Before I say anything else, in response to:

to raise this as an indictment of the continuation of a compassionate interest in those who are our spiritual brothers is quite misplaced

I would like to say that I only have the greatest respect for the compassionate interest of people who care about persecution. I presented my argument in a way that was not respectful of your strong feelings in this area, and for that I apologise.

When I said that:

Any attempt on the part of westerners to prevent persecution smacks of the cultural if not actual imperialism that most of these countries have suffered.

What I meant is that this is the way that they take it, not what I think about it. Politically, it is how they take it that is the important issue and that determines how effective the action is in the long term.

The issue I am trying to raise is the methods that we seek to use and to emphasise our own guilt in the current persecution. It is this guilt, if nothing else, that should motivate us do something about the persecution, but in a way that does not demonise the persecutors (I’m not suggesting that you do this), and that maybe goes some way towards apologising or making up for our past wrong doing. Until we accept our own guilt, I fear that our attempts at helping will only worsen the situation.

You said:

I will confess that I find myself staggered by the complacency towards fellow believers in parts of the world where the exercise of their faith entails a threat to their lives…
it is the manner in which the argument is packaged and presented as a fate accomplis with which I primarily take issue.

I have lived in an Islamic country, 50 miles away from a church that was boarded up and burned, so I don’t think my attitude is due to complacency, but I’m afraid that I do regard persecution as the inevitable result of many factors. This doesn’t mean that we are let off the hook, and I would like to discuss what our reaction should be.

To stop persecution we can either bring pressure on the persecutors to stop or we can remove the factors that are causing it.

Can we use coercive or political techniques to prevent the persecution?

If we (as the church) want to prevent persecution of people then the first place progress needs to be made is in our own back yards. When we have been so guilty of offending, and continue to be guilty of offending, we have no power to stop others doing the same offending. This is a spiritual law that is discussed in the Bible, even apart from the political reality that our attempts to protect people will be interpreted in the light of our previous and accompanying actions.

This does not mean that the groups trying to do something about persecution of Christians should stop, not at all. But the rest of the church needs gets its act together and do something about our guilt in this matter. Until we deal with the log in our own eyes we are in fact working against those groups trying to prevent the persecution of Christians.

So what are our remaining options …