Coptic Christians Voicing Frustration with Obama Administration

[BlackTerrel]

While the persecution of a growing Muslim population in Israel gets plenty of attention, the persecution of a shrinking Christian population in Egypt (and many other countries) is all but ignored.

I happen to have a number of Coptic friends and I went to school with one. I guess because they are a peaceful bunch and do not resort to terrorism or violence they are easy to ignore. He says they don't really have the means to fight back because they are truly oppressed. The truly oppressed know that if they started to fight back the retaliation would be swift and ruthless. Kind of like how blacks in the US protested and demanded rights in the 1960's but not in the 1800's - if they had tried it in the 1800's they would have been crushed.

http://www.nysun.com/foreign/coptic-christians-voicing-frustration-with-white/86971/


The leaders of Coptic Christians, whose community is facing growing persecution in Egypt, say they have been unsuccessful in efforts to gain a hearing from the White House or other parts of the Obama administration.

Heightened persecution of Egypt’s 12 million Christians coupled with growing power and prestige of their Coptic Diaspora in America and Australia is leading to new political efforts here. Educated and skilled Egyptian Copts who migrated in large numbers in recent decades are talking to Congress, organizing lobbies, and making other efforts to be heard.

They say they are frustrated by the current administration in Washington, particularly after President Obama’s overture to the Muslim world via a speech at Cairo. In the speech Mr. Obama President apologized for America’s misdeeds to Muslims, stating that he came “to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world.” Coptic leaders say that even while reaching out to Muslims the administration has turned a deaf ear to the pleas Arab Christian minority in the very country where he delivered his apology to Muslims.

“The Obama administration’s benign neglect of Arab Christians, is putting freedoms and human rights in the whole Middle East at risk,” is the way it was put in an interview with the Sun by the president of the U.S. Copts Association, Michael Meunier, who is headquartered in Washington “Friendships with Muslims has been the Obama Administration’s opening theme from his first day in office and in that famed Cairo speech in which he extended a hand to all Muslims in partnership.”

Mr. Meunier added that that the president’s failure to speak as extensively about the persecution of Arab Christians was a departure from American policy and a grave error. “We have no problems with American friendships with Islam and Muslims, but it cannot be accomplished at the expense of our rights as Egyptian Christians and Arab Christians, and as the very lives of our people there are endangered,” Mr. Meunier told the Sun.

One area of complaint by the Copt community is a law banning the repair or construction of churches without a “presidential decree.” The measure, known as the Hamayuni Law, is based on an 1856 Ottoman decree but was rarely enforced in Egypt under the monarchial dynasty overthrown by army officers in 1952.

Indeed, until the coup that put Gamal Abdel Nasser in power in 1952, Christian communities in Egypt — including Catholics, Protestants, Armenians, Greeks and Italians in addition to the Copts — enjoyed a climate of moderate Islam as the country westernized itself.

Because Christianity in Egypt is so ancient, preceding Islam by seven centuries, the country is a repository of multiple centuries-old churches, part of its international cultural heritage. As attractions for tourists, they rival the Pharos heritage. Those churches benefit somewhat as tourist sites, getting a measure of protection by the state. Elsewhere in Egypt, smaller, ordinary churches are burning. Because of the Hamayuni Law, the churches that are attacked or burned down remain gone.

Copts say they are down to 2,524 churches now, down from more than 3,000 churches in the early 1950s. The bigger problem is not only that of systematic destruction of churches but the inability to replace the losses and build more to keep up with the normal growth of the Christian population.

The squeeze has become bad enough that Copts have often have to travel far distances outside of their towns for religious services for baptism, marriage, funerals, and regular mass.

Since 1971 only 37 “presidential decrees” were issued to build new churches and a further 34 decrees for menial repairs or refurbishments, including absurd things like replacing broken windows, across all of Egypt.

Both the regimes of Presidents Al Sadat and Mubarak revived the Hamayuni Law, refusing or ignoring applications by Christians to repair, rebuild or erect churches. Egypt’s parliament, which is led by Mr. Mubarak’s National Party, has refused multiple proposals to write off the law or cancel it. Christian landowners need official permits to build a church. Muslims, by contrast, need no such permissions from the state, the presidency, or the government to build mosques anywhere in Egypt.

