An update on this story. "At Least 7 Killed After Coptic Christmas Mass In Egypt," from the Associated Press, January 6 (thanks to Sashland):
Three men in a car sprayed automatic gunfire into a crowd of churchgoers in southern Egyptian as they left a midnight Mass for Coptic Christmas, killing at least seven people in a drive-by shooting, the church bishop and security officials said.
Egypt's Interior Ministry said the attack Wednesday just before midnight was suspected as retaliation for the November rape of a Muslim girl by a Christian man in the same town. The statement said witnesses have identified the lead attacker.
Prior reporting described the accusation of rape as a rumor. Nonetheless, riots ensued.
The attack took place in the town of Nag Hamadi in Qena province, about 40 miles from the famous ancient ruins of Luxor. A local security official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media, confirmed that seven were dead and three seriously wounded.
Bishop Kirollos of the Nag Hamadi Diocese told The Associated Press six male churchgoers and one security guard were killed. He said he had left St. John's church just minutes before the attack.
"A driving car swerved near me, so I took the back door. By the time I shook hands with someone at the gate, I heard the mayhem, lots of machine gun shots," he said in a telephone interview. He said he saw five bodies lying on the ground when he first looked at the site of the shooting, about 600 yards where he was.
The bishop said he was concerned about violence on the eve of Coptic Christmas, which falls on Thursday, because of previous threats following the rape of the 12-year-old girl in November.
He got a message on his mobile phone saying: "It is your turn."
"I did nothing with it. My faithful were also receiving threats in the streets, some shouting at them: 'We will not let you have festivities,"' he said.
Because of the threats, he said he ended his Christmas Mass one hour early.
He said Muslim residents of Nag Hamadi and neighboring villages rioted for five days in November and torched and damaged Christian properties in the area after the rape.
"For days, I had expected something to happen on Christmas day," he said. The bishop said police have now asked him to stay at home for fear of further violence. [...]
Clashes between Muslims and Christians are not uncommon in southern Egypt and in recent years have begun seeping into the capital. An Amnesty International report said sectarian attacks on the Coptic Christian community, comprising between 6 million and 8 million people in Egypt, increased in the year 2008. Sporadic clashes between Coptic Christians and Muslims left eight people dead.
Vendetta killing is also common among southern Egyptians, and is usually over land or family disputes.
The bishop said he had an idea of who the attackers were, calling them "Muslim radicals."
"It is all religious now. This is a religious war about how they can finish off the Christians in Egypt," he said.
Clashes between Muslims and Christians are not uncommon in southern Egypt and in recent years have begun seeping into the capital.
..................
Untrue. The line should read, "Attacks on Christians by Muslims are not uncommon in southern Egypt and in recent years have begun seeping into the capital."
OT - Publix Supermarkets in Florida have published a 2010 calendar with Dec. 7 marked as "Islamic New Year" - no mention of Pearl Harbor:
http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=121181
The Copts are the unswerving, the descendants of the original Egyptians who did not, when the Arabs came, give up and accept Islam. Enduring the humiliation, degradation, and permanent physical insecurity of the dhimmi status, many Copts not unsurprisingly fell away, gave up, accepted Islam, took Arab names and thought of themselves no longer as Copts but as Arabs. They forgot their own past. But that was not enough for some Muslims, and there were episodes of mass forced conversions intermittently over the past thousand years.
How many of those Muslims now persecuting and even murdering Copts ever dare to realize that their own ancestors may have been Copts, and try to imagine the horrific circumstances which caused them to become Muslim? How many Pakistani, Bangladeshi, and Indian Muslims do the same, to deploy whatever imaginative sympathy they have back in time, and to think of what were surely their Hindu (or possibly Buddhist or Jain) ancestors, and the circumstances under which they converted to Islam, and all that followed from that conversion, including the stunting, over the centuries, of moral and mental growth?
Who, among those who think of themselves as Arabs and make life difficult for the Berbers of the Kabyle, in Algeria, or elsewhere in North Africa, realize how few Arabs really came to North Africa, and how many of today's Arabs are the descendants of Berbers, the very people now suffering from cultural and linguistic imperialism from the Arabs, because Islam is a natural vehicle for Arab supremacism, everywhere?
When will those whose ancestors were forced to become Muslim start to think back, start to wonder about it, as the film director Emir Kusturica did, and then decided, though formally born a Muslim, it was all nonsense, and he understood perfectly the conditions that caused his ancestors to become Muslim, and he was no longer going to continue the farce, and in a ceremony at a Serbian cathedral, this "Muslim" director had himself baptised?
