Cruelty and Silence

Makiya first gives us the stories of Khalil, Abu Haydar, Omar, Mustafa, and Taimour--the Arab and Kurdish heroes of this book. Their testimony, revealing the true extent of occupation, prejudice, revolution, and routinized violence, is a compelling example of the literature of witness. He then links these tales of survival to an examination of the Arab intelligentsia's response to Saddam Hussein and the Gulf War, comparing the flood of condemnation of the West with the trickle of protest over Saddam's mass murder campaign against the Kurds.

In his exploration of these "landscapes of cruelty and silence," Kanan Makiya lays out the nationalist mythologies that underlie them. He calls for a new politics in the Arab world--a politics that puts absolute respect for human life above all else.