Come Polling Day We Will Not Forgive Our Leaders for Their Silence Over Egypt’s Christians

Sticking up for Christians is not something Britain’s ruling Coalition does
 

Our Government needs to face up to the persecution of Christians abroad (PA)

From The Catholic Herald (UK)

By Father Alexander Lucie-Smith

It is nice to know that the US government has condemned the recent attack by gunmen on a wedding party coming out of a Coptic Church in Egypt. The attack in question took place last Sunday; two of the four people killed were little girls. The attack was reported by the BBC though there seems to have been little reporting of it elsewhere in the print media.

Everyone knows, or ought to know, that Christians in the Middle East are under siege right now. Some, such as our own government here in Britain, choose to ignore this, and there has been no statement from the Foreign Office on this matter. Christians abroad are simply not on our government’s radar. (Though the FCO did have this to say, back in December 2011. But that was almost two years ago.) Sticking up for Christians is not something the Coalition does, one assumes because the idea of Christians as an endangered species has little traction in the current cultural climate: Mr Cameron would much rather talk about species endangered by climate change. 

The Americans will condemn this attack and others like it, as they are Egypt’s chief allies and major donors of much needed aid. Their condemnation will be read in Cairo, perhaps, as a coded warning. Please make sure you protect your Christians better, for America cannot finance and protect an anti-Christian regime in Egypt. (It can do so in Saudi Arabia, but that is another matter.) The American government also has to heed its powerful Christian, particularly evangelical, lobby. It was this lobby that secured American interest in favour of South Sudan in its long struggle to break away from Sudan, and it may well have been American interest in the case that proved decisive in that decades-long conflict. Which all goes to show that when Christian opinion is organised, it can make a difference in foreign policy. After all, Christians in America have votes, lots of them.

Christians in Britain have votes too. While we are nowhere near as vocal or well-organised as the Christians of America, the Christians of Britain are its largest single affinity, and more likely to vote than others simply because they are Christian. We need to make it clear to our elected representatives that come polling day we will not forgive them for their silence on Egypt, or indeed the other places where Christians are victimised. 


Father Alexander Lucie-Smith is a Catholic priest and a doctor of moral theology. On Twitter he is @ALucieSmith  

Egyptian Christian Leader: 'Shame on Obama If He Is A Christian'

From CBN News

An Egyptian Christian leader is calling out President Barack Obama and his administration for not doing enough in face of intense persecution against the Church by the Muslim Brotherhood.

Following the recent barrage of church burnings, Father Rafic Greiche, the chief spokesman for the Catholic Church in Egypt, criticized President Obama for not speaking out against the worst violence against Egyptian Christians in nearly 700 years.

"President Obama when he made a speech he just touched on the burning churches instead of telling the Muslim Brotherhood that they are terrorists and they are making terror on Egypt," Greiche said. "He did not speak loud for this and shame on him if he is a Christian that he does not speak out loud."

"The spokesman of the White House who…was asked 'What is the red line for the Christians in Egypt?' he mocked and said, 'I didn't bring my red pen," he noted.

"So I think it was a mockery and not at its place and really shame on him also," he said.

Radical Islamists, many members of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, attacked at least 60 churches, Christian businesses, and institutions in the days following the crackdown against supporters of ousted President Mohammed Morsi.

"Obama does not appear to understand the situation," Greiche told AsiaNews. "In his speech he didn't even so much as mention all the churches and Christian buildings being burnt down by the Muslim Brotherhood."

"This must absolutely be made clear: the Muslim Brothers are terrorists and are tied to groups belonging to al Qaeda and to the Salafites," he said. "The history of the Muslim Brotherhood, even since their foundation, has been a history of 85 years of bloodshed."

A Christian Catastrophe

Islamist ‘cleansing’ in Mideast

From New York Post
By Ralph Peters 
 

Islamist terrorists and fanatics are methodically exterminating the 2,000-year-old Christian civilization of the Middle East through oppression, threats, appropriations and deadly violence.

