SORRY to return to the subject of appeasement so soon, but there’s a lot of it about. How scandalous it was to return the convicted Lockerbie bomber to Libya on allegedly compassionate grounds.

He was said to have but weeks to live. He has lasted more than a year and, predictably, Colonel Gadaffi and a great slice of the Libyan population are celebrating him as a hero and gloating at our weakness and gullibility.

Iran has begun officially to enrich uranium.

Unofficially – and illegally, of course – they have been trying this for years at almost invulnerable sites in the high mountains.

The Iranian leadership claims that its nuclear programme is quite innocent and solely for the production of electricity.

This reminds me of Hitler’s claim in the Thirties when he was accused by Britain and France of building up a modern air force. He said he was only making gliders for civilian flying displays. Actually, he was turning out fighters and bombers by the thousand.

It was appeasement in the Thirties which caused the Second World War. There were numerous occasions when Hitler could have been stopped: when he entered the Rhineland with just a ceremonial battalion while 20 miles away 100,000 French troops did nothing; at the Austrian Anschluss; and again in 1938 when the British and French governments broke promises so that Czechoslovakia was overrun by the Nazi war machine.

After the war, at the Nuremburg trials, distinguished German generals such as Jodl confessed they could hardly believe Hitler was getting away with his Thirties’ incursions.

They expected the West to move in any minute and, as Jodl himself said: “That would have been the end of the Third Reich.”

In the mid-Thirties the British ambassador in Berlin sent reports of how Hitler’s stormtroopers were beating up dissidents in the streets by the thousand and that tens of thousands more were disappearing into the new concentration camps. Our Prime Minister, Chamberlain, told the Cabinet the ambassador’s talk was upsetting Hitler. So he was sacked and replaced by Henderson, a Nazi sympathiser. The appeaser believes that if he feeds the man-eating crocodile he will not be eaten. Wrong: he will only be eaten last.

When we appease militant Islamists, they despise us and are encouraged to further aggression by our perceived cowardice. Since the mid-Nineties the West has been challenged by a worldwide Islamist jihad and because, apart from fighting the wrong wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, we do nothing but appease our enemies, they get more daring in their outrages and daily more contemptuous of us.

The Islamists are in so many places: Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Sudan, Indonesia and in Iran. Most dangerously for us, they are among us in British towns and cities. They are here in such numbers and they go about their terrorist plotting with such impunity that journalist and author Melanie Phillips has described London as “Londonistan”.

Why do our authorities refuse to close mosques where the preachers of hate ascend their pulpits every week and enthuse impressionable and disaffected youth? Why are those known to support and encourage terrorism not expelled? It is long past the time for strong action. Do not think there will be a long lead-in time to a conflagration in comparison to which Hitler’s Blitzkrieg was a stroll in the park. Time is running out.

■ Peter Mullen is Rector of St Michael’s, Cornhill, in the City of London, and Chaplain to the Stock Exchange.