William G Baker was raised in the Near East and is a native speaker of Arabic and Hebrew. He has served as assistant professor of Arabic at the U.S. Air Force Academy, and as a senior Near East analyst at the Pentagon. He has also been assistant air attaché, Tel Aviv, Israel; air attaché Riyadh, Saudi Arabia; and defense attaché, Doha, Qatar. Following his military retirement, he served as director of Asian and African Languages, assistant director of Middle East Studies, and senior lecturer in Arabic and Middle East Studies at Baylor University for twenty-years. He is also the author of The Cultural Heritage of Arabs, Islam, and the Middle East and The Arabic Sound and Script.