There's no need to worry about whether your children will someday listen to the siren-song of the violent Jihadists, or will be permanently looked at askance, with justified suspicion, all over the Western world -- from here on out. There is no need to condemn your children to what I mention above, the moral and mental stunting of growth that the Total Belief-System of Islam guarantees. No, there is a way out. It's the way chosen by Emir Kusturica, or by others who did not necessarily jettison Islam for some other faith, but at least, by way of that damned "identity" that everyone these days seems to think is so necessary to possess and give a name to, they choose another of their "multiple identities" (to borrow Bernard Lewis's phrase) -- Berber, Kurd, Turk, Perisan, Coptic Egyptian, Christian, Jew, Zoroastrian, Hindu, Buddhist -- just with a little effective use of a mental time-machine.
It can be done. It makes sense.
Hugh:
Thanks for your depth.
Maybe a posted translation of your comment in Arabic would be in order to expand opportunities to reach the largest target market.
Also, as I have been told by the 'learned' and have seen references to such claims in various books, that NO (sic) forced conversions occur in islan, would you be so kind one day to post on the real history of forced conversions. It would nice to be able to direct the confused and manipulated to a reference material that refutes their false claims.
Thank you
[be sure to click on "recommended" above the article at NPR]
and yip,yip, thanks for the hat tip Marisol, made my day!
Lets spell it out as it really is:- Heavily-armed Muslims with AK47s slaughtering unarmed and defenceless Christians in every case, whether it is in Egypt, Iraq, Pakistan or any other country where Muslims make up a large percentage of the population. Of course, it is too much to expect for our dhimmified and cowardly press and media to tell us all of this. They'd sooner sell out our fellow Christians than tell the truth. They are complicit in the slaughter of Christians and other infidels through their silence and moral equivalence and are therefore just as much to blame as the Muslim savages themselves.
The Copts got a vague reference in Obama's Cairo speech.
"The richness of religious diversity must be upheld - whether it is for Maronites in Lebanon or the Copts in Egypt. And fault lines must be closed among Muslims as well, as the divisions between Sunni and Shia"
(a call for the Copts to christain up?)
Now the Bishop is talking "religious war"
Holy unclenched fists, those Maronites better look out.
""It is all religious now. This is a religious war ......"
I have pointed this out on many occassions....the evidence is overwhelming...it is a "global" religious war being carried out by Muslims..and non Muslims are ever so slowly waking up...
"mental time-machine"
Perfect, Hugh!
I think of the 'Manchurian Candidate' whenever I think of Islam.
The ideology so warps peoples minds it would be almost impossible to recognize your own sister in five years after undergoing the indoctrination process.
The Nazis helped their people to turn on their friends and neighbors in the same ways and give them up to the Gestapo. Constant daily brainwashing with false propaganda and threats of torture or death if you do not comply can do wonders.
Today we are witnessing the takeover of the US government by a similar force that could, in less than four years, place the American people in the very same position.
Using it Hegelian Dialect, the Obama administration, and even using G.W. Bush, the puppet, before him, is doing all it can to erode Constitutional rights in the US even to the point of allowing Interpol full access to your records.
I, being a Canadian, feel threatened that this government will one day march troops into our country and force us under the same oppressive yoke. Anything is possible with the current administration. Fabian Society members, as they are, they live by the emblem of the "wolf in sheep's clothing"
They are usurpers, devious in their ways and sinister as an Islamic army was when conquering Egypt of the Germans were conquering Czechoslovakia or Poland.
America has every right to be concerned about their future just as the Egyptian Copts, had they known, may have prevented what has happened to them. They now persecute their own friends, relatives and neighbors because of a change in ideologies that made it so.
This is just a glimpse of what the non-Muslims of Europe have to look forward to in decades to come.
And when is His Bowerdownerness, the Christian Emir of the Unitedhimmi States of America, B. Hussein Obama, from the Church Of "GOD DAMN YOU AMERICA!" and the Church of "CHICKENS HAVE COME HOME TO ROOST!" or his administration utter a single word in defense of the persecuted Copt minority of Egypt? Is this the CHANGE WE NEED liberals ??
From the article - "He said Muslim residents of Nag Hamadi and neighboring villages rioted for five days in November and torched and damaged Christian properties in the area after the rape."
