Dear Leaders of the United Kingdom:

I offer up three cheers for your prime minister, Theresa May, for her speech during the early hours of June 4, 2017, after yet another horrific Islamic terror attack in London.

But the devastating reality is that the speech was 20 years too late!

For more than 20 years—from the governments of Tony Blair to Gordon Brown to David Cameron—the British government and the British media have acquiesced to the demands of Islamists.

As we say in the southern U.S.: “That horse is now out of the barn.”

With successive British governments submitting to the demands of militant Muslim imams and Muslim investors, Islamists have grown more and more confident that they have instilled enough fear to get whatever they demand.

Would you like some evidence?

1. When a Dutch member of parliament (who is an outspoken critic of Islamists and those who coddle them) flew to Heathrow Airport in London, Islamists demanded that he be stopped and sent back to Holland.

The British government acquiesced.

2. When Islamists began an alleged campaign of violence and harassment in an East London neighborhood, targeting non-Muslims and homosexuals, local officers reportedly downplayed the victims’ cases out of fear of being accused of discrimination.

Again, the British government chose appeasement over justice.

3. When the Islamists demanded that Sharia courts be used to resolve their disputes, including crimes, they initially got one or two courts. Now there are approximately 85 Sharia courts in the U.K.

Thus, when a Muslim man beats his wife or daughter in what he calls an “honor beating,” the British police and courts are helpless if the accused criminal demands to be tried in a Sharia court.

And since honor beating (or honor killing, for that matter) is consistent with Sharia law, the man walks away unpunished while the British government looks the other way.

4. When the outgoing head of the BBC admitted in 2012 that your government was soft on Islamists out of fear of retaliation, the British government refused to change its ways.

5. Even as Islamists elevate their own practices above national law, the British government continues to acquiesce.

The bottom line is: Fear has worked.

Not only has the fear of violence worked—but so has the fear of financial harm.

For example, Qatari investors have invested some 500-600 billion pounds in England, at the same time that Qatar is funding Islamist groups (which they do to protect themselves from those same terrorists). Naturally, when militants make a new demand upon Great Britain, they go to Qatar to have the Qatari investors pressure the British government into accommodation.

So now that your current government has tried to show some backbone in recent months toward Islamist demands and atrocities, the terrorists have responded with another attack.

This attack is the Islamists’ way of saying: “Get back to your acquiescence or else!”

As leaders of the United Kingdom, what will your response be? Will it be: “Message received”? Or will you, once again, turn and walk away?

The above list is just a small sample of the British government’s shameful lack of courage. In reality, it would take a book to enumerate all the threats sent by England’s militant residents for the last 20 years and the subsequent fear-driven responses.

The ignored threats are relevant to this very day—apparently, at least one of the terrorists was a known-extremist who had twice been reported to authorities and had even appeared in a documentary last year, in which he is seen unveiling an Islamic State flag in a London park.

Please understand, it is difficult for me to write about this reality. I grieve deeply over the actions of British authorities and the tragic consequences.

But it is because of those consequences that I cannot look the other way.

A year ago, when London elected a Muslim with Islamist sympathies, I warned on Twitter and Facebook that a day would come when Londoners would regret their choice.

But many of my followers chided me. “They chose hope over fear,” they said.

Well, how is that working out for you now? Is there any hope?

As a Bible-believing Christian, the only hope I see is in the hands of the Christian leaders in England. They need to call for a day of fasting and prayer.

Through humbling themselves before God, they can seek His mercy on the British government and ask Him to give them the spine needed to stay the course outlined in Theresa May’s speech.

Because if they don’t act now, it may be too late.

Dr. Michael Youssef is the founding pastor of the Church of the Apostles in Atlanta, Georgia and the author of over 30 books, including his most recent, “The Barbarians are Here: Preventing the Collapse of Western Civilization in Times of Terror” (Mar. 7, 2017, Worthy Publishers). Find him online at www.ltw.org and follow him on Twitter: @MichaelAYoussef.