Late last year, the Shadow Foreign Secretary, Douglas Alexander, wrote an article highlighting his concern about the persecution of Christians in the Middle East. Asked about it a few weeks later, he summed up the difficulty at the heart of Western indifference: “If I’m honest, I was very surprised when I contemplated writing this article how many people cautioned me against writing it, and said ‘Don’t do that, politicians don’t do God, it’ll be misunderstood, it’s the wrong thing to do’.”I was reminded of this remark last month when the UN secretary general called events in Mosul a “likely crime against humanity”. On the same day, a Foreign Office minister would not specifically name or condemn what was taking place in Mos