but don't ask me to draw a map of Palestine, Syria, Afghanistan and Israel. Geography in school and college concentrated on Europe. There was some information in my schoolbooks about China, India and Japan, but almost nothing about the Middle East. I never knew what it was in the middle of. When I read the newspapers about what happens in the Middle East, a shade comes down in my brain.
I thought I was getting a good education when I was growing up, butMr. Hahn never told me anything about the Shiites and the Sunnis. The Shiites practice a form of Islam known as Shia.
Like most Americans, I know somewhere in between very little and nothing about Islam, and less than that about Shia and the Prophet Mohammad. Neither Hezbollah nor Hezbullah is in my dictionary. I'm familiar with the word prophet, but I looked it up, anyway. It says,"a person who speaks by divine inspiration through whom the will of a god is expressed."
I found it of particular interest that the writer of the dictionary definition used the term "a god" in lower case, suggesting that there is more than one. It is interesting, too, how much like Christianity the religion Islam is in many ways. Muhammad came along more than 600 years after Jesus Christ, but the story about the revelations made to him in the mountain cave by the Angel Gabriel is remarkably comparable to how Moses is said to have received the Ten Commandments from God on Mount Sinai.
I want to be careful what I say here. I don't want to be the object of a jihad when they take over. I've learned what a jihad is. It isn't good. The closest thing we have to it is when the Mafia finds out that one of its members has been talking to the cops, they declare what is comparable to a "jihad" on the gang member. It means he's not long for this world.