It is ironic that Nag Hamadi is the village near the location of the Gnostic Gospels which were found in the 1950s. It also demonstrates that Christianity was present long before the armies of the Jihad arrived.
What I don't understand is why the Muslims seem to overreact over every little "wrong" - whether it was indeed wrong or not - by going to extreme measure causing death, yet they can do whatever they please themselves. This behaviour is not only hypocritical but also extremely childish. Time for them to grow up! *snarl*
This is UNBELIEVEABLE:
Egyptian Muhammadan Muslim "Sayiid Qutb" writes:
" The reason Allah has given us the command to fight the Infidels is:
First: they do not believe in Allah nor the Last Day.
Second: they do not forbid that which Allah has forbidden and His Messenger.
Third: they do not condone the religion of truth.
Fourth: that the Jews of them said: Uzair(Josiah or Ezra) the son of God. And the Christians whom said: "Christ(Jesus), the Son of God and are in these two opinions, resembling the saying of those who disbelieved before, whether from pagans, Greeks, Romans or Gentiles, or heathen Indians, or the pagans of Egypt, or others who disbelieve (and later that severing the trinity that the Christians, and the claim affiliation to God from them or from the Jews adapted from previous gentile and not out of Christianity and Judaism).
Fifth: they took their rabbis and monks as lords besides God. Have also taken Christ as Lord. And this conflict with what they ordered by the unification of God and condemnation him alone, and they are the "polytheists"!
VI: they are warriors, the religion of God want to extinguish Allah's light with their mouths, and they are this "infidel"!
Seventh: that many of the rabbis and monks eat people's wealth unlawfully, and bar from God's way(Jihad).
On the basis of these descriptions and this selection is a fact that by the people of the book, decided the final commands on which the relationship between the disbelievers and the believers of Allah's religion, based on the technique of God."
There are far too many people in the civilized world attached to insisting that we are not at war with mohammedanism ... and they just will not accept the fact that whether or not we are at war with mohammedanism, mohammedanism is at war with us.
So their attitude doesn't cut much ice.
Some of it may be sheer stupidity.
They seem to be incapable of recognizing imperialism, unless it is dressed up in the official school-sanctioned imperialism suit that they were shown at college.
Imperialism has to be well dressed, western, rich, equipped with massive military machinery and supplied by enormous banks and factories, and ... preferably, carrying a placard that says "I am imperialism".
The idea that miscellaneous non-western people with odds and ends of armaments and improvised bombs might be a serious, intent and real imperialist force doesn't seem to penetrate their thick skulls.
The mohammedan elites, for the most part, will not go head to head with the civilized elites militarily. They know they don't stand a chance. (Although the Iranians are going to give it a go.) So mohammedan imperialism, mostly, will not take it's more traditional and easier-for-idiots-to-recognize form.
I suppose our idiots in DC might actually get it if their rich saudi buddies started riding around on horses waving swords over their heads. But that is not likely to happen. I doubt they can ride anything rougher than a Mercedes.
But the mohammedan elites are just fine with training, financing and then disowning a nearly random mix of their people to come after us with every sort of covert operation and small scale assault imaginable.
And the dopes that our crack-brained universities have vomited into our governing elites just role right along with the program.
Greed, illusion and stupidity.
Good point, tanstaafl. Nag Hammadi is famous for this.
Instead of killing Christian and find away to free the killers; the Egyptian government should take care of its national security.
Israel to build wall along Egyptian border
Why NOT
CIA The World Factbook saying
“Egypt is a transit country for women trafficked from Eastern European countries to Israel for sexual exploita...tion. Egypt is on the Tier 2 Watch List for the third year in a row because it did not provide evidence of increasing efforts to investigate and prosecute traffickers. Egypt made no discernible efforts to punish trafficking crimes in 2007 and the Egyptian penal code does not prohibit all forms of trafficking; Egypt did not increase its services to trafficking victims during the reporting period (2008)”
Israel trying to solve a problem that Egypt should take care of
PLEASE HELP US IN EGYPT; THE ONLY WAY IS TO LET THE WEST KNOWS THE TRUE IT'S BEEN OVER 40 YEARS WE CAN'T TAKE IT ANY MORE.
the police got over 180 christian after the killing just to make the family not to say who is the organizer for the shooting because he is a member of the egyptian parliman Obama think said once Islam is peace I hope he think again