Our media ignore the intensifying savagery against Christians in Muslim Brotherhood-controlled Egypt. Unconfirmed reports assert that, last month, Muslim Brothers dragged Christian protesters to a mosque and tortured them — but our reporters won’t look into an Islamist Abu Ghraib.

For a century and a half, the varied strands of Middle East Christianity have faced increasingly fierce pogroms and, for the Armenians, outright genocide. But with the rise of Wahhabi and Salafist terror, the long, slow-motion Holocaust accelerated.

Western liberals romanticize barbaric cultures but have no interest in the destruction — before their averted eyes — of a great and brilliant religious civilization. It’s as if they accept the Islamist creed that Christians don’t belong in the realms of Islam.

But the Middle East was more than just Christianity’s birthplace. The faith we know matured in the Middle East and North Africa, from Ephesus and Antioch to Alexandria and beyond. St. Augustine, the most influential church father after St. Paul, was a North African.

Rome was a latecomer to Christian authority. Through the Middle Ages, substantially more Christians lived east of Constantinople (now Istanbul) than in Europe, the faith’s backwater, whose northern reaches had yet to be evangelized.

Christianity’s greatest thinkers, greatest monuments and greatest triumphs for its first 1,000 years rose in the Middle East. Even the Muslim conquest and relative servitude could not dislodge Christianity. In the worst of times, Christianity turned the other cheek and endured. Some Christians flourished.

Today, the end is in sight.

In Iraq, cities such as Mosul and Saddam’s hometown, Tikrit, were once vital centers of Christianity. But the country’s Christian population, estimated at up to 2 million a decade ago, has fallen by half — perhaps by three-quarters. 

Over 2 million Christians in Syria dread Islamist terror and religious cleansing so much, they lean toward the vicious Assad regime, which at least shielded minorities. Those who can, flee the country.

Christians were early supporters of Arab nationalism. One of the fiercest Palestinian leaders, George Habash, was a Christian, as was the wife of Yasser Arafat. Their thanks? Two-thirds of the West Bank’s and more of Gaza’s Christians have been driven out. They’re now a small minority even in Bethlehem (a situation ignored by our visiting president).

Egypt has the region’s largest remaining Christian population, at least 10 million Copts. With rare exceptions, they’ve long been confined to squalid quarters and treated as third-class citizens. Now the Salafist fanatics have been unleashed. The nation’s Muslim Brotherhood rulers could put a stop to anti-Christian violence, but appear willing to let the Salafists do the dirty work for them. They’re playing bad cop, not-so-bad cop.

And we’ll send the regime at least a billion dollars this year — with no stipulations or conditions except that military-related funds must purchase US-made or US-licensed equipment. With Egypt’s economy in desperate straits and the Brotherhood’s popularity fading, we’re propping up religious-cleansing bigots.

Christians in Iran? Gone. Turkey? Almost gone. Saudi Arabia? The once-thriving Christian and Jewish populations of Mecca and Medina were finished off centuries ago.

And in Lebanon, the only Middle East country that until recently had a Christian majority, Christian rights have been so threatened by Sunni fanaticism that some Christians have reached out to Shia Hezbollah in their desperate hunt for allies. 

Far to the east, in Pakistan, Christians face trumped-up charges of insulting Islam or rape, beatings, murder and church bombings. And we still pour billions into Pakistan.

It’s the end of a world as we know it.

If Islam is a “religion of peace,” it’s time to show the evidence to the endangered Christians of the Middle East.

Of course, not all Christians are angels, nor are all Muslims demons. Most humans of any faith just want to get through the day. And some Christians have collaborated with odious Baathist regimes (usually, to ensure their community’s survival). Nor are most Muslims active supporters of the religious cleansing of Christians from their shared homelands.

But disappointingly few Muslims actively defend religious minorities. It’s not unlike Nazi Germany, where most Germans didn’t want to murder Jews, but were complicit through their silence.

