Solidarity with Egypt's Christians: a little bit of action

I've just signed a petition here. Only takes a minute. (hat tip)

Those sectarian tensions in full

Following clashes between Christians protesting about the burning of a church (not such a very big deal surely - if it had been we'd have reported it) and the army, 25 people are dead. Not much we can tell you about who killed who, but we may be able to give you more details once the army have carried out their independent investigation. The Christians claim they were attacked, but they would say that, wouldn't they? Let's face it, there are usually faults on both sides when you get these sectarian tensions.


Thus, in substance, the BBC on Egypt's latest Bloody Sunday. The BBC can do better than this when it wants to. Where the Copts are concerned it apparently doesn't want to - and consistently hasn't wanted to in the face of all the outrages they have suffered over the last few years. Why not?

On the murder of 21 Christians

In the first place:-

'intermarriage between Coptic men and Muslim women is illegal.'

- from Time magazine



In the second place:-

The Laws for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour
(September 15, 1935)

Entirely convinced that the purity of German blood is essential to the further existence of the German people, and inspired by the uncompromising determination to safeguard the future of the German nation, the Reichstag has unanimously resolved upon the following law, which is promulgated herewith:

Section 1

Marriages between Jews and citizens (German: Staatsangehörige) of German or kindred blood are forbidden. Marriages concluded in defiance of this law are void, even if, for the purpose of evading this law, they were concluded abroad.

(source: Wikipedia)


In the third place:-

'We know the long and honourable history of co-existence of Christians and Muslims in Egypt and are confident that the overwhelming majority of Egyptian people will join in condemning this and similar acts.'

- the Archbishop of Canterbury, from his statement on the Alexandria church bombing.

Now I'm not expecting Rowan Williams to say something inflammatory. But waffle as mendacious as this is worse than silence.

There's some good background stuff at the Guardian, to give it its due - here and here. Another sample of that honourable co-existence:-

'Egypt's Christians have played as big a part in the recent demographic explosion as their fellow Muslims, but whereas new mosques are built and renovated freely, Christians have to navigate a bewilderingly web of bureaucracy to secure permission for construction. There are an estimated 2,000 churches in Egypt today, alongside 93,000 mosques.'

So 1 church for every 46-and-a-half mosques. One Egyptian in ten is Christian.

'Pontiff: Christians are most persecuted'

- so runs the front page headline in the Christmas edition of the Catholic Herald, over a report on the Pope's World Peace Day message, dated 8 December. Can we agree that Pope Benedict is not quite as out of touch as he's often painted? It's good that this is said, not because it's good for Christians to be trying to face down others in a game of victimhood poker, but because it's manifestly true.

Both the Pope and Rowan Williams have been at pains to further Christian-Muslim dialogue, and that is also a good thing. But only one of them seems prepared to say plainly that there can be no dialogue where one party is holding a pistol to the other's head.

As for the BBC and its talk of sectarian tensions...

When I entered "Islamophobia" into the BBC News search engine it offered me 171 hits in the blink of an eye. Then I tried "Christophobia"; I thought I would have to give this up as a bad job after it had pondered for five minutes, but eventually it dredged up three hits from 2004 and 2006.

Those who have introduced "Islamophobia" into our political discourse have been spectacularly successful in framing the terms of debate about the relationship between British Muslims and the rest of society. This has happened in spite of our Muslim communities never - thank God - having had to face anything remotely comparable to the Alexandria church bombing. If a bomb ever did claim 21 lives at a British mosque, can there be the slightest doubt that for the BBC it would be an "Islamophobia" story and not a "sectarian tensions" one?

Hey, let's not get judgmental here...

It's sectarian tension time again.

Father forgive them, for they know not what they do

'Zabihullah Mujahid, a Taliban spokesman, said bibles translated into Dari had been found.

'"Yesterday at around 0800 (0330 GMT), one of our patrols confronted a group of foreigners. They were Christian missionaries and we killed them all," he told the AFP news agency.'

I'm more or less at a loss for words over this. The BBC lives down to expectations: you have to get past the headline and the first four paragraphs before you find a hint that this is a story of religious intolerance (whether the Taliban actually fired the shots is virtually irrelevant in this respect - they want to claim the credit).

One word I hope I won't hear today is "Islamophobia". I won't be answerable for the consequences if I do.

Another bigoted man

More in the same vein as my last post: the Pub Philosopher has a neat take on the latest story. Equally symptomatic of the way we're governed and hence deserving of being pondered on the way to the polling station.

One can only marvel at the potential this nonsense has to stir up ill-will where none was before. I've always taken what police officers get up to when they take off their uniforms as being a matter of supreme unconcern to me. But when gay coppers start getting allocated to special jobs where they don't have to bother with mundane stuff like clearing up burglaries because they're too busy taking DNA swabs from preachers...

Two takes on moral responsibility: part 2

Can you believe that Simon Tisdall of the Guardian has written a piece about the plight of Christians in much of the Muslim world? Don't worry, normal service has been resumed by the time the article reaches its conclusion: it's all the West's fault.

