Over at the Investigative Project on Terrorism (via RaymondIbrahim.com), I discuss the latest attack on Egypt’s Christians in the context of collective punishment:
As many of Israel’s critics portray it as collectively punishing the Palestinians, overlooked and unsaid is the greater frequency with which Muslims collectively punish the religious minorities living under their authority, often in atrocious ways.
Consider Egypt alone. The most recent attacks on Egypt’s Copts, culminating in the unprecedented besiegement of the St. Mark Cathedral, the holiest site of Coptic Orthodoxy, is the latest large-scale “collective punishment” of the nation’s indigenous Christian minority. Indeed, almost all of the major attacks on Copts are carried out in the context of collective punishment, based on the idea that, if just one Christian upsets Muslims, all Christians””and their churches and their women and their children””become fair game.
Collectively punishing “upstart” religious minorities who refuse to know their place in the Islamic order actually has doctrinal backing….