If a Michigan mosque is defaced with graffiti, it makes national news and the Justice Department views it as a hate crime. It’s time for our government and media to apply the same standard abroad on behalf of Christians. 

Congressman Frank Wolf: Coptic Christians Fear for Their Future in Morsi's Egypt

Republican congressman Frank Wolf (R-Va.) who has recently returned from a Middle East visit has warned of eroding U.S. credibility in the region, especially in Egypt, because of the Obama administration's support to the Muslim Brotherhood.

Congressman Frank R. Wolf
—U.S. House of Representatives

Wolf also said that U.S. aid to Egypt should be "conditioned" on how the current regime of President Morsi treats its Christian minority.

According to the republican congressman, the Copts and other Christians he met during his visit believe the Obama administration supports Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood he hails from, regardless of the persecution Christians continue to suffer.

Wolf says that many churches have been desecrated, and no permits to build new churches have been granted since the January 2011 uprising.

Read more at The Christian Post >>

Two Children to be Tried for Insulting Islam in Egypt as Anti-Christian Hostility Escalates

Coptic Christians Persecuted in Egypt

Among files on arrested converts from Islam, kidnapped Christian girls and beaten monks piling up on the desk of a noted lawyer in Egypt, on top is the case of two boys about to be tried for allegedly showing contempt of Islam.

Attorney Karam Gabriel said anti-Christian hostilities in the restive country are getting worse as the two boys are to be tried in a court in Beni Suef – the same city where a mother and her seven children were convicted last month for reconverting to Christianity – for showing "contempt to Islamic religion and insulting the Koran."

The accusation against Nabil Naji Rizq and Mina Atallah (identified in some press reports as Mina Nadi Faraj), who were 10 and 9 years old respectively at the time of their arrest in late September, of insulting the Koran made headlines throughout the country after a man saw them playing in rubbish that he claimed included pages from the Koran. Accusing them of tearing pages of Islam's holy book – a later version of the story had them allegedly urinating on it – he filed a report that led to the arrest of the two children. They were released in early October.

Read more at The Christian Post >>

The Persecution Of Christians In Morsi’s Egypt Is Now Serious. So, Will Obama Use His Billion Dollar Subsidy In Their Defense? Don’t Hold Your Breath

Obama’s personal history may explain why

From The Catholic Herald (UK)
By William Oddie

A man weeps over the coffin of a Copt killed in clashes in Cairo last year (AP)

I open by drawing your attention to the shocking story (one among an increasing number of examples of the growing oppression of Coptic Christians under Egypt’s brand-new Islamist dictatorship) of Nadia Mohamed Ali, who was brought up as a Christian, and converted to Islam when she married a Muslim, 23 years ago. He later died, and his widow decided to return to her Christian faith, together with her children. She registered as such under the Mubarak regime, and applied for and received new identity cards containing this information, between 2004 and 2006. When her re-conversion to her old faith emerged under the Morsi regime, Nadia was sentenced to fifteen years in prison: so too were her seven children; even the clerks who processed the identity cards were imprisoned.

Egyptian Court Sentences Christian Family to 15 Years for Converting from Islam

"The United States will continue to be a friend and partner to Egypt.  We stand ready to provide whatever assistance is necessary — and asked for — to pursue a credible transition to a democracy.  I’m also confident that the same ingenuity and entrepreneurial spirit that the young people of Egypt have shown in recent days can be harnessed to create new opportunity — jobs and businesses that allow the extraordinary potential of this generation to take flight.  And I know that a democratic Egypt can advance its role of responsible leadership not only in the region but around the world."

 Barack Hussein Obama

Today's headline about an Egyptian woman and her seven children being sentenced to 15 years for converting from Islam falls on the Feast Day of Saint Anthony of Egypt, the father of monks, whose life of oblation, fasting and prayer in the desert fortified him with a profound sense of Christian realism.  His life is a reminder that this world is not our home; instead we are on a journey, confronting great evil along the way.  It is an evil which can no longer be viewed as foreign or in the past.  It touches us every day.  It resides in the highest places, it appeals to our vanity, and it seeks our destruction.  But it is fleeting and can be withstood and overcome, as it was by Saint Anthony of Egypt,  only with Christ in whom "we live and move and have our being."

