I encourage everyone who reads this, and who is angry about what is being done to Christians (and for that matter all non-Muslims) throughout dar al Islam, to go to the website of the Barnabas Fund and check out their current campaign, 'Proclaim Freedom'.

Launched in March, it is gathering signatures for petitions which will at the end of the year be formally presented - by sympathetic politicians who have agreed to speak to same when tabling them - to the governing bodies of the major western democracies. , e.g. the UK, Australia, Canada, the United States.

One can obtain copies of the petition by contacting the Barnabas Fund branch in one's country; and then one can go round one's parish church, or one's friends and family and colleagues, and gather signatures, in support of the call to our elected representatives to do much more to promote religious liberty, particularly for religious minorities - most notably, the Christian minorities in heavily Islamic lands such as Pakistan, Egypt, and today Syria - suffering persecution, discrimination and advantage.  Barnabas is also encouraging those who sign the petition to write personally - on paper, not by email - to their elected representatives, discussing the same topic.

This is about consciousness-raising: making sure that none of our politicians can pretend they do not know and have not been told about the sufferings of people such as the Syrian Christians or the Copts.

It follows on from a previous petitiion and letter writing campaign that sought to inform our politicians and governing bodies about the law of apostasy in Islam, so that they could not pretend they didn't know that in Islamic countries and communities those who leave Islam are harassed, attacked, and not infrequently killed.

The aim is to prod our as-yet-majority-nonMuslim nations, our governments that are still relatively free, to apply at least some pressure to and inflict Consequences on those countries - nearly all of  them Muslim though there are a few non-Muslim offenders e.g. North Korea - that are actively persecuting Christians (and in the case of Islamic lands, persecuting all other non-Muslims as well) or are winking at / passively conniving in such brutality and violations of human rights.

So far, by end May, Barnabas had 14,750 signatures.  They need a LOT more; preferably, across the free world, hundreds of thousands.  And preferably, each signature should be backed up by a short, sharp individual letter sent to a head of state and to an elected representative.