FATHER Tom Uzhunnalil has been crucified by Islamic State in Yemen. Nothing unusual about that. Crucifixion is IS’s preferred method of murdering Christians and Fr Tom’s cruel death made the news only because, with barbarous mockery, they did it on Good Friday. Thus one priest’s murder was meant to warn Christians everywhere that they are the targets of the violent Islamic insurgency on three continents.

Indeed, we have ample evidence of the terrorists’ policy which struck new depths of savagery when more than seventy people – mostly women and children – were murdered by the bombers in a park in Lahore on Easter day. A sect of the Taliban immediately announced that they had deliberately targeted those innocent families because they were Christian.

Of course, Christians are not the only people to be murdered by IS and other terrorist groups. They kill Muslims too. But it is becoming plain that what is being perpetrated is ethnic cleansing, genocide of the Christians. The UN has published a report to confirm that this is happening in 50 countries, among them North Korea, Syria, Iraq, Somalia, Nigeria, Mali, Egypt – where Coptic Christians have been almost wiped out – as well as Pakistan and Yemen. Twelve years ago there were 1.5 million Christians in Iraq. Today only a few thousand are left. Mosul in Iraq was captured by IS in 2014 and all the Christians slaughtered or forced to flee. That city was home to one of the oldest Christian communities in the world. Christians are being obliterated throughout the Bible lands. In his Easter sermon the Archbishop of Canterbury said, “Christians are facing elimination in the very regions in which Christian faith began.”

Hamas burn churches in Gaza and the last remaining Christian bookshop in that territory has been razed to the ground and its owner murdered. For centuries there was a thriving Christian presence in Afghanistan. In 2010 only one church there was still standing, and now that has been destroyed as well. Ironically, it is a prominent Jew, the former Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks, who has most vociferously drawn the world’s attention to the scale of these atrocities. He wrote last week: “The ethnic cleansing of Christians throughout the Middle East in particular is one of the crimes against humanity of our time, and I am appalled that there has been little serious international protest.”

Well then, why has there been so little protest? The genocide is proceeding at such a pace and has reached such a pitch that you would think there would be universal outrage – such as there was when thousands of Muslims were murdered by the Serbs in Bosnia between 1992 and 1995. I’m not sure I can give you a full explanation, but I can certainly provide an historical comparison in the policy of appeasement adopted by the western powers towards the Nazis in the 1930s.

In those days, memories of the carnage of the First World War were fresh and there was, understandably, a great dread lest, by our actions, we should provoke a repeat of that calamity. And so we stood back and allowed Hitler to occupy the Rhineland, to effect the Anschluss with Austria and then to invade Czechoslovakia. It was only when Germany attacked Poland that we realised we would soon be obliged to fight a war for our very survival. Yes, appeasement so often seems the best policy. Peace at any price. Actually, it makes war more likely, because it emboldens the aggressor.

If you appease the crocodile, that doesn’t mean he won’t eat you. He will just eat you last.