More on this story (note the initial, spurious allegations that accompanied the violence), and another scintillating study in proportional response. "Egypt: Christians arrested, shops looted in village," from Compass Direct News, November 21:
ISTANBUL, November 21 (Compass Direct News) – Authorities in an Egyptian village arrested 50 Coptic Christians, whose shops were then looted, to pacify Muslims following violence that erupted on Nov. 4 over a Christian boy’s unwitting break with custom.
Muslim villagers attacked the homes and shops of Coptic Christians in violence-prone Tayyiba, a town with 35,000 Christians and 10,000 Muslims, after 14-year-old Copt Mina William failed to dismount his donkey as a funeral procession passed.
William was watching the procession in Tayibba, 220 kilometers (137 miles) south of Cairo, with Nathan Yaccoub, also 14. William’s failure to dismount violated a local custom of showing respect, Copts United reported, and members of the procession reportedly beat him before completing the procession. William suffered minor injuries.
After the funeral procession, the processional members began throwing stones at the homes of local Copts and attacking their shops before police broke up the crowd with tear gas.
A priest said members of the procession did not attack the youths for showing disrespect but as an excuse to lash out against the community’s Christians for a previous episode of sectarian violence.
“These two children with the donkey didn’t know about the traditions,” said Father Metias Nasr, a Cairo-based priest with connections in areas south of the capital. “The Muslims there were angry about the last case of violence and wanted to create a new problem with these two children there.”
When the violence began, police presence increased significantly in the city. But rather than quell the unrest, police reportedly made matters worse for the Christians. After breaking up the crowd, officers detained 50 Copts and 10 Muslims.
A source told Compass that police arrested a disproportionate amount of Christians to create a false sense of equanimity and to pressure the Christians into “reconciliation” with the attackers so the Copts would not prosecute them. The arrested Christians have since been released.
In the two weeks since the attacks and looting, the increased police force in the village has harassed Copts through intimidation, “fines” and racketeering. Police have taken an estimated $50,000 from village Copts, the source said.
Once police lifted the curfew, Coptic shopkeepers returned to their stores to discover that they had been looted. Sources said the perpetrators were “supply inspectors,” local government inspectors who do quality control checks on goods. They gained access by smashing locks and doors of the shops.
The sources said supply inspectors plundered grocery stores, a poultry shop, an electronics store and a pharmacy.
According to Coptic weekly Watani, looters stole nearly $2,000 worth of goods from grocer Bishara Gayed. Another victim of the looting, an owner of a poultry shop who declined to give his name, blamed supply inspectors for running off with his stock.
A local clergyman condemned the violence.
“It is unreasonable that a mistake by some 14-year-old should lead to all that rampage,” a village Coptic priest known as Father Augustinus told Watani. “Something ought to be done to halt all this.”
Orphanage Bulldozed
Numerous instances of sectarian violence have struck Tayyiba in the last few months.
Last month a Coptic Christian was killed over a dispute with a Muslim who wanted to buy his house. Violence escalated, resulting in damaged storefronts, 48 arrests and injuries sustained by three Christians and a Muslim.
Such quarrels typically arise from land ownership issues. A Coptic source told Compass that Christians in Tayyiba are generally wealthier than their Muslim counterparts, often leading to resentment.
Tayyiba was stable at press time, though the town is considered to be continually in danger of religious violence flaring. This situation is common throughout Egypt, Fr. Nasr told Compass.
“The village is like anywhere in Egypt,” he said. “In every place in Egypt we can say that in one minute everyone can be destroyed by fanatics, sometimes through the encouragement of security [forces].”
The Coptic Church has faced recent difficulties in other Egyptian cities, with government officials attempting to obstruct their religious activities. On Wednesday (Nov. 19), city officials in Lumbroso, Alexandria destroyed an unfinished but recently furnished Coptic orphanage owned by Abu-Seifein Church and worth 6 million Egyptian pounds (US$1 million).
Officials claimed the building did not have a license, although church leaders said the demolition came on orders from the religiously zealous Islamic mayor. Ali Labib, former head of police and state security in Alexandria, in his two-year tenure as mayor has refused license applications for new church construction or rebuilding, said a Cairo-based Coptic priest who requested anonymity. [...]
And this is the kind of democracy and republic that we must encourage in the Arab world?
