In Algeria, bands of roving killers wipe out whole villages by night, burning or mutilating and beheading men and women, infants and old people.
Israel's supreme court has legalised the use of torture, and the Palestinian Authority maintains 11 security services to silence its opponents.
Iraq keeps a hangman on duty 24 hours a day.
Outside mosques on Fridays, Saudi executioners wipe their swords on the clothing of the person whose head they have just cut off, before proceeding to their next victim.
From the Atlantic ocean to the Persian Gulf, North Africa and the Middle East are a human rights disaster, a region whose citizens live in terror of brutal secret police, where torture is routine and due process of law a rare exception. Virtually all Arab regimes and Israel treat their minorities with contempt.
The hypocrisy of the governments involved is stunning. All of them, except for Saudi Arabia and a few Gulf sheikhdoms, have constitutions and rubber-stamp parliaments. Most have adhered to international human rights conventions.
"There is a new trend (among Arab governments)," Mr Olivier Jacoulet, a spokesman for the human rights group Amnesty International says. "They are trying to get around criticism of their human rights records by bureaucratising the issue.
"Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Lebanon and Yemen create layers of management to give the impression they are doing something about violations. When you question an official, they say: `But we have a commission'." Tunisia has gone so far as to set up a government propaganda web-site whose misleading address is Amnesty.Tunisia.Org.
When Algerian security forces or government-backed militias engage in torture, rape and murder, the authorities refer to "excesses". But when the same atrocities are committed by Islamist rebels, they are "crimes against humanity".
One Algerian official even claimed on French radio that "you can't compare being raped in a police commissariat to being raped by the Islamists".
Human rights groups who refuse to differentiate between victims have been denied access to the country, and the government vehemently refuses to allow an international commission of inquiry into the violence that has claimed 100,000 lives in six years.
Next door to Algeria, Tunisia is a popular Mediterranean holiday destination for Europeans who prefer to ignore widespread human rights abuses by the regime of President Zineddine Ben Ali.
Tunisian officials would argue that torture and the imprisonment of at least 2,000 people suspected of links with the Islamic movement Ennahda and the Communist party are necessary to prevent bloodshed comparable to that in Algeria.
The wives and relatives of imprisoned or exiled activists are frequently detained and interrogated as well. Human rights defenders are increasingly targeted.
For example, Khemais Ksila, the vice-president of the Tunisian Human Rights League, was this year sentenced to three years in prison for issuing a communique condemning human rights violations.
Israel claims to be the Middle East's only democracy, yet Palestinians and Lebanese from territories occupied by Israel enjoy no democratic rights.
Amnesty says more than 2,500 Palestinians are held as political prisoners by Israel. At least 60 Lebanese nationals, including 23 held without charge or trial or after expiry of their sentences, are held in Israel, in violation of international law. Another 150 Lebanese are held without charge or trial at Khiam, in the Israeli-occupied zone of southern Lebanon.
In a report issued last month, Amnesty said both the Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority have inflicted arbitrary arrest, torture and unfair trials on the Palestinian population.
"The main concern we have (regarding Israel) is that torture is legalised," Mr Jacoulet says. "The supreme court said it was all right to use a reasonable amount of physical force during interrogation."
Mr Yassir Arafat had a chance to found an Arab democracy, but his 11 intelligence services have ensured that his is just another Mideast regime using any means to stay in power. The responsibility for his failure must be shared.
"Under the Palestinian Authority," Amnesty writes, "pressure from outside to stamp out the sources of `terrorism' has led, often with the apparent encouragement of the United States or Israel, to waves of arbitrary arrests, summary and unfair trials and torture." Twelve Palestinians have died in the custody of the Palestinian Authority.
King Fahd of Saudi Arabia enjoys the unconditional support of Western leaders, yet Saudi Arabia has long outlawed political parties and trade unions.
Flogging is a common punishment for even minor offences. Millions of foreign workers from developing countries are treated as virtual slaves. Their passports are usually taken from them on arrival, and women have been sexually abused by their Saudi employers.
Foreign workers are often accused of theft - for which their hands are amputated - and murder, for which they are beheaded. Foreign workers from developing countries constituted the vast majority of the at least 122 people executed in Saudi Arabia last year. None was allowed access to a lawyer, and the trials were held in secret.
In official circles in the US, it is fashionable to say that the peoples of the Middle East deserve human rights but are not "mature" enough for democracy.
This begs the question of Arab leaders whose principal interest is the perpetuation of their own power - not the welfare of their people. The West fears that, if truly democratic elections were held, anti-Western, Islamic parties would take over the region.
Yet without democratic guarantees, there will be no respect for human rights, and the legacy of Arab regimes will continue to be one of blood and violence.