EGYPT - Egypt, Muslim Brotherhood assaults 22 Christian churches [AN]

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GraceSofia said:
Well, I don’t know. The Muslim Brotherhood is attacking the ancient Christian churches that were in the land well before Islam came on the scene. The Copts are the original inhabitants of Egypt so they are not “Western.” The MB have also attacked police stations, army positions, museums, an orphanage, and a blood bank. I think the MB supporters are attacking anybody who disagrees with their idea of radical Islam.

This is a fairly good overview: What is happening in Egypt?
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…and the Muslim Brotherhood has yet to condemn this violence against Christianity! The Muslim Brotherhood must support it then. The MB is a terrorist group. :cool:
 
Dr. Murad Ali, Media Spokesman for the Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated Freedom and Justice Party, posted the following message on his Facebook page… Make of it what you will.
“Based on the true nature of our religion, and pursuant to our party’s indivisible principles, we strongly condemn any attack, even verbal, against Copts, their churches or their property.
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"Although some Coptic leaders may have supported (or even participated) in the July 3 coup, for one reason or another, no such attacks can be justifiable.
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“Our Revolution is non-violent. We will continue to mobilize and mass in the streets without violence and without destruction or sabotage.”
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ikhwanweb.com/article.php?id=31246

Statement by the Coptic Church
…we strongly condemn the misleading media coverage in the Western countries, and we call upon the media representatives to objectively look into the reality of events, and to refrain from providing an international or political cover for such terrorist blood-thirsty groups and all those who belong to them, as such groups intend to unfold devastation and destruction in our beloved country. We call upon the Western and international media to reflect the real image of what is happening, in a truthful genuine manner and with due integrity.
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gilliam said:
In Egyptian village, Christian shops marked ahead of church attack

csmonitor.com/World/Middle-East/2013/0818/In-Egyptian-village-Christian-shops-marked-ahead-of-church-attack
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Good article.

I noticed at the bottom : One page that appears to be the authentic Facebook page for the FJP in Helwan, south of Cairo, listed accusations against the church, before concluding: “After all this people ask why they burn churches.” The page noted that “burning houses of worship is a crime,” but added: **“For every action, there is a reaction.”
** :rolleyes:

In July, Egyptians started a White House petition to have the MB declared a terrorist organisation and quickly got the 100,000 signatures needed, but nooooo…
 
Following four days of violence against Christian institutions in Egypt, “nearly 40 churches have been looted and torched, while 23 others have been attacked and heavily damaged,” the …

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Sister Manal, principal of a Franciscan school in suburban Cairo, watched for six hours as a mob looted the building, knocked the cross off the gate and replaced it with a black banner resembling the flag of Al Qaeda.
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The classrooms were then burned to the ground and the women taken away, attracting a crowd of abusive onlookers.
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Police told Sister Manal that the nuns had been targeted by hardline Islamists, convinced that they had given Muslim children an inappropriate education.
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‘We are nuns. We rely on God and the angels to protect us,’ she said. ‘At the end, they paraded us like prisoners of war and hurled abuse at us as they led us from one alley to another without telling us where they were taking us.’
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Siblings Wardah and Bedour, two Christian women employed by the school, also found themselves having to fight their way through the mob while being groped, hit and insulted by the extremists.

So far two Christians have been killed since the military-backed government moved against protesters calling for former president Mohamed Morsi’s reinstatement.
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And dozens of churches, homes and businesses owned by Christians have been attacked and razed to the ground.
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‘I am terrified and unable to focus,’ said Boulos Fahmy, the pastor of a Catholic church a short distance away from Manal’s school. ‘I am expecting an attack on my church any time now.’
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And Bishop Ibram, head of the local Coptic Orthodox church, said he had instructed Christians and clerics not to resist the mobs of Islamists to try and avoid any loss of life.
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‘The looters were so diligent that they came back to one of the five churches they had already ransacked to see if they could get more,’ he said.
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‘They were loading our chairs and our benches on trucks and when they had no space for more, they just destroyed them.’
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Christians have long suffered from discrimination and violence in Egypt, where they make up 10 per cent of the population of 90million.
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Read more: dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2396764/Egypt-crisis-Islamist-mob-parades-nuns-Cairo-prisoners-war.html#ixzz2cQ8T1M9U
Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook
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The Islamist world according to the MB would just as likely regard these women as booty as POWs.

meforum.org/3280/egypt-sex-slave-marriage

What is being dubbed as Egypt’s “first sex-slave marriage” took place mere days after the Muslim Brotherhood’s Muhammad Morsi was made president.
Last Monday, on the Egyptian TV show Al Haqiqa (“the Truth”), journalist Wael al-Ibrashi began the program by airing a video-clip of a man, Abd al-Rauf Awn, “marrying” his “slave.” Before making the woman, who had a non-Egyptian accent, repeat the Koran’s Surat al-Ikhlas after him, instead of saying the customary “I marry myself to you,” the woman said “I enslave myself to you,” and kissed him in front of an applauding audience.
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Reality TV in Egypt is a very different kind of reality than Survivor or Big Brother.
 
And to think that John McCain is outraged that the man these criminal thugs support, was overthrown. What does that say about him ?
 
And this is as far as the story will go. Exchange the word ‘Christian’ for ‘gays’, and you’ll have a never-never-never-never ending story.
 
In two separate statements, the Coptic Orthodox and Catholic Churches condemn the recent violence and offer their support to the government. They call on Western media to show the true picture of Egypt without fomenting sectarian clashes. Only unity between Christians and Muslims can save the country.

