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The article presents information on the book "Cruelty and Silence," by Eqbal Ahmad. The are the worst of times in Middle Eastern history he concedes and never before has the region experienced such moral bankruptcy. "Cruelty and Silence," was written to illustrate this bankruptcy. The book was written by an Arab who grew up in the Middle East and who identifies with it. Whatever the historical and political origins of the contemporary malaise of the Arab world, and however pernicious anti-Arab sentiments inside the West may still remain, nothing is more urgent for a new generation of Arabs than to learn how to acknowledge the truth about the state of their world, and to take responsibility for changing it.

Rape as an act of conquest and subjugation of whole societies, involving deliberate national humiliation as a means of suppression and social control, has often accompanied warfare and social breakdown. It seems, for instance, to have become widespread among some paramilitary organizations in the former Yugoslavia since the summer of 1992. A half-century earlier, in the so-called rape of Nanking, a defenseless Chinese city occupied by the Japanese Army in 1937, it is estimated that 20,000 cases of rape occurred during the first month of occupation.