As a result, thousands new mosques, some starting as nothing more than storefront shops, have been established over the past 30 years. Most were funded with Saudi money. As the expansion of Islamic houses of prayer proceeds in Egypt , Christians there remain frozen in place.

Sectarian outbursts, which always end up in attacks on churches, are diminishing their numbers. Nagaa Hamadi is close to Luxor the fabled capital of ancient Egypt where several dynasties of Pharos ruled, a place replete with splendid ancient sites and a region of the Deep Nile Valley South, where millions of Coptic Christians live and work as merchants, landowners and businessmen.

Attacks on those Coptic Christians and their shops in Luxor, as well as in major cities like Cairo and Alexandria, are now monthly occurrences. Their employees are mugged, robbed, stabbed, and occasionally shot and killed, while their establishments are damaged or destroyed. The Islamists’ objective is to drive Copts out of the business of tourism and commerce,

That objective is voiced openly by advocates of the Moslem Brotherhood, who voice the ambition in weekly sermons, as well as over the airwaves by such broadcasters as the Qatari Al Jazeera and the Suadi Al Arabia television networks. Both networks keep a large contingent of reporters in Cairo and carry a stream of anti-Christian speeches and news programming. Anti-Christian exhortations are far from discreet; they are made openly on loud speakers in mosques on Fridays across Egypt, even in Christian neighborhoods.

Imams routinely urge Muslims to boycott Christians in business and social gatherings, cross the street to avoid mingling with them, refrain from shaking hands with them, or joining them in business ventures.

[torchbearer]

what are they wanting?

[lester1/2jr]

whatever AIPAC tells them to claim they want

[samforpaul]

BT, what is a "Coptic" Christian?

[TER]

BT, what is a "Coptic" Christian?

Coptic Christians are members of the Oriental Orthodox Church which can be directly traced back to the early Church. They split from the Church around the third century over a doctrinal issue (see Council of Chalcedon) which most people believe was more of a semantic misunderstanding than anything else. Theologically, liturgically, and structurally both the Oriental and Eastern Orthodox Churches are basically identical and share the same Divine Liturgy of St. James.

This early schism represented the first real break of the Church and regretfully has persisted. The good news is that there is real progress in the talks between the Eastern Orthodox Church and the Oriental Orthodox Church, and may someday soon (maybe within our lifetime) re-unite after 1700 years of schism.

May the Lord bless these true Christians who suffer for the Lord.

[TER]

whatever AIPAC tells them to claim they want

If you are suggesting that the Coptic Church is under the instruction or guidance of AIPAC, you are most assuredly wrong.

[TER]

what are they wanting?

They want the freedom to be able to live in a society which doesn't persecute them, discriminate against them, and terrorize them.

[TER]

Killings of Egypt’s Christians Escalate In Ghastly Slaughter Nearly Ignored in the West (http://www.nysun.com/foreign/killings-of-egypts-christians-escalate-in-ghastly/86965/)

By YOUSSEF IBRAHIM, New York The Sun | May 19, 2010

At 11:30 p.m. on January 6, the Orthodox Christmas for millions of Egyptian Christians, gunshots rang from a drive-by car, killing 7 parishioners exiting evening mass. The Nagaa Hamadi Church Massacre, as it became known, left 26 seriously injured in the small southern town.

During the funerals, greater mayhem erupted. In surrounding towns and villages some 3,000 Muslims broke into Coptic properties, agricultural plots, and businesses, looting and setting fires to shops. Across the country churches were burned. It took Egypt’s police three days to show up and six weeks to arrest a single culprit.

As it has become customary, the government described the attack as ‘’an individual incident’’, another dispute among villagers. The phrase has become so habitual in describing attacks on Christians over the past 40 years, it is used as a practical joke.

In reality The Nagaa Hamadi Church Massacre was the latest spike in a 40-year-long campaign of killing and violence against of Egypt’s estimated 12 million Christians, known as Copts It’s a campaign that is all the more ghastly for the fact that it has been largely ignored by the world of elite opinion. Yet in the past 40 years, the numbers of victims has soared to well more than 20,000, if the count includes those killed, wounded, dispossessed, or otherwise harmed, according to human rights groups.

