"The rumours began on Saturday" and I can assure you that the violence would have begun in short fashion. It never takes long, as many Muslim thugs here in Egypt look for any excuse to "get the cross lovers"...

An example of the growing tension here... many Copts used to have the fish(an ancient symbol of Christianity) displayed on their vehicles... now you see Muslim youth sporting a shark... some say it is just "cute, youthful pranksterism" ...I doubt that any Copt would agree. I think the message to Christians is all too clear.

Security Forces... what a joke... I have lived here in Cairo for many years... I always pondered what they called these sloppy, dot headed (the mark of peity...not) baffoons... now I know... Security Forces = /

Posted by: gnegypt at February 17, 2007 8:43 AM

There is no love in Islam.....not then, not now, not ever.......

Posted by: exsgtbrown at February 17, 2007 10:03 AM

Seems like Al-Reuters wants to give the impression that the problems happening in Egypt are similar to those in Iraq, where Shias kill Sunnis, and vice versa. The problem, of course, is that what is happening in Egypt is MUSLIMS attacking CHRISTIANS. Period.

Notice also how Al-Reuters says the man who stabbed a CHristian was "mentally ill". Yes, he has the "Jihad Sindrome".

Posted by: Crusader at February 17, 2007 10:51 AM

Maybe Father Patrick Gaffney of Notre Dame University, mentioned in the article above, might want to leave his Ivory Tower, go to Cairo, and help the his fellow Christians rebuild and restock their stores, that is if the Egyptian government will give them permits to do so. On the other hand, people like Father Gaffney, a total apologist for Islam, would probably not want to get his hands dirty. Instead, he would act as a counselor, urging the Christian man to do the right thing...and convert to Islam for his future wife's sake and for the Religion of Peace.

Posted by: maryrose at February 17, 2007 12:24 PM

The attack was taken "out of context."

Posted by: exsgtbrown at February 17, 2007 1:42 PM

This isn't the Montagues and the Capulets, with some kind of ancient feud. This merely reflects the division of the universe between Believers and Infidels that is central to the belief-system of Islam. Concocted out of bits of pagan Arab pre-Islamic lore (those jinns), bits and pieces of distorted because misunderstood or misremembered Jewish and Christian lore and stories and major figures (all of them appropriated, in their new, Islamic form, as part of the Narrative of Islam), Islam owes its origins to the need for conquering Arab tribes, managing to subdue peoples who, though less warlke, were far more productive, wealthy, advanced in civilizational terms (were not the Nazis essentially killing people, both Jews and non-Jews, who were more advanced than they in civiliztaional terms?), were not as aggressive or warlike. A very small number of Arabs managed to conquer very large territories very quickly. They needed an ideology that would both justify such conquest (to those conquered) and promote further conquest. The result was what, in the seventh and eighth centuries, became known, and fixed, as Islam. Whether or not Muhammad existed, whether or not any of the stories attached to his name are true or not, does not matter: what matters is that Muslims believe he existed, and where and when the official narrative tells them, and they further believe that over a period of 23 years the Qur'an, uncreated and immutable, was revealed to him, the Seal of the Prophets, and they further believe that his words and deeds have been recorded, and that the most skilled muhaddithin have managed, by dint of study of transmission or isnad-chains, have been able to properly assign levels of authenticity to the many tens of thousands of hadith, so that Muslims are justified in relying on such collections as those of Bukhari and Muslim.

Islam is literally a fighting faith, constructed to justify and promote fighting and conquest. It has had an amazing run, but the mental incapacity that it encourages for a while put a stop to it. Muslims following Islam were and are incapable of creating modern economies. But along came the fabulous unearned wealth -- some ten trillion dollars since 1973 -- from sales of oil and gas which had nothing to do with hard work or entrepreneurial flair, or inventive genius by any Arabs or Muslims. And that money has bought hundreds of billions of dollars worth of weapons, of armies of Western hirelings at every level, in every capital of the West, has paid for mosques and madrasas all over the world (soon one is coming to a city or town near you -- unless you manage somehow to stop it, or get the government to stop such foreign funding). And the West's own political decadence, and the stupidity of its leaders, and fashionable attitudes rooted in a diseased sympathy for those who merely appear to be victims (but are not, are so often the ones to blame for their own predicament, their own backwarness), and of course the sentimentalism (ranging from Family-of-Man "we're all the same" nonsense that ignores the influence of ideas or what may be called "culture" were that word not so mishandled, to Rodney-Kingesque "why-can't-we-all-get-along" since, presumably, "we all want the same things" -- see Bush, see everyone now in power in the Western world -- and even the sentimentalism of the tear that Baba Wawa managed to extract from her celebrity interviewee, or for that matter the goddam panda whose love-life is supposed to offer one of those cheery, see-you-tomorrow endings to the nightly news by some news-reader whose network have created a cult of personality around his, or her, utterly vacuous reality).

