I was in Simele, northern Iraq, last month, where the forerunners of ISIS cut the throats of up to 3,000 men, women and children in 1933. No memorial has ever been erected to these Assyrian Christians and the site of their bloody end is shamefully littered with rubbish. Historians are uncertain whether their corpses were taken away to a mass grave, but you can still see fragments of bone protruding from the broken walls of what was once a police station. At the time, the British authorities rejected calls for an international inquiry into the killings, arguing cravenly that it might lead to further massacres of Christians. They did not support calls to punish the offenders as they had become national heroes. The Simele genocide of 1933 was preceded by demonstrations in Mosul, where frenzied mobs decorated the city with melons pierced with daggers, symbolising the heads of murdered Assyrians. Even Iraq’s Crown Prince came to encourage the blood letting. Fast forward to Mosul 2014. This is when ISIS took Mosul, daubing the homes of Christians with the letter N (for Nazarene) in red. Refusal to convert or yield to extortion led to confiscation, forced conversion, exile or worse. I met two men whose families fled from Mosul and another whose home was burnt down in Sinjar. No one from the international community or the governments in Baghdad or Erbil has ever asked to meet them or take their statements. Yet we in the West are endlessly being told that we are “collecting evidence” and that perpetrators will be brought to justice. Our generation has done little better than the British authorities of 1933. No wonder it happened all over again.