In the past Americans would look to our government to express our collective outrage at injustice and the persecution of Christians around the world.  Perhaps it is better, through silence and prayer, that we recognize, as did the third century saint, our only sure path and true hope:

"Let it be your supreme and common purpose not to grow weary in the work you have begun, and in time of trial and affliction not to lose courage and say: Oh, how long already have we been mortifying ourselves! Rather, we should daily begin anew and constantly increase our fervor. For man's whole life is short when measured against the time to come, so short, in fact, that it is as nothing in comparison with eternity. . . . Therefore, my children, let us persevere in our acts of asceticism. And that we may not become weary and disheartened, it is good to meditate on the words of the apostle: 'I die daily.' If we live with the picture of death always before our eyes, we will not sin. The apostle's words tell us that we should so awaken in the morning as though we would not live to evening, and so fall asleep as if there were to be no awakening. For our life is by nature uncertain and is daily meted out to us by Providence. If we are convinced of this and live each day as the apostle suggests, then we will not fall into sin; no desire will enslave us, no anger move us, no treasure bind us to earth; we will await death with unfettered hearts."

Saint Anthony of Egypt

St. Peter's Abbey, Solesmes: 'Christus Vincit! Christus Regnat! Christus Imperat!

This video is dedicated to and in solidarity with the martyred and persecuted Coptic Christians of Egypt.

  

This 11th century monastic chant is based on 8th century Carolingian Acclamations.

The Benedictine Abbey of Solesmes is a metaphor of the Christian life.  Founded in 1010, it suffered considerably during the Hundred Years' War and was dissolved during the French Revolution.  In 1833 it was reborn in response to a vision.  By 1837 it had not only received Papal approval, it was elevated to the rank of abbey and made head of a restored French Benedictine Congregation.  Between 1901 and 1922 it was closed several times and the monks were driven into exile in England by oppressive, secular French governments.  Yet the community of monks endured those trials and the hardships of two World Wars. They have since spawned new monastic communities throughout the world. St. Peter's Abbey  endures today where it began in 1010, as a Benedictine Abbey in Solesmes, France.

Where the cross is, there also is the Resurrection.

Egyptian Government Complicit in Church Burnings

The Egyptian government, complicit in the burning of Christian churches in that country, received over $1.5 billion from the Obama administration last year.

From Catholic World News

The spokesman for the Catholic Church has charged that Egyptian government officials have been complicit in the burning of churches.

“The governor gave the green light for the fundamentalists to burn the church near Aswan,” said Father Rafic Greiche. “It’s the fourth time in recent months that a church has been burnt in this way by Islamists.”

Referring to the recent violence against peaceful Coptic Christian protestors, Father Greiche said that “the army and the police … used vagabonds, a rabble force of street fighters, to attack the demonstrators.”

“The army and the police are confronting the Copts. This is the problem. It is not a Christian-Muslim problem anymore.”

“People, not just Christians but many Muslims, too, are frightened for the future of our country,” he added.

Source(s): these links will take you to other sites, in a new window.

• Christian demonstrators killed in Egypt (Aid to the Church in Need)

• Egypt: police open fire on Coptic Christian protestors; dozens slain (CWN, 10/10)

• Coptic Catholic Church (CNEWA)

3 Churches Attacked in Egypt; 12 Dead, over 200 Injured

From Catholic World News

Firefighters extinguish a blaze at a church following clashes between Muslims and Christians in Cairo, Egypt on May 8, 2011.

Armed with guns and Molotov cocktails, thousands of Muslims attacked Coptic churches and neighborhoods in a Cairo, provoking sectarian violence that led to at least 12 deaths and 232 injuries. Several news reports identified the attackers as members of the Islamic Salafi movement.

