Poetry

Terrorism Studies

Robert Frenkel

 

No evil so extreme, no act so dire

but it makes our commentator’s day.

We think we may have standards; his are higher,

so high that black and white are shades of grey.

He commandeers a lofty moral plane

that, weaponised, will target the benighted.

Condemn the perpetrators? How inane.

I take their point, he says. A wrong’s been righted:

we brutes have humbled them in peace and war

while fools who claim to represent us tell

big lies. That’s what democracy is for.

Observe: one-party states are doing well.

Such scholarship must rank among the best;

so learned, and so fearlessly expressed.