In that period, Copts started to flee Egypt, and at least 2 million, mostly members of the upper and middle classes, now reside abroad. Within Egypt, the Coptic community has continued to grow, but nowhere as rapidly as the Muslim communities, whose numbers have soared, in line with a birth rate that is far above that of the Copts.

The word Copt refers to Egyptians whose ancestors embraced Christianity in the first century after Christ. It has its origins in ancient languages of Pharos to denote ‘’original Inhabitant’’ or simply ‘’Egyptian’’. Copts are part of the Eastern Orthodox Church that ranges widely from Ethiopia to Russia. In the Arab world however, they constitute the largest Christian minority.

In the 14 centuries since Muslim Arabs invaded Egypt, those who remained Copts were descendents of Egyptians who resisted conversion to Islam. Indeed they refer to themselves as the country’s founders and Egypt was a Coptic nation in the first seven centuries of Christianity.

Since, they have suffered cycles of persecutions that ebb and flow as Muslim rulers succeed one another.

By and large the Copts enjoyed a golden period of tolerance starting the1860s. It came to an abrupt end when a group of army officers, led by Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser overthrew the monarchy and took power in 1952. Under the officers’ rule, but especially starting in the early 1970s, a systematic campaign, with evident government acquiescence, was set in motion to reduce Christians to second class citizens.

“Egypt has witnessed confessional tensions over the centuries involving attacks on Copts, but they were never as intense and widespread as they have been since the 1970s,” Moheb Zaki, a former managing director of the Ibn Khaldun Center, a nonprofit organization that supports democracy and civil rights in Egypt and the Middle East, told this reporter.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal yesterday, Mr. Zaki asserted that “the violence of the last few years is more like a purge, as waves of mob assaults have forced hundreds, sometimes thousands of Christian citizens to flee their homes. In each incident the police, despite frantic appeals, invariably arrive after the violence is over.” The Ibn Khaldun Center was founded by the Egyptian Human Rights activist Saad Eddin Ibrahim, who was jailed by the Mubarak regime and now is living in exile in America.

Copts have been eliminated from all senior positions in government administrations, the army, the police, the security services, and top echelons of the vast public sector. In the educational sector once largely endowed with Christian leadership, there are virtually no Christians left. Out of Egypt’s 17 government-owned and administered universities which have a total of 71 presidents and 274 vice presidential jobs, there is one Coptic Christian dean and one Christian Vice President.

Egypt stands out for a number of reasons. It is, with 81 million citizens, the most populous Arab nation, the second largest recipient, after Israel, of American financial and military aid, and the intellectual leader of the Arabs. Since 1979 America has given Egypt well more than $ 60 billion and totally re-equipped its entire army with advanced weapons.

In that same period, successive governments especially those of Anwar Sadat, who took power in 1970, and Hosni Mubarak, who acceded in 1981, refined a system of “Islamization” across the whole society that includes a calculated marginalization of Christians.

Sadat referred to himself as “The Believer President,” coming to power with an extensive Islamist agenda. He welcomed the return from exile in Saudi Arabia of hundreds the banished Muslim Brotherhood leadership and released thousands of them from Egyptian jails. In those jails they fundamentalists were replaced with secularists, socialists and many Christian activists.

Sadat cancelled Egypt’s secular constitution designating Sharia Islamic Law instead as the source of all legislation. By September 1981, after ten years of power, he had stripped the Coptic Pope, Shenouda III, leader of the Christian community, of all authority, banishing him to a desert monastery and ordered the arrest of some 125 Coptic clergy and lay activists along with hundreds of secular Muslims.

Ironically, a month later, in October of 1981, militant Islamist army officers assassinated Sadat, as he reviewed a military parade. Hosni Mubarak, a former air force commander and Sadat’s vice president, stood next to him when he died along with 25 others on the reviewing stand.

Mr. Mubarak moved immediately to strike a deal with the Islamists in return for their subtle agreement to retain a dynastic rule for his family. The covenant turned over to Islamists control in media, education, and government administrations in return for allowing Mr. Mubarak’s rule to go on unchallenged, setting the stage for the Rais, as Egyptians call their leaders, to prepare for his son, Gamal, to succeed him. As part of the deal, this Rais agreed to feed Egypt’s Christians to the growing Islamic beast.

