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Fitzgerald: The Coptic Pope is held hostage

Sep 17, 2006 8:35 am By Hugh Fitzgerald

The Coptic Pope — the one held hostage by the Muslims of Egypt, subject to their pressures, aware of the potential for mayhem and murder visited upon the Copts by Muslims at any time — has denounced the Pope of Rome. We understand this. We understand that he is held hostage, and we dismiss these remarks even as we now dismiss the Michel Sabbaghs and Naim Ateeks and other “Palestinian” islamochristians who speak out of internalized fear, and also in some cases out of a misplaced identification of “Uruba” or “Arabness” with Islam. (That is an identification that Muslim Arabs insist on forcing on everyone who uses Arabic, and only the Maronites and the Copts, and not even all of them, have refused to fall for this aggrandizing and false definition of “Arab”).

But here’s the point. What if the world remains too fearful and confused ever to confront the truth? After all, those whose duty it is to instruct us remain unable to instruct us out of the fear and confusion from which Pope Shenouda is suffering. Or, still worse, they remain silent out of a diseased sympathy for Muslims, a belief that we should not tell the truth about Islam but try only to “win hearts and minds” of Muslims by lying to ourselves, as well as to them, about the nature of Islam. Yet the evidence is not only in the texts, not only in the 1350 years of Jihad-conquest and subjugation of non-Muslims, but in the behavior of Muslims, mobs and rulers, clerics and generals and political figures and so-called “intellectuals” alike, all over the world.
Under Sadat, the Coptic Pope went for a time into seclusion. The Copts are the original inhabitants of Egypt. What is left of Coptic art far outdoes in beauty, though not in monumental impact, the only other thing in Egypt worth seeing — the pre-Islamic tombs of the pharoahs, and the Sphinx.

Many of those who consider themselves Arabs are, in fact, the descendants of Copts. Would that some of them who are now persecuting Copts, were to come to their senses, and regain some interest in and sympathy for their pre-Islamic ancestors. (There is in the British Museum a Persian miniature that shows a mountain of Coptic skulls, apparently from some Muslim victory, real or imagined, that had even been heard of, and celebrated in painterly fashion, in distant Persia.)

But as Pope Shenouda tries to head off more violence against Copts by condemning Pope Benedict, other Christian prelates have felt forced to take more dramatic gestures — even to sacrifice their lives. One wishes here to recall the suicide, not a suicide-bombing, but a lone protest of Bishop John Joseph, back in 1998. Does everyone remember that act, or Bishop John Joseph? He shouldn’t be forgotten — not quite yet.

It is, in a way, so memorable not because of its impact but because it had so little impact. There is a poem among her Stikhi k chekham (“Verses to the Czechs”) by the Russian writer Marina Tsvetaeva, which begins with a clipping from a Czech newspaper about a single officer and twenty soldiers who were on the border when the Germans came marching in. The officer, leaving his soldiers behind, went forward on his own, to meet the Germans — to fight the Germans. The newspaper account read: “Sud’ba ego neizvestna.” (“His fate is unknown.”) And Tsvetaeva makes a poem out of it, and keeps repeating the line: “Dvadtsat’ soldat, odin’ ofitser” (“Twenty soldiers, and one officer.”) The point to the poem is that, while the Czechs could not actually go to war against the overwhelming forces of the Wehrmacht, and it was hopeless and helpless to stop the Nazi aggression, at least that one soldier went forward to sacrifice himself, and “voina — vsyo zhe byla.” (“There was a war.”). Bishop John Joseph protested, seemingly as futilely.

Here is an excerpt from a story about Bishop John Joseph in an Asian dispatch by Choong Tet Sieu and Shahid-ur Rehman: “IT WAS A PASSIONATE gesture in a land where passions often run high. For Catholics such as Bishop John Joseph, it is a mortal sin to take your own life. But on May 6, the 65-year-old Pakistani clergyman went to the courthouse in the town of Sahiwal, 700 km south of Islamabad, and shot himself in the head. What drove him to pull the trigger was the court’s decision last month that a young member of his Faisalabad diocese, Ayub Masih, must die for sullying the name of the Prophet Muhammad. What prepared him for his desperate act was despair at the increasing abuse of blasphemy laws in mainly Muslim Pakistan. His action was “˜the only effective answer to the ever-growing violence which surrounds us,” the bishop declared in a suicide note that called for the laws to be repealed.”

Tsvetaeva’s poem — it begins, for those who want to look it up, with the scene (“Cheshskij lesok, samij vesnoi….Den’ i mesyats, vershiny, ekhom, den’ kak nemtsy vkhodili k chekham….)–immortalized that unnamed officer whose fate was unknown.

Bishop John Joseph needs to be remembered in the same way. Perhaps no one will bother to write a poem about him. So let’s erect a monument to him in memory, right here.

We can do so by — unlike Pope Shenouda — speaking out, and speaking plainly.

The bullying, the fear for how murderous Muslims may take out their anger on helpless Christians within the Muslim lands (knowing full well, as they do, that nothing will be done — not even expulsion — to Muslims in Dar al-Islam), must not be allowed to hamper discussion. Nor should leaders — or anyone in the Western world, or anywhere in the Lands of the Infidels — be inhibited one whit by the attempts to silence or force apologies and implied obeisance (and of course some kind of implied promise “not to do that again”) from Pope Benedict.

Learn from Pope Benedict, if you are a Christian.

Learn from Oriana Fallaci, if you are not.

Learn from Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Ibn Warraq and Ali Sina, if you were born into Islam and know there is something terribly wrong with it as a belief-system, but don’t quite — out of a tangle of confused emotions, including contempt for much of what the infidel world offers, and filial piety — know what to do.

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