You don't have to know anything in this case to take a side. The side is that of Ethiopia, formerly "Christian" Ethiopia, and once the site, for the hopes and dreams of beleaguered Western Christendom, of the mythical Christan kingdom of mythical Prester John, that great and good king, a "Christom king," who ruled a land on the other side of the lands taken by the Muslims or Saracens, and who was the great hope -- black or brown (his kingdom was first placed in India) but definitely not white -- of Christian imaginations.
Ethiopia as a Christian country for a while -- for a very long while -- was given a kind of special dispensation in Muslim attitudes, because it was the Ethiopian king who gave refuge to 85 followers of Muhammad who had fled the Hejaz, and that act gave Ethiopia a special status. But no longer, apparently. Ethiopia is in part of the world. The world belongs to Allah, and the People of Allah. Ethiopia, too, will have to be islamized, and given where it is in the world, it may be culturally arabized as well.
Ethiopia as a Christian redoubt makes it, in the eyes of the Egyptians, automatically enemy territory. Ethiopia as a black African (even if Hamitic) country, makes it a place automatically to be despised by the Arabs, whose supremacist ideology finds its perfect, semi-submerged vehicle (a veritable submarine), in Islam. And now Ethiopia is to be conquered by Islam for other reasons as well. For the Ethiopians have suffered famine after famine, drought after drought. They have never taken advantage of the Nile waters that flow through the country. In the past ten years, more and more, intelligent Ethiopians, and agronomists from outside the country, have pointed out how silly it is not to engage in irrigation projects that use some of that Nile water.
Plans have been made. But meanwhile, in the malevolent circles of Arab Muslims in Egypt, other plans have been made to prevent Ethiopians from using some of that Nile water. How dare they, those black Christian Ethiopians, think that they can divert some of the waters of the Nile to their own use? Don't they know that the Nile belongs to Egypt? Don't all the storybooks, and history books, say so? Doesn't the Nile belong to Egypt the way, say, the Danube belongs to...well, hmm, who does that Danube belong to, anyway?
Threats have been made by Egypt: don't do a thing without our permission. Has the American government stepped in? Has the Black Caucus been alterted, has the Ethiopian embassy moved heaven and earth to make this issue known to Americans? No and No and No.
Well, then, let's get the ball rolling right here and right now. Make this an issue. Make the defense, and shoring up, of Ethiopia, and total support for it, as a Christian country whose very name resonates through Western literature, glitters "like a rich jewel on an Ethiop's ear," Western history, and of course in the consciousness of black Africans, as the only country to remain free both of European imperialists, and more importantly, free of the longer-lasting Arab imperialism that deprives Believers of interest in, consciousness of, knowledge of, their own pre-Islamic or non-Islamic pasts.
Support Ethiopia, to the hilt, in its pre-emptive strike against the forces of Islam. Whether those forces are in Somalia, or sitting in Cairo, trying to deny the Ethiopians their perfectly legitimate rights to divert some of the headwaters of the Nile into irrigation projects.