In the Wall Street Journal article of Tuesday, Mr. Zaki related, among other things, that this year alone witnessed several attacks by roving bands of Muslims. In the run-up to Nagaa Hamadi, a mob of several tens of thousand Muslims gathered in the Mediterranean city of Marsa Matrough, after an imam exhorted them to cleanse it of “infidel Christians.” They went onto ten hours of rampage that burned or destroyed 18 Christian homes and 23 shops, as well as 16 cars, as 400 Copts barricaded themselves in their church, where they stayed for those hours, until the frenzy died out.

Last year saw a dozen such attacks. Typically the police show up after the damage is done. The government-controlled press describes consistently individual incidents. Equally typically, the Egyptian government, bans publication of the full scale of assaults on Christians, even in the single Coptic weekly that is allowed to publish.

As a result accurate statistics are slow to surface. But NGOs and Human Rights groups record dramatic heap of ruined lives, expropriated lands, and injured, wounded, homeless and killed. Weekly reports surface of kidnapped Christian girls, who are raped and — to save their honor — forced of convert to Islam and marry their rapists. The government only intervenes to prevent the girls from leaving their marriage or reverting back to Christianity. Altogether these attacks add up to around 10,000 since 1971.

It is a narrative of persecution that keeps piling on. Higher and upper middle class Coptic Christians responded by immigrating in huge numbers. Today these immigrant Copts form a nascent Diaspora that is moving to political activism. It is estimated to number between 2 million to 3 million spread over Canada, Australia and the USA. My extended family and I are among those who are in America.

But the bulk of ordinary Egyptian Christians, who number at least 12 million and possibly as many as 14 million, remain trapped in Egypt. The government does not permit census numbers to be released insisting in unofficial statements for well over two decades now, that Copts do not number more than 8 to 9 millions.

[Toureg89]

wouldn't the answer be the same for both the Coptic Christians requests and the Middle East Muslims requests be the same: America stop financially/militarily supporting the regimes in place?

[torchbearer]

They want the freedom to be able to live in a society which doesn't persecute them, discriminate against them, and terrorize them.

what does that have to do with our government?

[BlackTerrel]

wouldn't the answer be the same for both the Coptic Christians requests and the Middle East Muslims requests be the same: America stop financially/militarily supporting the regimes in place?


what does that have to do with our government?

This:


They say they are frustrated by the current administration in Washington, particularly after President Obama’s overture to the Muslim world via a speech at Cairo. In the speech Mr. Obama President apologized for America’s misdeeds to Muslims, stating that he came “to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world.”

How about when Obama goes to Egypt and apologizes for how bad we are in treating Muslims he also asks them to stop brutalizing the Christians in their country?

[samforpaul]

Killings of Egypt’s Christians Escalate In Ghastly Slaughter Nearly Ignored in the West (http://www.nysun.com/foreign/killings-of-egypts-christians-escalate-in-ghastly/86965/)

By YOUSSEF IBRAHIM, New York The Sun | May 19, 2010

At 11:30 p.m. on January 6, the Orthodox Christmas for millions of Egyptian Christians, gunshots rang from a drive-by car, killing 7 parishioners exiting evening mass. The Nagaa Hamadi Church Massacre, as it became known, left 26 seriously injured in the small southern town.

During the funerals, greater mayhem erupted. In surrounding towns and villages some 3,000 Muslims broke into Coptic properties, agricultural plots, and businesses, looting and setting fires to shops. Across the country churches were burned. It took Egypt’s police three days to show up and six weeks to arrest a single culprit.

As it has become customary, the government described the attack as ‘’an individual incident’’, another dispute among villagers. The phrase has become so habitual in describing attacks on Christians over the past 40 years, it is used as a practical joke.

In reality The Nagaa Hamadi Church Massacre was the latest spike in a 40-year-long campaign of killing and violence against of Egypt’s estimated 12 million Christians, known as Copts It’s a campaign that is all the more ghastly for the fact that it has been largely ignored by the world of elite opinion. Yet in the past 40 years, the numbers of victims has soared to well more than 20,000, if the count includes those killed, wounded, dispossessed, or otherwise harmed, according to human rights groups.