I hope the Coptic community the world over as well as representatives of other communities oppressed by Muslims, past and present, show up in Geneva in April of 2009.
I urge dhimmis and their descendents to get out of their lethargy and start talking and demanding REPARATIONS!
Throw their institutionalized racism their barbarism and the atrocities committed in the name of Islam to their faces! Let the world know what Islam is really about!
If you are new to this site: note well that the horrible behaviour recorded of the Muslims in this story, toward the Christians - the hairtrigger rioting on the most trivial excuse, perhaps even on an entirely trumped-up excuse, the lynching, the looting spree and vandalism, and the connivance of the authorities in a Kristallnacht-style assault on a defenceless community -
is *absolutely typical* of the way in which Muslims treat dhimmi or de facto dhimmi communities *all over* the Muslim world; it is the way that communities like the Copts, non-Muslim people living within Muslim-dominated societies, were forced to live, and still are forced to live, in every part of the Muslim world.
Even if, due to sheer hard work and guts, or due to this or that local Muslim community or ruler slacking off on the persecution for a while (humans can grow weary in ill-doing, as in well-doing) the non-Muslims attained a degree of prosperity, they were always - always, always, always - liable to be, at any moment, out of the blue, slandered, lynched (as the boy was, in this report), raped, robbed and - in the worst cases - forcibly 'converted' to Islam, or still worse, mass murdered, in pogroms ranging in scale from the local to the genocidal.
They lived, as Mr Fitzgerald here at this site has often observed, in "a condition of degradation, humiliation, and extreme physical insecurity". They lived, from day to day, under a Scimitar of Damocles.
As for the claim that the Christian boy had dissed the Muslims by not getting off his donkey...this is straight out of the cruel and draconian 'rules for dhimmis', all of them designed to expose dhimmis to perpetual humiliation.
If you read Bat Yeor's The Dhimmi, you will find that in many Muslim lands it was the rule that a non-Muslim had to dismount from his donkey (non-Muslims weren't permitted to ride horses) if he met a Muslim; this appears to be an elaboration of the general principle involved in this clause of the legendary Pact of Omar, which prescribes "We [i.e. dhimmis] will respect Muslims, move from the places we sit in if they choose to sit in them."
Here, from Ibn Kathir's interpretation of Quran Surah 9: 29, the line about how the dhimmis must ' feel themselves HUMILIATED', is what Muslims are taught to do, the attitude they are supposed to display, toward people like the Copts:
" (until they pay the Jizyah), if they do not choose to embrace Islam,
﴿عَن يَدٍ﴾
" (with willing submission), in defeat and subservience,
﴿وَهُمْ صَـغِرُونَ﴾
(and feel themselves subdued.), disgraced, humiliated and belittled.
"Therefore, Muslims are not allowed to honor the people of Dhimmah or elevate them above Muslims,
"for they are miserable, disgraced and humiliated.
Muslim {one of the authoritative Hadith - dda} recorded from Abu Hurayrah that the Prophet said,
«لَا تَبْدَءُوا الْيَهُودَ وَالنَّصَارَى بِالسَّلَامِ، وَإِذَا لَقِيتُمْ أَحَدَهُمْ فِي طَرِيقٍ فَاضْطَرُّوهُ إِلَى أَضْيَقِه»
(Do not initiate the Salam to the Jews and Christians, and if you meet any of them in a road, force them to its narrowest alley.)"
Got that, O new reader? This respected Muslim theologian/ jurist/ Qur'an commentator is *telling. Muslims. to. behave. like. thugs. and. bullies.* toward non-Muslims.
Sacralised gangster behaviour. Thuggery - commanded and justified. *spit *spit* spit*.
Here is Bat Yeor, in her essay 'A Christian Minority: The Copts in Egypt', in Spencer's 'The Myth of Islamic Tolerance', summing up the system of dhimmitude: "a codified system of legal tyranny that...in practice often led to genocide".
A poster on this site, who had spoken with Jews from Yemen who escaped dhimmitude in the 1950s, related what they had said, of what it was like to live - or, to survive - under that system. They told him it was "hell on earth".
Tell me again just why Egypt is receiving one cent in foreign aid from the U.S. and other Western contries.
