What's behind those pyramids?
The next time you hear someone screaming about how Israel violates the human rights of Palestinians, you might want to ask that person about a nearby country that truly violates the rights of one of its minorities. That would be Egypt, a nation in which the Coptic Christian minority is brutally persecuted. Read the below article from the Wall Street Journal of May 18, 2010:
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Article in the Wall Street Journal:
Egypt's Persecuted Christians
Wall Street Journal, May 18, 2010
By Moheb ZakiCairo
A few weeks ago in the coastal city of Marsa Matrouh, an enraged mob of some 3,000 angry Muslims gathered after Friday prayers. After the mosque's imam exhorted them to cleanse the city of its infidel Christians, called Copts, they went on a rampage.
The toll was heavy: 18 homes, 23 shops and 16 cars were completely destroyed, while 400 Copts barricaded themselves in their church for 10 hours until the frenzy died out.
This was only the latest of more than a dozen such attacks during the past year, including in the village of Kafr El-Barbary on June 26, the town of Farshout on Nov. 21, and the village of Shousha on Nov. 23. Then came Naga Hamadi, where passengers in a drive-by car fired at random into Christians leaving a Coptic Christmas service on Jan. 6. The massacre killed seven and left 26 seriously wounded.
Such behaviour is encouraged at the highest levels - from government departments through the most respected of Islamic institutions. Al-Azhar University, font of much discord for several decades - many of its Malay, Philippino, Indonesian, Afghan, and Pakistani graduates have founded terror-cults upon returning to their homelands - is perhaps the most guilty of inculcating violent tendencies among the 'Umma'.
Al-Azhar's textbook for its high-school students, called "Al Iqna'," states that killing a Muslim is punishable by death, but if a Muslim kills a non-Muslim he is not subject to capital punishment since the superior cannot be punished for killing the inferior (p. 146). It also states that the blood money (compensation for manslaughter) rates for a woman is half that for a man, but for a Christian or Jew it is one third that of a Muslim (p. 187); and that there can be no stewardship (such as a superior in work) of a non-Muslim over a Muslim (p. 205).
Thus the hundreds of thousands of Azhar schools, which are monitored by the state, indoctrinate and then discharge annually into Egyptian society hundreds of thousands of young Muslims with an ideology of intolerance, contempt and hatred toward Copts (and even more intensely toward Jews).
The Egyptian rulers, like many despots, refuse to acknowledge that there is an issue.
Despite the long-standing suffering of the Copts, the Egyptian government cynically insists that there is no sectarian problem and brands as traitors those who draw international attention to the Copts' plight. So far the United States and the rest of the Western democracies, despite repeated Coptic appeals, have done little besides calling upon the Egyptian regime to foster greater tolerance.
Read the entire article here:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703745904575248301172607696.html
Then bring it to the attention of your elected representatives.
You may also wish to contact the Egyptians directly................
The Egyptian Consulate General in San Francisco
القنصلية العامة لجمهورية مصر العربية
في مدينة سان فرانسيسكو
276 Mallorca Way, San Francisco, CA 94123-1515
Tel. (415) 346-9700 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting (415) 346-9700 end_of_the_skype_highlighting / 346-9702 / 346-7352
Fax (415) 346-9480
email: egypt@egy2000.com
Web: http://egy2000.com/
The Consulate covers Arizona, Alaska, California, Idaho, Washington, Utah, Montana, Oregon, Nevada, Hawaii and Wyoming.
You may address your letter to the Honourable Consul General:
Mr. Hesham Elnakib, Ph.D.
http://www.egy2000.com/indexl.htm
Do not count on a positive response, however; the Egyptian government does not recognize a problem in the persecution of Copts.
In any case, San Francisco is merely a plum posting, staffed by comfortable people with a properly clerical attitude.
I would assume that the most you can expect them to do is put your name on a list, for possible watching or "minding" should you ever decide to take a jaunt to the Sphinx and the Pyramids.Like many 'Arab' governments, they don't take kindly to critics. Especially not pesky Westerners.
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I remember back in 1995, when I was nearing the end of my career in government with DEA. I was assigned to go to Cairo on the occasion of the UN Conference on Crime, where we gave presentations on how US federal law enforecment agencies were training police around the world. One of our local assistants was a beautiful young Egyptian girl in her 20s. She was a Copt. At that time, I was totally ignorant about the Coptic Christians and their plight in Egypt, so unfortunately, I didn't learn about it at that time since she never brought it up.
If you are a university student, especially in Middle Eastern studies, and you are getting your fill about how evil the state of Israel is, you might want to ask your professor about those Coptic Christians in Egypt. Or maybe about the Jews in Yemen. Or maybe about the Baha'i in Iran. Or maybe about Christians in Pakistan....
I could go on and on, couldn't I?
6 comments:
First, we have to figure out how the United States is going to find allies in the region -- the only ones we have are the House of Saud, the Mubarak dictatorship, and the Hashemites, other than Israel. We've been picking some really bad paragons of democracy, and it doesn't seem the Copts rate highly as power brokers. The U.S. doesn't have friends, only interests, right?
Incidentally, this is endemic in Egyptian history. Christians treated the last pagans similarly, not really polytheists either, just non-Christian philosophers: lynching them, chasing their daughters through the street, burning their libraries. Only the names change.
When the first Islamic conquest arrived, everything was settled amicably, with payment of a small tax, but over time, the need for scapegoats reasserted itself.
Siarlys,
With all due respect, you are spinning. That amicable small tax was part of the dhimmi arrangement. Do you know the full details of dhimmitude?
The original arrangement was, the Arab tribes that just kicked the butts of the Byzantine and Sassanid empires are the new rulers, their religion is Islam, that's for the Arabs, the subject peoples (who were already subject peoples), are going to pay a tax. The first two caliphates didn't WANT conversion to Islam. That would have cost them the tax structure their empire rested on.
Oh, and Jews were particularly privileged, since they had assiduously assisted the conquest of Jerusalem, and various other points, but in particular, the Caliphs let them back into Jerusalem, from which the Greeks had excluded them.
OK, paint your picture of "dhimmitude." I bet its bogus. It certainly isn't in David Levering Lewis's excellent, well researched, and tightly footnoted book. It hasn't figured highly in any reputable, thorough, studies I've seen. It may be making the rounds on the internet -- which, as Joseph Stalin said, will put up with anything you post on it.
Subject peoples? Certainly, as with any middle eastern empire. Some sort of abject brutalized enslaved status, deprived of church, literacy, and commerce? Not hardly.
Siarlys,
I just adressed the issue of dhimmitude in repsonse to another of your comments to another post. Check it out.
PS Siarlys,
Before you downplay the treatment of non-Muslim minorities in Egypt, Iran et al, check out the situation of Copts in Egypt, Jews in Yemen and Baha'i in Iran.
It's much more serious than you depict.
I have not in the least questioned the seriousness of the treatment of religious minorities in any of the countries you mention at this present time. I have questioned the distortions of Islamic history relied upon by
(a) those with a primarily military sense of jihad, who are patently ignorant of the history of their own faith, and of the caliphate(s) they claim intent to restore, and,
(b) those who try to construe Islam itself as an enemy of freedom, democracy, peace, brotherhood, and other "western" values.
I'll try to find your piece on dhimmitude, but your articles multiply like rabbits, and I have limited time to go back and back and back to sustain the thread of coherent conversation. I even have a full time job temporarily.
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