Guardian: The massacre in churches in Sri Lanka forms part of a global pattern of religious persecution and hostility. To target Christian churches on their holiest day of the year is not only an attempt to kill as many families as possible, but also to maximise the shock and demoralising effect of the attack, a tactic familiar from the sectarian wars in Iraq. If this atrocity was perpetrated by jihadis, as seems likely, it is also an attempt to bring about a clash of civilisations.

This is not the pattern of most religiously inspired murder, not least because it is an assault by a minority on a larger population. Usually, persecution is carried out against minorities: Christians are persecuted to a greater or lesser degree across much of the Muslim world, from Sudan to Pakistan, as are atheists. Christians and Muslims are attacked in India. Some of the most savage persecution is directed at small and isolated groups. In that light, the Yazidi minority of Iraq are probably the worst persecuted people in the world, at the hands of Islamic State, which systematically murdered, raped and enslaved them as part of a religiously motivated genocide. Christians and Muslim minorities are brutally repressed by atheists in China, where up to a million and a half people may have been herded into “re-education” camps, and by Buddhists in Myanmar; the Ahmadiyya sect is persecuted by other Muslims in Pakistan.

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