Lies and Truth, by Orson Scott Card

The other night I heard an Arab spokesman on Fox News tell a real whopper. "Don't talk to us about anti-semitism. You Christians had a thousand years of pogroms against the Jews, and we Arabs have never had a pogrom."

For those who don't know the word, a pogrom is a sort of large-scale lynching. A mob would be whipped into a frenzy against the Jews and then would storm into the Jewish quarter of the town and slaughter, rape, and pillage until they ran out of victims or became exhausted.

At least the Spanish Inquisition used legal process to kill Jews. In northern and eastern Europe the bloody work was done by volunteers. But it is not true that there were no Muslim pogroms against Jews.

In April 1920, five Jews died and 211 were wounded in a pogrom committed by Arabs in Jerusalem. Ninety Jews died in a pogrom the following year, and in 1929, 133 Jews were killed in Palestine by Arabs.

And the pogroms worked. The British government (which ruled the "protectorate" of Palestine in those days) was so horrified by this terrorism that it clamped down on Jewish immigration and made it much harder for Jews to enter Canaan legally.

In other words, terrorism directed against Jews in Canaan effected a change in the public policy of a Western government in favor of the terrorists and against the Jews.

Kind of makes Arafat's strategy look sensible, doesn't it? History is with him. Indeed, history is repeating itself.