But don't get me started.

Posted by: Hugh at February 17, 2007 2:26 PM

Good lord, could a muslim woman want a christian man?

Posted by: mustang65 at February 17, 2007 2:31 PM

Man I used to think the UK was a racist place with people doing things like that. But I guess today it's not about race it's about belief it's the social politics.

Posted by: jesusisthelamb at February 17, 2007 7:07 PM

Nicely put, Hugh.

It still astonishes me the terror that make up some people’s lives in certain places. This terror did not come into place by chance or unfortunate consequences, but by choice and artificial reinforcement. The fact that no attempt is made by the terror makers to recognize their wrongdoing tells us something is seriously wrong with them: something is missing in them or something destructive is added to them. Are they broke? We have enough evidence now to suggest they are, and they actively try to break us as well, sometimes successfully.

Posted by: ofcourse at February 17, 2007 7:55 PM

Huge you are wrong the Koran didnot borrow anything from Christian or jew. First many pagon in hot climate donot eat pork as pork can make you ever ill
and some case kill you. Muhammad didnot have any contact with jew or christian in Mecca. The christian in Arabric workship idol also in fact than idoel of Jesus was place inside the Ka'bah.
T than reading Critical Lives Muhammad by Yahiya Emerick than american protestant who convert to Islam in 1989. Michael Hart in the one Hundred Most Influential People who ever live pick as number one Muhammad ihn Abdullah.

Posted by: DefenderofIslam at February 17, 2007 11:34 PM

huge

muslim good, you chritian bad, so we kill you

and it u own falt, islam good, relig of peece

i need spel lesson

my name defendr of islam (wee wee on him)

Posted by: leonthepigfarmer at February 17, 2007 11:59 PM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qleluagt4U
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HcbUsXPXyz4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vs8JzhpkGUY

http://www.stlyrics.com/lyrics/forrestgump/whattheworldneedsnowislove.htm

Artist: Jackie DeShannon Lyrics
Song: What the World Needs Now Is Love Lyrics

What the world needs now is love, sweet love
It's the only thing that there's just too little of
What the world needs now is love, sweet love,
No not just for some but for everyone.

Lord, we don't need another mountain,
There are mountains and hillsides enough to climb
There are oceans and rivers enough to cross,
Enough to last till the end of time.

What the world needs now is love, sweet love
It's the only thing that there's just too little of
What the world needs now is love, sweet love,
No, not just for some but for everyone.

Lord, we don't need another meadow
There are cornfields and wheat fields enough to grow
There are sunbeams and moonbeams enough to shine
Oh listen, Lord, if you want to know.

What the world needs now is love, sweet love
It's the only thing that there's just too little of
What the world needs now is love, sweet love,
No, not just for some but for everyone.

No, not just for some, oh, but just for everyone.

Posted by: ofcourse at February 18, 2007 1:20 AM

"Huge you are wrong the Koran didnot borrow anything from Christian or jew. First many pagon in hot climate donot eat pork as pork can make you ever ill
and some case kill you. Muhammad didnot have any contact with jew or christian in Mecca."
-- from a Muslim poster above

The Muslim poster apparently ignores all the mention of Jews and Christians in the Qur'an, in the Hadith, in the Sira. He forgets the Banu Qurayza. He forgets the Jewish farmers of the Khaybar Oasis. He forgets so many mentions of Jews, Christians, and pagans. Or did he mean, slyly, the words "in Mecca" to exempt Muhammad's encounters or attacks on non-Muslims -- Jews and Christians as well as pagan Arabs still wedded to their Jahiliyya? Even if he did, he is flatly wrong.

Apparently he hasn't read closely enough the Qur'an and Hadith and Sira. He really should do so.

And of course Islam took over, appropriated, wholesale, the major figures, and even in one case a site holy to Jews in a city holy to both Jews and Christians -- the Temple Mount -- there to finally fix (after much debate among Muslims of the time) the "furthest mosque" (al-masjid al-aksa) right there, in order to stake a religio-politico-geopolitical claim to Jerusalem, and against the two prior monotheisms which Islam claimed not so much to supercede, but rather to have always been there, as the Real Thing, while both Jews and Christians had mistakenly distorted or received incorrectly the message of Islam.

Comparative religion is not exactly a subject of study among Muslims. They don't want to hear anything about a conceivable reality other than the Official Islamic Narrative.

This poster offers a good example of this mental set.

Posted by: Hugh at February 18, 2007 10:11 AM

DefenderofIslam at February 17, 2007 11:34 PM:"Huge you are wrong the Koran didnot borrow anything from Christian or jew. First many pagon in hot climate donot eat pork as pork can make you ever ill and some case kill you."