The attacks followed reports that a Christian woman who had converted to Islam had been kidnapped and was being tortured at St. Mina Church in the Cairo suburb of Imbaba. Later, two other churches in the suburb were attacked. 

“We have no law or security, we are in a jungle,” said Coptic Orthodox Bishop Anba Theodosius of Giza. “We are in a state of chaos.” 

Source(s): these links will take you to other sites, in a new window.

• Sectarian strife rips Cairo (AP)
• Muslims Attack Christians in Egypt, 12 Killed, 232 Injured (AINA)
• Egyptian Copts, reeling from violence, want protection (CNN)
• Salafi (Wikipedia)

'Six Shot Dead' in Egyptian Religious Clashes

Egyptian Coptic Christians demonstrate outside the state radio and television building in central Cairo

From The Age (AU)

Six Coptic Christians were shot dead and at least 45 were injured in religious clashes with Muslims in the Egyptian capital, a Coptic priest told AFP on Wednesday.

"We have at the clinic the bodies of six Copts, all of them shot," local priest Samann Ibrahim told AFP.

The clashes between Christians and Muslims erupted in the poor working class district of Moqattam late Tuesday after at least 1,000 Christians gathered there to protest the burning of a church last week.

Who Will Defend Mideast Christians?

From USA Today

By Joseph Bottum

Perhaps the situation in Egypt will resolve itself peacefully. Or perhaps we'll see a long stretch of public unrest before the nation finally stumbles its way into a new form of stable government. But there's one easy prediction to make: Whatever happens, Egypt's Coptic Christians are going to be hurt, unless the United States makes a major diplomatic effort to help them.

About 10% of the Egyptian population (and declining, down more than half over the past century), these people have suffered discrimination under 30 years of rule by the now-embattled president, Hosni Mubarak. And they've seen that discrimination ratcheted up into open persecution during the current unrest, which began with a car bomb in Alexandria killing 21 at a Coptic church on Jan. 1 and continued through the massacre of 11 Christians in the village of Sharona on Jan. 30.

So why should they expect improvement from a new government? Particularly one in which the radical Muslim Brotherhood is certain to play a major role? The Copts are under the screw, and somehow, every time modern Egyptian history makes a turn, it ends up biting down harder on the nation's religious minorities.

European Parliament Adopts Resolution Condemning Attacks Against Christians

From Vatican Radio

Members of the European Parliament today adopted a resolution condemning persecution and discrimination based on religion. In particular MEP’s condemned attacks against Christians in countries including Egypt, and Iraq.

They also called for a strategy to enforce the human right to freedom of religion, including a list of measures against states who knowingly fail to protect religious denominations.
Lydia O’Kane spoke to MEP Mario Mauro, who is head of the delegation of the EPP group in the European parliament.

He says there is now a growing awareness in Europe of the plight of Christians in many countries.

“I think we are in a very significant moment in the history of the European institutions, because for the first time we declared this kind of judgement, the fact that there exists the problem of persecution of Christians.”

MEP’s also want the forthcoming External Affairs Council of 31 January 2011 to discuss the persecution of Christians and respect for religious freedom. 

Listen to Mario Mauro's interview with Lydia O'Kane. 

The Alexandria Church Bombing: The Plot Thickens

From Gates of Vienna

By Baron Bodissey

On New Year’s Eve a car bomb exploded outside a Coptic church in Alexandria, Egypt. 21 people were killed, and more than 100 were injured. All of the dead were Christians, as were all but a few of the injured.

President Hosni Mubarak was quick to condemn the “attack against Muslims and Christians”, a characterization of the event that was echoed by President Obama. The sophistication and scope of the attack were downplayed, with the Egyptian government insisting that a lone suicide bomber was responsible, rather than a remotely-detonated car bomb. When the Pope condemned the attack, the imam of Al-Azhar University accused him of interfering in Egypt’s internal affairs.

Today brought two new developments: evidence that there was careful advanced co-ordination for the blast, and reports by witnesses that the security detachment guarding the church abruptly departed about an hour before the bomb exploded.