Mirror mirror on the wall, who’s the craftiest of them all?
The most assured, the most possessed of enviable gall?
Well my child, since you ask, there’s none but he,
The chutzpah-filled interpreter of the land of Araby.
What does the erudite professor profess?
He does possess an unctuous and glib finesse.
Long ago he reached a momentous conclusion:
The route to fame demands intimate collusion.
Our adroit doctor kept one foot in the harmless academy,
And another firmly planted in the environs of national security.
His task was precise: deciphering the unruly Arab mob,
To the unlearned and gullible American sahib.
The Arab street you see is a dangerous, atavistic place,
In thrall to ancient hatreds and putrid Arab nationalist theories.
The professor partook before his deliverance by some mysterious grace,
So he’s uniquely positioned to purge the Arabs’ fantasies.
In newspapers and journals and books and TV,
The scholar proclaimed: the Arabs are hateful, envious, unfree.
They don’t believe in peace, or Israel’s security,
Why if they had the chance, they’d throw the tiny state into the sea.
Negotiations, engagement, diplomacy, it’s all humbuggery.
Arab potentates, princes, presidents and pashas,
Wrote the book on the ways and means of skullduggery,
They understand only force, bombs, any violent fracas.
Bomb Baghdad, Sudan, perhaps Damascus too,
And the Arabs in gratitude will learn to be free.
But never forget to give credit where credit’s due,
It was George W. Bush who stumbled upon Arab liberty.
So democracy is advancing, it’s the autumn of the autocrats,
Our florid professor is all aflutter at his finding.
A storm wave of freedom will usher in the democrats,
But ustaz doktor Araby cautions it may not be binding.
But details, details, who cares for mere facts?
They’re so stale and boring, let’s stick with fictive acts.
They lend themselves so easily to rousing flights of rhapsody,
And that’s the preferred genre of our faithless doktor Araby.
