The Brotherhood is Burning Down Churches

Mike L.

The snippet below was written by Benjamin Weinthal and published by the Jerusalem Post.

Islamic supporters of Egypt’s ousted president Mohamed Morsi launched on Wednesday arson attacks against churches, resulting in the destruction of at least three buildings. Muslim Brotherhood supporters wreaked havoc on Coptic Christian businesses and property throughout the country.

There may have been more than 20 incidents of burning of churches and attacks on Christian institutions, based on unconfirmed reports on Twitter from Coptic leaders and organizations who are closely following the outbreak of anti-Christian violence.

Bishop Anba Suriel, the bishop for the Coptic Orthodox Church in Melbourne, wrote on his Twitter micro blog, “over 20 separate attacks on churches and Christian institutions all over Egypt.”

Suriel added, ”These attacks on the Copts is unprecedented in the modern era.” He called on the international community not to be passive.

This is rank bigotry of the very worst sort.

Egypt has a population of about 80 million and the indigenous Christian community there, the Copts, represent maybe 10 percent of the total and now they are being persecuted, and chased out of the country, because the Egyptian military ousted Muslim Brotherhood leader Muhammad Morsi.

What pisses me off most about this is that so few westerners give a damn about their fellow Christians under the boot of Arab-Muslim imperialism and oppression.  Morsi's failure is not the fault of the Copts and, speaking as a Jewish person, it is just so typical that these racist Brotherhood supporters would target a minority community for violence as a scapegoat for their own failings and stupidity.

We have got to stand up for the Copts in Egypt because virtually no else will.

Speaking with The Jerusalem Post from Ottawa, Irwin Cotler, a former Canadian justice minister and current Liberal MP, said the “Army should be providing more protection to the Copts.”

Cotler spearheaded a report – Securing the Human Rights of Coptic Christians in Egypt After the Arab Spring – in Canada’s Parliament in May to protect the rights of Copts and “hold those responsible for attacks on Copts.”

The anti-Christian violence by radical Islamists and Muslim Brotherhood supporters is taking place within “a general culture of impunity,” he said...

The “silence is troubling” from “the people charged with promoting human rights,” Van Zile said. “Progressive Christianity does not want to confront Islamic violence.”

Most westerners have no idea that the Middle East was almost entirely Christian when Muhammad's armies marched out of Saudi Arabia and conquered the entire region in relatively short order in the decades and centuries after the "Prophet's" death.

Christians, like Jews, have been a persecuted minority throughout the region for the last 14 centuries and that persecution continues to this day.

It is, by the way, not "racist" to point out when another minority is being abused and hounded and persecuted.

The "go to" guy on contemporary and historical Muslim persecution of Middle Eastern Christians is Raymond Ibrahim, an American scholar of Coptic descent.

The problem is that the western-left press will not publish him because he is highly critical of the Jihad against Christians throughout the Middle East and he is therefore relegated to places like David Horowitz's Front Page Magazine.

This is a phenomenon that Barry Rubin discusses in his recent piece, How Western Intellectual Values Have Gone Hawire.

Rubin, like me, comes out of the left.  And because he is critical of the Obama administration he has found his publishing options cut short and therefore publishes at, among other place, Pajamas Media.

He writes:

So first they bar certain arguments from the mass media and then they say that if you persist in making certain arguments this proves bias because of the few remaining and smaller places you are allowed to appear. In other words, first you bar people and arguments; then you say that the fact that they are barred proves that they — not you — are the biased ones.

Indeed.

But the bottom line is that there is virtually a media blackout in the American press concerning the horrendous persecution of Christians in the Middle East and particularly in Egypt.

Noah Beck writes:

Egypt’s Christians are being targeted and scapegoated for the ousting of the Muslim Brotherhood. An Egyptian human rights activist tweeted that the Virgin Mary in Minya, one of the oldest churches in Egypt, built in the 4th century, was destroyed by fire last Wednesday. Up to 40 more churches have been reportedly been burned since then. Muslim Brotherhood members have also been attacking monasteries, schools, Christian owned shops and individuals.

What a disgrace.