YEREVAN, Armenia — A trip to Armenia, where one of history's most neglected genocides was carried out, is a reminder of other examples of man's brutality to fellow human beings.

Recently in Iraq, two mentally sick women were used as carriers of distance-detonated bombs that killed dozens of people and injured several dozens more. What perverse rationale, either religiously based or not, can explain such a terrible act?

"Passage to Ararat," Michael Arlen's beautiful ode to the past and to his father's memory reflects on the loss of more than 1 1/2 million Armenians at the hands of the Turks in 1915. There was a particular cruelty to those murders. They were not the anonymous deaths caused by bombs dropped from high-flying aircraft but, more perversely, the assassination of human beings by other humans in particular brutal and sadistic ways.