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.

For Malcolm and Eleanor

geoffff

Now safely back home in Israel after a flying visit.

And especially Eleanor who I helped set up a Google Account to make it easier for her to comment here. And in the grip of a brain snap conflated the Hebrew spelling of her name, elinor, with the English,  Eleanor, and managed to come up with Elanor as her display name.

Sorry.  

Nevertheless a beautiful drive in my country.

Emailing some photos soon.  

Egypt in Flames

Mike L.

The snippets below were written by Reuters staff and published by Y-Net.

At least 623 people died and thousands were wounded on Wednesday when police cleared out two protest camps in Cairo set up to denounce the military overthrow on July 3 of Egypt's first freely elected president, Islamist leader Mohamed Morsi.

623.

Can you imagine if this was going on in Israel?  The western-left would go into orgasmic convulsions of sadistic rage, if this was Israel and not Egypt.  Once again, when Muslims kill Muslims no one cares.  It only matters, for political purposes, if Jews are involved and then the righteous indignation and gleeful schadenfreude are immediately spit into Israel's face.

But it is Egypt and Egypt is a mess.  It's a wreck. The status quo under Mubarak was oppressive, but stable.  This, however, is just bloody chaos.  And what it represents are the fruits of the "Arab Spring."  And to you naifs, who kept telling us how wonderful the "Arab Spring" is and how it represents the rise of Arab democracy and that a new day was dawning throughout the Middle East, I wonder if you are capable of recognizing and acknowledging your mistake?

I sincerely doubt it.

The "Arab Spring," in Egypt and elsewhere, was the rise of political Islam, but not all Arabs want to live in the 7th century.  Egypt is tearing itself to pieces over which type of racist dictatorship to live under.  Should it be an anti-Semitic, homophobic, and misogynistic dictatorship, of the type that Barack Obama preferred in his support for the Muslim Brotherhood?  Or should it be a brutal secular military dictatorship of the type that we have seen for decades and that Hosni Mubarak represented?

The one thing that we have not seen in the "Arab Spring" is any significant political movement toward anything resembling democracy.  The Muslim Brotherhood, as a matter of principle, is anti-democratic precisely because al-Sharia is anti-democratic.  Meanwhile, I do not believe that the Egyptian military is going to be spending much time canvassing for votes for the next election.

The truth, of course, is that Barack Obama should never have called for the ouster of Hosni Mubarak, who was an ally of the United States, to begin with.  What he should have done, as the pressure mounted in Egypt, was insist upon democratic reforms.  Instead of taking a moderate route aimed at bringing about gradual progressive change, Obama insisted that Mubarak step down, thus clearing a path for the Muslim Brotherhood and thereby helping to set into motion the series of events that has led that country into its current state of chaos and blood and misery.

Whatever else we may make of this, it certainly represents one of the more significant failures in Obama administration foreign policy.

A statement from the Brotherhood called for a nationwide "march of anger" by millions of supporters on Friday after noon prayers.

A "march of anger"?

Yes, because there is not nearly enough rage and anger and bloody hatred throughout the Arab Middle East.   We clearly need more rage and anger and bloody hatred in that part of the world.  And let me ask you this.  Just why is it that Muslims in the United States tend not to go for this kind of thing?

American Muslims aren't screaming from the hillsides.  American Muslims aren't calling for blood.  Some might say that American Muslims are strong and steady and hard-working and honest and normal because they live in a democracy and their co-religionists in Egypt do not and that if we want to see the normalization of the Arab-Muslim world then we need to encourage democracy throughout the region.

This was the basic idea of both George W. Bush and Barack Obama.  They both sought to support democracy in the Middle East.  What they both overestimated, however, was the desire of the locals to actually create such democracies.  The Egyptians do not have democracy because they, for the most part, do not want democracy.  If they actually wanted democracy they would inevitably create democracy, but this is not what they have done.

Obama thought that his meddling in Egyptian political life could get that country on the right track, but he was sadly mistaken and entirely arrogant to think so.

By cancelling the military exercise, but not cutting off US aid, Obama was seeking to show his displeasure at the violent crackdown without totally alienating the generals.

The Obama administration is not entirely incapable of learning from their numerous mistakes.  By cancelling a certain degree of military cooperation, while maintaining the 1.5 billion dollars in annual aid that Egypt receives, Obama is seeking to walk a tight-rope.  The administration has thus learned to be a tad more cautious in its dealings with the Middle East.