So this is a country that is one of the largest recipients of my government's foreign aid largesse. Does anyone have the name and address of the Ambassador of Egypt? I'm also thinking of writing to my congressman and senators to ask for a defunding of the Egyptian government.
It's a shame that Copts and other Christians have to bear the brunt of so much of Islams peace.
Christians are suffering the peace of Islam all over the world.
The last thing we want is for Islam to bring peace. You can see the high price that is demanded...
dumbledoresarmy...Got that, O new reader? This respected Muslim theologian/ jurist/ Qur'an commentator is *telling. Muslims. to. behave. like. thugs. and. bullies.* toward non-Muslims.
A while back there was an article about an imam who told his followers to hit kufrs on the head and take their money, and to otherwise beat and abuse them...his argument was that if it was fine for the Prophet it was fine for them...
Egypt: Christian boy fails to dismount from donkey in custom for passing funeral procession; Muslims riot, loot Christian shops
..............
Yes, this is straight out of the 7th-century "Pact of Omar"--the constant humiliation of its non-Muslim, second class citizens. It also shows how shaky is the status of the "protected people"--how would anyone like their security to rely on the considered social etiquette of 14-year-old boys? Any "slip" results in punishment of the whole community.
more:
"Coptic shopkeepers returned to their stores to discover that they had been looted. Sources said the perpetrators were “supply inspectors,” local government inspectors who do quality control checks on goods. They gained access by smashing locks and doors of the shops."
So these are not just actions by random thugs. Imagine being subjected to official "quality control checks", knowing that these inspectors might well be filing away the fine points of the wealth of your shop for future reference, when an opportunity for looting might arise.
more:
"Such quarrels typically arise from land ownership issues. A Coptic source told Compass that Christians in Tayyiba are generally wealthier than their Muslim counterparts, often leading to resentment."
Yes--and how is such a thing possible, considering how harassed the Coptic community is? And yet, you find this all over the Muslim world--no matter how oppressed or threatened, one often finds that the Jewish community (in cases where all the Jews have not been driven out), or the Eastern Orthodox community, or the Catholic community, or the Armenian community, or the Buddhist community, or the Hindu community, is so much wealthier than the local Muslims?
And this is not a regional phenomenon--one finds it in India, and Thailand, and in Iraq, and Turkey, and Egypt. This is also observable in Europe, where Muslim communities tend to trail the success of even communities of other new immigrants.
Muslims seldom seem to consider this, in terms of wondering why it is that non-Muslims have such a better work-ethic than their Muslim neighbors, even under the most insecure of circumstances.
Instead, it leads them to resent the unfathomable success of the Infidels, and leads them to loot, and extort, and threaten these people who dare to outdo their betters, those "best of people", the Muslims.
From the above article: A local clergyman condemned the violence.
This clergyman was a village Coptic priest. Conspicuously absent here are any reports of protests or denunciations of violence uttered by Muslim clerics.
Carsten Niebuhr reported more than 200 years ago, circa 1762, that forcing Christians and Jews to dismount from their donkeys [they weren't allowed to ride horses] when passing a Muslim was a regular practice in Egypt. It seems that things have not changed for the better in Egypt over those last 246 years.
I've noticed that in their religious fervour, they always have time to steal!
rioting and looting....favorite Muslim pasttimes...they will look for any reason under the sun to do so...
Eliyahu, it dates back to the Pact of Umar, in the 7th century, not the 18th century.
We shall not mount on saddles, nor shall we gird swords nor bear any kind of arms nor carry them on our- persons...
We shall not strike a Muslim...
We accept these conditions for ourselves and for the people of our community, and in return we receive safe-conduct.
If we in any way violate these undertakings for which we ourselves stand surety, we forfeit our covenant [dhimma], and we become liable to the penalties for contumacy and sedition.
How can we help the Copts?
Give them, and no other Egyptians, asylum.
As any Hindu intellectual would say, this was a religious riot.
* 33:21 ** 33:21 ** 33:21 ** 33:21 ** 33:21 ** 33:21 ** 33:21 ** 33:21 ** 33:21 ** 33:21 *
It's cheating honest language to call Islam a religion, per se, but despite that it's a good term for describing this Islamic sacrament, a tiresome yet exciting sacrament best consecrated in human blood. When done well, at least.
I prefer to call it (Islam) a political cult. Or fascist ideology. Calling Islam a religion is a disservice to the word religion.