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Abused Churches and clergy are not as serious a matter as destroying defaced Quran’s.
 
Alexandria, Egypt, Aug 19, 2013 / 05:08 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- The head of the Coptic Catholic Church has expressed solidarity with other Egyptians over the wave of violence that has struck the country, bluntly calling the events a struggle against terrorist forces.
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Patriarch Ibrahim Isaac Sidrak of Alexandria said that “out of love for our country and in solidarity with all lovers of Egypt, both Christians and Muslims,” the patriarchate will not label the crisis “a political struggle between different factions.”

Rather, the conflict is “a war against terrorism,” he insisted in an Aug. 18 statement.

On Aug. 14, Egyptian security forces violently broke up the camps of protesters allied with the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist movement. The protesters were demanding the restoration to power of Mohammed Morsi, who had been elected president of Egypt following the country's Arab Spring, yet was ousted by the military July 3.

Since the Wednesday crackdown, violence has spread across the country, with at least 900 dead in the past six days. Nine Christians are reported to have been killed by Islamists, one in Alexandria, seven in Al Nazla, and one in Sohag, about 280 miles south of Cairo.

In the ensuing violence, many churches have been vandalized, burned, and looted because of perceived Christian support for the coup that ousted Morsi. Christian homes and businesses have also been destroyed.

Patriarch Sidrak expressed appreciation for the government institutions which have tried to protect Egyptians from this week's violence, and for “our honorable Muslim compatriots who have stood by our side, as far as they could, in defending our churches and our institutions.”

An Egyptian Catholic who requested anonymity and is from Sohag told CNA in an Aug. 19 telephone interview that moderate Muslims helped defend Christians against attacks in the city, by rushing to help put out the fires in the churches.

He said that “national media is saying it’s only 42” churches that have been attacked since Wednesday, but “everyone knows it’s 82.”

“Twenty-six cities in Egypt have at least three or four big churches and they have been affected,” he remarked.

Western media reports vary between citing 47 and 63 churches having been attacked since Aug. 14.

In Sohag, the source said, the vandals “burned the biggest Orthodox Church and they burned the cars and shops that belonged to the Christians, too.”

The man's lament that the violence is being under-reported in the media was echoed by Patriarch Sidrak, who condemned “those media that promote lies and falsify the truth in order to mislead world
public opinion.”

Pope Tawadros II of Alexandria, head of the Coptic Orthodox Church, also denounced “the fallacies” broadcast by Western media.

The man from Sohag said that “to save Christianity” in Egypt, “we must get rid of the Muslim Brotherhood and Salafists.” Both groups support the imposition of sharia law.

While violence against Egypt's Christian minority, which represents 10 percent of the nation, is nothing new, it had been sporadic before the Aug. 14 crackdown on Morsi supporters. Despite this, the Muslim Brotherhood stated last week it “stands firmly against any attack – even verbal – against churches.”

A high-ranking source in the Coptic Catholic Church, who requested anonymity due to the delicate situation, told CNA Aug. 19 that the violence is due to “the categorical rejection by the Muslim Brotherhood of every kind of dialogue with the Egyptian people.”

The belief that Islamists, and the Muslim Brotherhood in particular, are responsible for the violence against Christians, seems to be a common one among Copts, the country's ethnic Christian community.

Pope Tawadros II added in his statement that the Coptic Orthodox “have full faith and confidence in the Divine intervention that will navigate the Egyptian people in this delicate time of our history to a better tomorrow and a brighter future filled with  justice, peace, and democracy.”

In Beni Suef, a city 80 miles south of Cairo, three nuns were paraded through city streets after their Franciscan school was looted and torched. They were rescued by a Muslim woman who had taught at the school and whose son-in-law is a policeman there. Two other teachers at the school “had to fight their way out of the mob, while groped, hit and insulted by the extremists,” the AP reported Aug. 17.

In two Egyptian towns, Al Nazla and Minya – over 100 miles apart from each other – it is reported that Islamists marked Christian homes and businesses with graffiti to mark them for attack.

According to the Christian Science Monitor, in Al Nazla Christian buildings were marked with red graffiti.

The AP reports that in Minya, black Xs were painted on Christian stores, and red Xs on Muslim-owned stores. “You can be sure that the ones with a red X are intact,” Bishoy Alfons Naguib, a business owner from Minya, told the AP.

The U.S. Commission on International Religious freedom said Aug. 16 that “the government’s excessive use of force when breaking up protests, the high number of deaths, the return to a state of emergency, and the targeting of Christians by extremists are all profoundly troubling.”

The commission's chair, Robert George, added that “assaulting religious minorities is not a legitimate form of protest against government action … USCIRF calls on the Egyptian government to immediately ensure the protection of places of worship and urges justice and accountability for perpetrators, both inside and outside of government.”

In their statements, both Patriarch Sidrak and Pope Tawadros II stated opposition to foreign influence in Egypt's internal affairs.

In the midst of the violence, it is expected that former president Hosni Mubarak could be freed from jail this week. Mubarak was the nation's leader before the 2011 revolution that lead to the election of Morsi.
feeds.feedburner.com/~ff/catholicnewsagency/dailynews?d=yIl2AUoC8zA
http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/catholicnewsagency/dailynews/~4/XK6CMEeLHrQ

Full article…
 
It would be good at least if Catholic churches could organize some kind of day of solidarity with Coptic of Egypt, some kind of demonstration to show the world that we are not oblivious to what is happening to the Christians of Egypt.

Not that the Western media would give more than a passing note to such a thing, but…
 
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