The very first line -- "Father Metyas Mankarios ministers to garbage men" -- flies right by but actually it is telling. Islamic law for dhimmis forbids them to hold authority over Muslims, so they generally occupied the most menial positions in society. Thus this is not just evidence of "discrimination," but of the lingering effects, and new resurgence, of Sharia in Egypt.
"Egypt's Copts fearful amid increasing tensions," by Jeffrey Fleishman in the Los Angeles Times, February 7:
Father Metyas Mankarios ministers to garbage men and runs a newspaper for Coptic Christians from an office crammed with brittle archives above vegetable sellers and fishmongers barking out prices along the muddy roads of a Cairo neighborhood.Few have it easy here. From dawn until deep into the night, there is the clatter of making a living, no matter how small. But these days, Mankarios, his face engulfed by a graying beard, worries more about the increasing discrimination and resentment from Muslims who attack monasteries and teach their children that Christians are infidels.
"It's dangerous today," he said. "Egypt is going in new directions that are starting to affect the harmony between religions. This attitude is evident not only among ordinary Muslims but among top government and Islamic officials."
Egypt's Copts and Muslims have co-existed for centuries, through spasms of bloodshed and recrimination but mostly in relative peace. In recent years, however, tolerance has ebbed and tensions have multiplied in a predominantly Muslim society that has grown more conservative and inclined to drawing religious distinctions in schools, public offices and in mixed neighborhoods.
They've "co-existed for centuries" as long as the Christians knew their place, and acquiesced quietly to ever-dwindling numbers brought about by the depredations of Sharia for dhimmis.
The atmosphere was further agitated this month after a bishop received death threats and six Christians attending a Coptic Christmas Eve Mass north of Luxor were killed in a drive-by shooting. The Muslim assailants were reportedly seeking revenge for the alleged rape of a Muslim girl by a Copt.The killings highlighted years of sectarian unease in the village of Nag Hammadi, where riots erupted immediately and shops and businesses were burned.
A human rights group accused a member of President Hosni Mubarak's ruling party of inciting the animosities through his connection to one of the attackers. The group, which filed a lawsuit, alleges that lawmaker Abdel Rahim el Ghoul intervened to have one of the gunmen released from prison days before the shooting. Ghoul has denied wrongdoing, and the prosecutor general's office announced that there was no larger conspiracy.
"We need a parliamentary investigation to find out who was really behind this massacre," said Ashraf Radhi, one of a number of Muslim political activists who condemned the deaths. "It is clear to all of us that the three criminals or mercenaries did not act alone. They were backed by someone with authority."
The shooting roiled deep-seated religious prejudices in a nation where Islamic clerics were outraged by a recent ban on minarets in Switzerland but have been less vigorous in speaking out against abuses or protecting the rights of Copts in their own country.
Nag Hammadi "was not an individual act. It is a political, religious, social and above all a governmental crime," wrote Mohamed Shabba in the independent Nahdet Masr newspaper....
"It's dangerous today," he said. "Egypt is going in new directions that are starting to affect the harmony between religions. This attitude is evident not only among ordinary Muslims but among top government and Islamic officials."
When did Islamic Egypt ever have "harmony between religions"? My Coptic friends tell me they fought wars against Islamics in their youth, and they are no longer young. Egyptians Jews were expelled in 1967. This religious intolerance Christians and Jew 'dhimmis' suffered in Egypt is eons long, had temporary reprieve during era of post-colonial semi-secularization, but is regressing back to retro-Sharia religious intolerance at break neck speed. See the growing hijabs in Cairo as evidence of this social-religious retro rush. No reason to think Mohammad's evil minions will change either.
From the remainder of the article:
Statement #!, describing the words of a Copt, Fr Mankarios:
"He recalled his boyhood in the 1960s, when, like today, there were symbols of differences between Copts and Muslims: Copts bore the tattooed cross and Muslims a brownish callus on their foreheads, known as the raison, from years of prostrating in prayer.
But mostly, he said, the faiths mingled with little anxiety because Copts were less demanding of their rights."
Got that, everyone? - 'the faiths mingled with little anxiety *because Copts were less demanding of their rights* {my emphasis - dda}".
Statement #2, from the same Fr Mankarios:
"When I was young, I didn't see all this tension coming," he said. "We got along with Muslims just fine".
Conclusion: you can 'get along with Muslims just fine'...so long as you don't demand your rights. So long as you accept that * you have no rights; not even a right to criticise, to complain, to scream or to cry out against the cruelties that are casually or deliberately and obsessively inflicted upon you*.
Like the Pol Pot torturers, who demanded that their victims must smile, and remain silent, and NEVER weep or scream, the Muslims also demand that those they are tormenting must never, ever complain.
Has anyone *explained* to Mr Fleishman, of the LA Times, exactly *why* it is that Copts tattoo a cross onto the bodies of their newborn children, girls and boys?
Answer: because, down the centuries, Muslims have repeatedly helped themselves to beautiful girls and beautiful boys from among the Copts, raping and torturing and enslaving them and forcibly 'converting' them to Islam. To mark your child's skin with the cross is an attempt to say: no matter where my child is taken, my child will never be able to forget that he or she began life as a baptised Christian child.
Today, of course, when such girls, marked with the sign of the cross, are seized and raped and 'converted' and 'married' to their Muslim rapists (who often discard them later), Muslim doctors have been known to excise the skin bearing the tattoo.
Allah is the DEVIL and Mohammed is his prophet.