Pope Francis called the murder of an 86-year-old Catholic priest while saying Mass in a suburb of Rouen this week “an act of absurd violence”. Why “absurd”? Others speaking for the Catholic Church have described the killers of Fr Jacques Hamel as “psychopathic” or “madmen”. They seem not to want to talk about the motive for the violence as stated by the killers themselves – their Muslim faith.

It is true that psychopaths quite often enlist God, and that young men who go round killing people usually have disturbed personal lives. But when, day after day, in three or four continents, many people commit extreme violence in the name of Islam, this cannot be accounted for by mental illness alone. In parts of the Middle East, near where the founder of Christianity lived and died, the murder of priests and other Christians by Muslims is systematic. The word “absurd” does not describe it.

It does not fit here in Europe either. As so often, it was the Jews who suffered first. Since 1994, when Islamist bombers attacked Balfour House, a Jewish community centre in London, the Community Security Trust, a Jewish charitable organisation, has offered protection to all Jewish buildings which request it.