United States by Japan. Not kidding. Same mind set. And no not a bad person, an excellent person in most respects but this one. I don't know the name for the syndrome but there is one. "Using a single ancient religious text as our only reference? Yeah, I got some questions about that approach." Why? Is that not basically what the participants are doing? (Well, other than the Qu'ran.) And it's not like the Bible lacks documentation (e.g., the Dead Sea Scrolls). It is basically historically accurate. This is a religious war. To understand it, one needs to understand the religious texts. Seems pretty reasonable to me. You need to get over your knee-jerk resistance to the Bible. It is an historical text, as well as a religious one. Which texts would you add ? The Noble Qur'an, the Vedas, the Eddas ? There are winners and losers everywhere, including religion, in which area the Judeo-Christian texts have no peers, and the Old Testament gives the best historical lessons in living. Western "elites" are baffled by the Middle East in general because the two areas' inherent thought processes can never be connected, or made to "meld", hence they start out misunderstanding and baffling each other with their very first syllables. East and West simply aren't "wired" the same way. Being exposed to a Western University after the age of about nineteen or twenty only means that all of what they (Middle easterners) learn here starting at that age has to