In that period, Copts started to flee Egypt, and at least 2 million, mostly members of the upper and middle classes, now reside abroad. Within Egypt, the Coptic community has continued to grow, but nowhere as rapidly as the Muslim communities, whose numbers have soared, in line with a birth rate that is far above that of the Copts.

The word Copt refers to Egyptians whose ancestors embraced Christianity in the first century after Christ. It has its origins in ancient languages of Pharos to denote ‘’original Inhabitant’’ or simply ‘’Egyptian’’. Copts are part of the Eastern Orthodox Church that ranges widely from Ethiopia to Russia. In the Arab world however, they constitute the largest Christian minority.

In the 14 centuries since Muslim Arabs invaded Egypt, those who remained Copts were descendents of Egyptians who resisted conversion to Islam. Indeed they refer to themselves as the country’s founders and Egypt was a Coptic nation in the first seven centuries of Christianity.

Since, they have suffered cycles of persecutions that ebb and flow as Muslim rulers succeed one another.

By and large the Copts enjoyed a golden period of tolerance starting the1860s. It came to an abrupt end when a group of army officers, led by Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser overthrew the monarchy and took power in 1952. Under the officers’ rule, but especially starting in the early 1970s, a systematic campaign, with evident government acquiescence, was set in motion to reduce Christians to second class citizens.

“Egypt has witnessed confessional tensions over the centuries involving attacks on Copts, but they were never as intense and widespread as they have been since the 1970s,” Moheb Zaki, a former managing director of the Ibn Khaldun Center, a nonprofit organization that supports democracy and civil rights in Egypt and the Middle East, told this reporter.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal yesterday, Mr. Zaki asserted that “the violence of the last few years is more like a purge, as waves of mob assaults have forced hundreds, sometimes thousands of Christian citizens to flee their homes. In each incident the police, despite frantic appeals, invariably arrive after the violence is over.” The Ibn Khaldun Center was founded by the Egyptian Human Rights activist Saad Eddin Ibrahim, who was jailed by the Mubarak regime and now is living in exile in America.

Copts have been eliminated from all senior positions in government administrations, the army, the police, the security services, and top echelons of the vast public sector. In the educational sector once largely endowed with Christian leadership, there are virtually no Christians left. Out of Egypt’s 17 government-owned and administered universities which have a total of 71 presidents and 274 vice presidential jobs, there is one Coptic Christian dean and one Christian Vice President.

Egypt stands out for a number of reasons. It is, with 81 million citizens, the most populous Arab nation, the second largest recipient, after Israel, of American financial and military aid, and the intellectual leader of the Arabs. Since 1979 America has given Egypt well more than $ 60 billion and totally re-equipped its entire army with advanced weapons.

In that same period, successive governments especially those of Anwar Sadat, who took power in 1970, and Hosni Mubarak, who acceded in 1981, refined a system of “Islamization” across the whole society that includes a calculated marginalization of Christians.

Sadat referred to himself as “The Believer President,” coming to power with an extensive Islamist agenda. He welcomed the return from exile in Saudi Arabia of hundreds the banished Muslim Brotherhood leadership and released thousands of them from Egyptian jails. In those jails they fundamentalists were replaced with secularists, socialists and many Christian activists.

Sadat cancelled Egypt’s secular constitution designating Sharia Islamic Law instead as the source of all legislation. By September 1981, after ten years of power, he had stripped the Coptic Pope, Shenouda III, leader of the Christian community, of all authority, banishing him to a desert monastery and ordered the arrest of some 125 Coptic clergy and lay activists along with hundreds of secular Muslims.

Ironically, a month later, in October of 1981, militant Islamist army officers assassinated Sadat, as he reviewed a military parade. Hosni Mubarak, a former air force commander and Sadat’s vice president, stood next to him when he died along with 25 others on the reviewing stand.

