Mozambique
Sir: It is refreshing to see Father Hastings' report treated with the common sense of your leader (July 21). It has been noticed that many of the allegations have appeared in previous atrocity stories (Orwell points out that in 1914 the Germans were invariably said to be raping nuns on tables in the streets — the tables somehow making it worse); may I add, for the record, that the story of a pregnant woman being carved up to find out the sex of her baby is retailed by Glubb Pasha in his memoirs, according to which the operation was performed by two Israeli soldiers with a broken beer-bottle on an Arab woman. Truly, there is nothing new under the sun.
Significantly, the story about the burning alive of a woman and her unborn baby is even older — it appears in Foxe's 'Book of Martyrs.' The whole article has a Foxe-like tone. It remains to be seen whether we have become less gullible in the last four hundred years.
Andrew Turek
Hertford College, Oxford.
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