Well today is Chinese New Year and I assure you about 1.3 billion Chinese people - most of whom live in hot humid countries - are eating a lot of pork. I know of no one outside the Jewish-Islamic tradition that does not eat pork. Any meant, if left too long, can kill you. Beef as easily as pork.

DefenderofIslam at February 17, 2007 11:34 PM:"Muhammad didnot have any contact with jew or christian in Mecca. The christian in Arabric workship idol also in fact than idoel of Jesus was place inside the Ka'bah."

Muhammed's wife's cousin was a Christian. Not only was he a Christian, but he wrote the Bible in Arabic for Muhammed to read if he wanted (and don't claim he couldn't because he clearly could). From the Sahih Bukhari Volume 1, Book 1, Number 3:

Narrated 'Aisha:
....
Khadija then accompanied him to her cousin Waraqa bin Naufal bin Asad bin 'Abdul 'Uzza, who, during the Pre-Islamic Period became a Christian and used to write the writing with Hebrew letters. He would write from the Gospel in Hebrew as much as Allah wished him to write. He was an old man and had lost his eyesight. .... But after a few days Waraqa died and the Divine Inspiration was also paused for a while."

Wow. When Muhammed's Christian in-law died, the Revelations stopped. Who would have thought it?!!

Posted by: HeiGou at February 18, 2007 1:35 PM

The US used to see this sort of thing, albeit on a much smaller scale, in the deep south.

A rumor would go around about a white woman and a black man, and the next thing you know the poor sob would be hanging from a tree and his house burned down.

It's not real hard to identify and understand.

Christians are the n*ggers of Egypt.

Posted by: joeblough at February 18, 2007 4:00 PM

exsgtbrown

That was a great line.

We all know that everything is taken out of context. The burning of embassies, the beheading of Christian schoolgirls as trophies, etc. Either taken out of context or misinterpreted. Kind of like Dom Irrera. He likes to say things like, "He is the stupidest, ugliest, moron who couldn't find sand in a desert. But I don't mean that in a bad way."

Posted by: one of the chosen people at February 18, 2007 6:31 PM

To Hugh:

TYBALT under ROMEO's arm stabs MERCUTIO, and flies with his followers

MERCUTIO
I am hurt.
A plague o' both your houses! I am sped.
Is he gone, and hath nothing?

BENVOLIO
What, art thou hurt?

MERCUTIO
Ay, ay, a scratch, a scratch; marry, 'tis enough.
Where is my page? Go, villain, fetch a surgeon.

Exit Page

ROMEO
Courage, man; the hurt cannot be much.

MERCUTIO
No, 'tis not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a
church-door; but 'tis enough,'twill serve: ask for
me to-morrow, and you shall find me a grave man. I
am peppered, I warrant, for this world. A plague o'both your houses! 'Zounds, a dog, a rat, a mouse, acat, to scratch a man to death! a braggart, arogue, a villain, that fights by the book ofarithmetic! Why the devil came you between us? I was hurt under your arm.

ROMEO
I thought all for the best.

MERCUTIO
Help me into some house, Benvolio,
Or I shall faint. A plague o' both your houses!
They have made worms' meat of me: I have it,
And soundly too: your houses!

Exeunt MERCUTIO and BENVOLIO

My namesake's obscure reference.
You're right, this isn't about a feud, but the plague is on both houses. Dar al Islam and Dar al Harb.

Posted by: A_Plague_on_Both_Houses at February 19, 2007 12:03 PM

ofcourse - many times I've listened to that song and thought 'nothing was ever truer'.

The problem isn't in what has been made in this world. The problem is what's been made of this world. People make the choice. In that sense, the lyric of the song is off, but the sentiment is dead right.

We can't make the true believers love us.

Right after 9/11 I did pray with my children that God forgive the people that destroyed the towers. They think they're doing the work of God and that what they do is good. I told that to my children. While I still believe this is true, I don't delude myself into thinking the living believers like the 19 on 9/11 will change their ways. I still pray sometimes and ask God to help them change their hearts, but I'm not going to count on this to fix my world.

And when the time comes and I'm up against the next Sudden Syndrome Jihadi I won't hesitate to pull the trigger of my .357 and I'll still pray for the mo-foes that remain.

Posted by: A_Plague_on_Both_Houses at February 19, 2007 2:23 PM

"And when the time comes and I'm up against the next Sudden Syndrome Jihadi I won't hesitate to pull the trigger of my .357 and I'll still pray for the mo-foes that remain."

.....May your aim be true, your vision clear, and be sure to get the one around the corner...Muslims, like rattlesnakes, travel in pairs most of the time....

Posted by: exsgtbrown at February 20, 2007 5:37 PM