Mr. Mubarak moved immediately to strike a deal with the Islamists in return for their subtle agreement to retain a dynastic rule for his family. The covenant turned over to Islamists control in media, education, and government administrations in return for allowing Mr. Mubarak’s rule to go on unchallenged, setting the stage for the Rais, as Egyptians call their leaders, to prepare for his son, Gamal, to succeed him. As part of the deal, this Rais agreed to feed Egypt’s Christians to the growing Islamic beast.

In the Wall Street Journal article of Tuesday, Mr. Zaki related, among other things, that this year alone witnessed several attacks by roving bands of Muslims. In the run-up to Nagaa Hamadi, a mob of several tens of thousand Muslims gathered in the Mediterranean city of Marsa Matrough, after an imam exhorted them to cleanse it of “infidel Christians.” They went onto ten hours of rampage that burned or destroyed 18 Christian homes and 23 shops, as well as 16 cars, as 400 Copts barricaded themselves in their church, where they stayed for those hours, until the frenzy died out.

Last year saw a dozen such attacks. Typically the police show up after the damage is done. The government-controlled press describes consistently individual incidents. Equally typically, the Egyptian government, bans publication of the full scale of assaults on Christians, even in the single Coptic weekly that is allowed to publish.

As a result accurate statistics are slow to surface. But NGOs and Human Rights groups record dramatic heap of ruined lives, expropriated lands, and injured, wounded, homeless and killed. Weekly reports surface of kidnapped Christian girls, who are raped and — to save their honor — forced of convert to Islam and marry their rapists. The government only intervenes to prevent the girls from leaving their marriage or reverting back to Christianity. Altogether these attacks add up to around 10,000 since 1971.

It is a narrative of persecution that keeps piling on. Higher and upper middle class Coptic Christians responded by immigrating in huge numbers. Today these immigrant Copts form a nascent Diaspora that is moving to political activism. It is estimated to number between 2 million to 3 million spread over Canada, Australia and the USA. My extended family and I are among those who are in America.

But the bulk of ordinary Egyptian Christians, who number at least 12 million and possibly as many as 14 million, remain trapped in Egypt. The government does not permit census numbers to be released insisting in unofficial statements for well over two decades now, that Copts do not number more than 8 to 9 millions.


Today's E R, I'd like to meet you some day.

One of the things that brought me to the Paul Camp was his opposition to go into Iraq. The following commentary by Chuck Colson is a big reason that I have grave misgivings about our involvement there.

www.breakpoint.org/commentaries/2602-defend-the-persecuted

[furface]

US isn't going to push Egypt on anything except its relationship with Israel. In exchange for having diplos with Israel, the Mubarak government does pretty much what it wants. Equality for Christians in Egypt would mean a more democratic, just society which would mean the end of Egypt's diplomatic relations with Israel.

The irony of when Rand and Ron Paul want to revoke aid to Egypt, Jordan, and Turkey "for Israel's benefit" is that the biggest loser in doing that would be Israel because those countries would almost definitely revoke relations with Israel immediately, thus further deligitimizing Israel.

Muslims don't have many freedoms in Egypt either. It's pretty much a joke in terms of individual liberties.

[South Park Fan]

what does that have to do with our government?

If I'm not mistaken, the Egyptian government is one of the largest recipients of US foreign aid. The persecution of Coptics in Egypt ought to have as much attention as the persecution of Palestinians in Israel.

[Imperial]

I don't think there would be anything wrong with Obama calling for a more open and tolerant policy to the Copts in Egypt. What would be wrong is to financially support the Copts or militarilly support them.

[TER]

Today's E R, I'd like to meet you some day.

Thank you my brother. Until then, let us pray for one another.


One of the things that brought me to the Paul Camp was his opposition to go into Iraq. The following commentary by Chuck Colson is a big reason that I have grave misgivings about our involvement there.

www.breakpoint.org/commentaries/2602-defend-the-persecuted

Many thanks for this article. So many untold hardships these fellow Christians endure living in such hostile lands... May the Lord grant them strength and make His face shine upon them.

[BlackTerrel]

Today's E R, I'd like to meet you some day.

One of the things that brought me to the Paul Camp was his opposition to go into Iraq. The following commentary by Chuck Colson is a big reason that I have grave misgivings about our involvement there.

www.breakpoint.org/commentaries/2602-defend-the-persecuted

Thank you for posting this article. This deserves more attention.