Jewish Holocaust survivor saves Christian refugees

Publisher Lord Weidenfeld, who is Jewish, is spending a fair portion of his fortune rescuing Christian refugees from ISIS. Born in Vienna, he was fed and clothed and helped to reach Britain to escape the Nazis shortly before the Second World War by Quakers and Plymouth Brethren. "I had a debt to repay," he said.

"The primary objective," he told the Times, "is to bring the Christians to safe havens. ISIS is unprecedented in its primitive savagery compared with the more sophisticated Nazis. When it comes to pure lust for horror and sadism, they are unprecedented."

A chartered plane has already flown 150 Syrian Christians to a new life in Poland. They will be supported with living costs until they are settled. With the help of other Jewish philanthropists, Lord Weidenfeld, who is 96, hopes to have up to 2,000 Christians airlifted from war zones in the next 12 to 18 months.

Lord Weidenfeld has been criticised in certain quarters for rescuing Christians and not Muslims. To ensure Britain is taking genuine refugees and not economic migrants purely seeking a better life, Prime Minister David Cameron is taking refugees direct from refugee camps, but, in common with the UN and the EU, without reference to their religion. Christians often do not go to refugee camps for fear of intimidation by the Muslim majority, but prefer to congregate in church halls, meaning they would otherwise again miss out.