Mick Hartley

A Times editorial reminds us of the horrors we ignore:

This week, more than 40 churchgoers were killed by the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), an affiliate of the murderous death cult Islamic State, as they maintained a nocturnal vigil at a church in Komanda, a rural town in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Nine of the dead were children; the Catholic community’s shops were burnt and looted. Christian worshippers in remote areas, where state security is non-existent, are easy prey for Islamists. In February the ADF beheaded 70 Christians in a church in the neighbouring province of North Kivu.

These acts of religious hatred are increasingly common in sub-Saharan Africa, where Islamist groups are perpetrating heinous crimes with seeming impunity. Last month, Nigeria’s Fulani jihadists — acting like their Congolese counterparts under cover of darkness — set upon a Catholic mission in the village of Yelwata. Armed with rifles and machetes, they killed about 200 people and forced thousands more to flee their homes. “Most of them,” said Terhemba Lormba, a farmer who lost three of his children in the massacre, “were burnt alive.” As the Pope noted in the hours following the attack, to be Christian in a volatile and contested land means being “targeted relentlessly” by sectarian violence.

Such is life for embattled Christians in the nations where their faith is not the default or established religion. In Pakistan, Christians who resist conversion to Islam are regularly beaten and killed, and women and girls raped or forced into marriage. One Christian, Waqas Masih, 22, who worked at a paper mill in the Punjab, ended up in hospital after refusing his employer’s attempts to convert him to Islam.

Even countries that have been historically tolerant of Christians are now witnessing a grim uptick in violence. In Syria last month, Islamic State was blamed for a suicide bomb and gun attack on a Greek Orthodox church in the suburbs of Damascus during a Sunday evening service in which 25 people were killed and 63 wounded. It was the first time the city’s Christian community had been targeted openly since conflict with the Druze in 1860.

Even as church attendances creep up across Europe and North America, the plight of Christians is neither a fashionable nor popular cause for the socially conscious. But westerners owe their solidarity — and western governments their diplomatic might — to these embattled minorities. Church leaders in Britain and abroad must take up the cause, ensuring that these atrocities are not relegated to footnotes in the news agenda.

Not to worry. When Labour have got their Islamophobia agenda sorted we won't have to put up with this kind of depressing read any more.