Western Christians are not helping their persecuted brothers and sisters

As Christmas Day breaks over Maaloula, one of the last few villages which still speaks the language of Christ, Islamist fighters will patrol the streets. Whether the nuns of its ancient convent are safe depends on who you believe, President Assad or Al Qaeda. The local shrine of St Thecla was built in the cleft of a miraculous rock: there’s a grim irony in the knowledge that the nuns of St Thecla will spend Christmas Day caught between a rock and a very hard place.

That’s why Saturday’s intervention by the shadow foreign secretary, Douglas Alexander, is important. Alexander, like the Prince of Wales, wants the UK to do more to defend the rights of Christians abroad. In a swipe at his old colleague, Alastair Campbell, he diagnoses Western politicians’ reluctance to defend Christianity’s place in the world: ‘perhaps through a misplaced sense of political correctness, or some sense of embarrassment at “doing God” in an age when secularism is more common’.