eChurch Blog

The following is a cross-post by Medusa of CIFWatch:

I have written before here about the persecution of Coptic Christians by Muslims in Egypt, and we have been hearing more of late about the threats posed to other Christian communities throughout the Muslim/Arab world.  It would seem that Muslim mobs of Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Ethiopia and elsewhere – possibly whipped up by sermons during Friday prayers – are bent upon realising their threats to the “Sunday people.”  Could it be that, having all but disposed of the “Saturday people” among them, there is no “other” upon which to vent their misplaced rage?

In Egypt, for example, amid the delirious headiness of the revolution they envisage, mobs attacked a Coptic church in the village of Soul, about 30 km from Cairo.  They also vented their rage on Coptic homes and attacked and killed two Coptic families in the village of Sharona near Maghagha, Minya province. Their excuse for the latter was the usual one – a rumour about a liaison between a Christian man and a Muslim woman was enough to ignite the hate fest which subsequently followed.  From the account of the incident, this was no minor flare-up – a mob of 4,000 attacked and set fire to the church.  The Coptic leaders attributed the latter attack on “Islamists” who had taken advantage of the mayhem in Egypt.  We should remember that they had to couch their statement carefully.  They have the status of  dhimmis in Egypt, which has a constitution based on sharia law, and as such cannot rely upon the police to protect them.

It must seem to the Copts of Egypt and indeed all Christians in Muslim countries that hell has descended upon them, and yet compared to the obsessive coverage of Israel at the Guardian, discussion there of the Copts’ plight barely registers – a glaring hypocrisy which was recently exposed by Nick Cohen.

True, there have been some articles, including one by Khaled Dhiab, but most if not all of them however, in true Guardian fashion, fail to address the elephant in the room, the principal driver of the Muslim animus against Christians and Jews – ie the Arab/Muslim tendency to divide the world into Muslim and Other and to view that Other as the eternal enemy.   Islamists personify this mindset and in many Arab countries increasing numbers of attacks on Christians are linked to Islamists.  Such behaviour seems to be all of a piece with a pronouncement from a Salafi-Palestinian Jihadi group leader in Gaza, that it is permissible to kill Jewish and Christian civilians in jihad, since they are ‘fundamentally not innocent’.

One of the more informative CiF articles was written by Amira Nowaira, and entitled “The Slow Death of Tolerance in Egypt”, written on 5^th January, the sub-heading of which refers to the threat from the spate of anti-Christian violence to Alexandria’s “long history of co-existence”.  She makes a plausible enough case for such co-existence, from own experience, but given the Egyptian state’s attitude to the dhimmi population of Christians and Jews and the ease with which the hate mobs can be whipped up and turned loose against them, her picture is an overly rosy one.

Did the sort of tolerance she describes ever exist as a rule in Egypt?  Could it be depended upon to endure without incident?  I have referred above to the dhimmi status of Christians and Jews in Muslim countries.  Bat Ye’or’s[i] scholarly exegesis of Jewish experience under Islamic rule shows Muslim “tolerance” to have a very different connotation to that implied by Nowaira.   Jews and Christians were second class citizens, always at the mercy of their Muslim masters.  They had few rights in law then and Egyptian Copts have only nominal “rights” now.  If their experiences and those of Christians in other Muslim countries offer us little else, they show us that nothing has changed for them and that they still are very vulnerable indeed to Muslim violence.

However, I suspect that Guardian readers will have to wait a very long time before someone of Nick Cohen’s stature and intelligence is provided a platform to comment on this increasingly dangerous phenomenon.

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Tags: Christian Persecution, Media

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 9th, 2011 at 10:33 am and is filed under Webmaster's Ramblings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.