No need for a long post since Mr Eugenides is in sparkling form on this one. A small touch of irony from self can be found nestling among the comments.

Al-Beebi update

A loyal reader thinks I've been slacking long enough, so here goes, following on from the theme of the last. The Beeb and the Middle East - enough material for an entire something-or-other.

Whilst last time I was suggesting that a little contextualization wouldn't go amiss, here we get contextualization in abundance. Six bomb attacks on Baghdad churches over a single weekend might make it appear that this is not a great place to be a Christian, but these things are relative...

'There are some 750,000 people in Iraq's Christian community. Christian targets have been attacked in the past, but are spared much of Iraq's deadly violence.

'They have been targeted in some areas of the country, mainly in Baghdad and in the northern city of Mosul.

'However, most of the violence in Iraq is sectarian in nature and targets either Sunni or Shia Muslims.'

So, no whining from you Christians. Count your blessings!

When I first read the story this morning it was even more dismissive; methinks the middle paragraph has been inserted later.

Given the small size of the Christian minority, I'm not sure whether the writer's perception that Christians have been 'spared' is based on hard statistics or on the finger-in-the-wind approach. Iraqi Christians themselves feel the wind coming from a very different direction - they're emigrating in droves, and 750,000 is already almost certainly a gross overestimate of their numbers. Odd that that's not mentioned, don't you think?

And in any case, if we're going to do odorous comparisons, 'poor Muslims bearing the brunt of the violence' isn't quite the whole story, is it? There's also the small matter of who it is that thinks other people's places of worship are legitimate targets. Number of mosques blown up by Iraqi Christians, please? Over to the Beeb's man in Baghdad... Hmmm, we're having some trouble accessing that statistic. We'll get back to you as soon as we can.

Rod Little professes to be shocked that an esteemed colleague from his BBC days has taken the mullahs' shilling and joined the One Formerly Known As Gorgeous at Press TV. Really, Rod?

The persecution of Christians

From the Sunday Times, a survey by Brian Moynahan of the global phenomenon of persecution of Christians. As it contains much valuable information I will try to overlook this observation on the Middle East:-

'At the same time, the start of real problems in the region can be dated back at least to the foundation of Israel in 1948.'

Well, he does include that qualifying 'at least', allowing for the theoretical possibility that the region's Christians already had some problems before 1948, for which it would therefore be a little difficult to blame Israel. There is, after all, the small matter of the 1915 Armenian Genocide.

Did you know that there are at least 50,000 Christians held in labour camps in North Korea? Does the World Council of Churches know? Is there any way of interesting them in the fact, other than by convincing them that the Dear Leader's real name is Cohen?

The non-persecution of Egypt's Christians

OK, it was naïve of me to imagine that the Beeb does its own news-gathering in southern Egypt. The BBC report on the church attack in el-Udaysaat came straight from Reuters.

Compare and contrast this from Reuters…

‘The Christians called the police when the group set fire to building materials with which they planned to turn a house into a church.’

…with this alternative version…

‘Muslims who heard prayers from the all-night service in the community center threw torches into the building at 4 a.m. Thursday, Egyptian daily Al-Akhbar reported today.’ (source here)

Partisan though this source may be, given that two Christians have so far died it seems reasonably plausible to me that something more than an attack on a stack of planks was involved.

Reuters now have an update which in turn comes from IRIN, a news agency run by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. This piece is suggestive of an interesting balance of forces within the organization that produced it. On the one hand, somebody somewhere cares enough about the plight of the Copts to make sure the issue got covered. On the other hand, it is clear that somebody else is imposing strict limits on what may be said. There can be ‘sectarian friction’ in Egypt, there can be ‘religious intolerance’, there can be ‘violent clashes’, but what there absolutely mustn’t be is a wave of vicious persecution of Christians by Muslim militants. Who would think of suggesting such a thing, anyway? Well, wouldn’t you know it…

‘Some observers have noted that religious intolerance is often aggravated by external influences.

‘One formidable element of the equation is the expatriate Coptic Christian community based in the United States, which has a history of accusing Cairo of “religious persecution”.’

They’re all brainwashed by the Zionist lobby, I presume.

And since there is friction but no persecution, one incident in particular requires very delicate handling:-

‘By far the biggest incident of sectarian friction in recent history, however, was in the village of El-Kusheh, south of Cairo, in 2000.

'After twenty people were killed in armed clashes between Christian and Muslim residents, the government renamed the village Dar El-Salaam, or “Haven of Peace,” hoping to stamp out all traces of animosity.’

Twenty one people were killed, to be precise. One Muslim, twenty Christians. If the Christians were doing any armed clashing, they were evidently extremely poor shots.

‘Bridging the Information Gap’ is the claim IRIN makes for itself. Sometimes, though, when you’re coordinating humanitarian affairs, information is just too dangerous to be passed on without very careful management.

Egypt: thoughtless Christians annoy the neighbours

The headline here maintains the BBC's standards of objectivity in covering interfaith relations in Egypt. '12 injured in Muslim attack on Christians' would be just so judgmental, wouldn't it? So let's stick with 'church clash' and 'violent sectarian incidents'.