I take this as a positive sign.

In the mean time, however, Egypt is burning to the ground.

Muslims Slaughter Muslims in Lebanon and Blame the Jews

Mike L.

The snippet below was written by Gil Ronen and published by Arutz Sheva.

At least 20 people were killed and more than 212 were injured on Thursday when a car bomb went off near a Hezbollah stronghold in southern Beirut's Dahia quarter, a security source in Lebanon said.

While a Sunni Islamist group claimed responsibility for the bombing, Hezbollah and Lebanese officials said it bore the markings of a Zionist attack and served the interests of Israel.

The Jerusalem Post reports:

Senior Hezbollah figures said that the blast "has Zionist fingerprints all over it."

Vice President of the Higher Shiite Council, Sheikh Abd al-Amir Kabalan, said the the attack "serves the Zionist agenda in the area."

Lebanese President Michel Suleiman also said that the attack bore the hallmarks of "terror and Israel."

And yet we also learn from the JPost:

A Sunni Islamist group calling itself the Brigades of Aisha claimed responsibility for the explosion, saying it targeted the militant group Hezbollah and promising more attacks.

"This is the second time that we decide the place of the battle and its timing...And you will see more, God willing," said a masked man, flanked by two others brandishing rifles, in a video statement addressed to Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah.

I don't know about you, but I am getting a little tired of the Arab-Muslim world always and forever blaming everything wrong in their societies on the tiny Jewish minority in the Middle East.  The Jews in that part of the world have been the victims of Arab-Muslim aggression since the time of Muhammed and since that time Muslims have perpetually blamed the Jews for their own deficiencies and problems and violence toward one another.

The Jewish people need to stand up and tell the great Arab-Muslim majority in the Middle East that we will no longer be their perpetual scapegoats.  The Arab-Muslim Middle East is a holy mess, but that is not the fault of the Jews.  On the contrary, one of the few stable countries throughout the region happens to be Israel. But, yet, the Jews get the blame from dysfunctional Arab cultures and western progressives tend to believe them.

This has got to stop and western-left progressive Jews have an obligation to stand up to their ideological compatriots and tell them so.  Progressive-left Jews can have a positive influence, but not before they acquire the cajones to stand up to both the rise of political Islam and to their own political movement that so-often justifies Jihadi violence as a matter of righteous political resistance.

The voice of the Jewish left is key.

If the Jewish left would stand up and denounce political Islam it would go a long way toward helping the non-Jewish western left to understand that political Islam opposes everything that the progressive-left claims to stand for.  So long as the Jewish left generally remains silent on this question, the non-Jewish left - which represents well over 90 percent of the western left - will have much less reason to articulate the understanding that political Islam is malevolent, violent, and oppressive.

Furthermore, it must be understood that one cannot stand up for the well-being of the Jewish people without standing against the rise of political Islam.  Political Islam represents the foremost genocidally-inclined challenge to the Jewish people in the world today.

What we need to do is start by saying so.

MK Slams Kerry

Mike L.

The following was written by Moran Azulay and published by Y-Net:

Following Israel's renewal of talks with the Palestinians, Knesset Member Ayelet Shaked (Habayit Hayehudi) on Thursday delivered a letter to US Secretary of State John Kerry, in which she slammed his diplomacy regarding the talks.

"You have forced us into peace talks during a period of time that the entire Middle-East is in chaos, without realizing that by doing so, you have foolishly put us in an impossible situation, in which we cannot and will not make any concessions."

Shaked added: "I suggest to you that you perform your job in a much more effective and relevant fashion by focusing your attention on Syria and Egypt."

"Mr. Secretary of State – by forcing Israel to capitulate to terrorism by releasing murdering terrorists with so much blood on their hands that the United States would never dream of releasing them if it was their own citizens whom they murdered – you are not only being extremely hypocritical, but are actually dabbling in experimentation and gambling, by putting me and my children's lives at risk."

The MK wrote to the secretary of state that US's insistence that Israel release said terrorists is absurd, seeing as the US "refuses until this day to release Jonathan Pollard from jail, despite the unprecedented term he has served thus far."

It still amazes me that Israel capitulated to this vile precondition.

How does one stand up for a country that refuses to stand up for itself?