It’s not long ago since the media began to give us glimpses of the terrible atrocities committed in the Middle East by ISIS. Beheadings and crucifixions – where life is treated as an incredibly cheap commodity. Often we were cautioned beforehand: "We warn our viewers that some people may find some images in this report disturbing." In the case of the ISIS atrocities that is an understatement. The images are not just disturbing they are deeply offensive.

Some reactions have been interesting. I got the impression at times that some folk seem to think this is something that has never ever happened before. Such people should read a little history. I've just finished reading a biography of a Dutch family (‘The century of my father’). The author not only writes about the slaughter that took place on the battlefields of two world wars but also the extermination of Jews in the holocaust and Stalin's annihilation of millions of Russians in the gulags. But it was not only the sobering statistics of millions of casualties that shocked, more so the spelling out of some of the wartime atrocities.

All of that was nothing new for me. Since I had studied European history for Matric I was reasonably familiar with the huge wartime loss of life and the prevalence of war-crimes. What I did read for the first time was that the nation of my birth was not as squeaky clean in these matters as I had assumed. Prior to World War II The Netherlands had a significant colonial empire in the "Dutch East Indies". Geert Mak tells of the unravelling of that colonial empire and that in the process of Dutch attempts to put down the uprising and the movement for independence some horrible atrocities took place. He furthermore relates that successive Dutch governments were in denial about these matters until the evidence became incontrovertible.

I could spell out some of these atrocities (as Mak does) to demonstrate that what ISIS is doing in the Middle East is nothing new. I restrain myself. It's too horrendous to repeat.

The problem is that man's inhumanity to man is pervasive. And even the most "civilised" nations have been guilty of it. Atrocities didn’t end with Nero hanging Christians dipped in tar from poles and set alight to provide some “fun” night-lights for Rome. In Christian England political opponents could be drawn and quartered (remember the final scene in Braveheart where the hero is tied to four horses, one to each limb, and then literally torn apart).

Sadly, man's inhumanity to man is there in the Bible too. It's there in the Biblical record, from the murder of Abel to the slaughter of the infants in Bethlehem and from Pharaoh's drowning of Hebrew boy babies to the cruel execution of Jesus on the cross.

What is particularly sad is when barbaric cruelty is perpetrated by Christians. I don't know how reliable the novelist, James Mitchener, is as an historian, but in his historical novel about South Africa, ‘The Covenant’, he relates an event from the life of Van Riebeek. He portrays this Governor of the fledgling Dutch colony at The Cape as a capable and compassionate Christian leader. Yet he reports that Van Riebeek had devised a particularly cruel way of dealing with renegade Dutchmen who proved incorrigible. They were hoisted to a yard-arm that was common on multi storied buildings to hoist furniture to upper floors. Ropes were tied to both legs to keep them apart and the man was then dropped over a saw-horse that was placed right underneath him. Just thinking about it brings tears to my eyes. It invariably left such a man severely crippled. Reading that story left me with the question: How can a Christian leader do something so incredibly cruel?

Part of the answer is that Van Riebeek was a child of his times. And they were harsh, cruel times. Yet that doesn't exonerate him. I understand why evil people commit atrocities but I do not understand how someone who claims to be a follower of Jesus can treat a creature made in God's image with such cruelty.

All I'm left with is the power of sin that can mistreat a fellow human being that way and then I just want to pray for Jesus to come and put an end to the incredible cruelty in this world - not least the horrible cruelty unleashed by ISIS.

John Westendorp.