If there is any lesson we have learned from the Garland, Texas jihad shooting at our AFDI event, it is that one must not provoke Muslims. Anyone who provokes Muslims is responsible for what those Muslims do. See how these children provoked the Muslims? They made fun of the Islamic State that has nothing to do with Islam! How hateful and Islamophobic these children were! They poked them in the eye! The responsibility is entirely on the children, for inciting this violence! “‘You are a target’: Muslim extremists terrorize Egypt’s Coptic Christians,” by Steven Edwards, FoxNews.com, May 5, 2015 (thanks to Anne Crockett):
Christians in Egypt are facing a new wave of persecution at the hands of Muslim extremists, and human rights groups fear the situation could be on the brink of exploding.
While the attacks on Egypt’s Christian community are not on the scale of persecution faced by their brethren in Syria and Iraq, the Coptics – mostly descendants of the people whose Pharaohs ruled ancient Egypt before the 7th century – say they face renewed isolation in the country.
“We are the weaker element in society, so if anything happens, we will be the first victims,” Mina Thabet, a Coptic activist and researcher at the Egyptian Commission for Rights and Freedoms, told FoxNews.com from Cairo.
“You are a target for extremists when no one is supporting you,” he added in a reference to the “often-sluggish” protection the Christian community says it gets from the police.
While Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has taken steps to protect Coptic Christians amid his calls for national unity, many of the latest incidents have occurred in Minya Governorate of Upper Egypt, about 150 miles south of Cairo.
The mix of poverty and limited job prospects there is typical of the social conditions Thabet says could trigger the sort of unrest in which the country’s Christians – comprising Orthodox, Catholic and some Protestant members of the faith – become central targets, just as Jews were historically targeted during pogroms.
“Not all the people would blame the Copts,” he said. “But many ordinary Egyptians have strong thoughts toward the Coptic community.”
A recent incident saw Muslim mobs in the Minya village of Nasreya descend on the homes of five Coptic students, chanting they had “insulted” Islam in a video that was circulating showing the youths praying with their Coptic teacher.
In fact, the students had been making fun of ISIS, according to Coptic activists. While police arrested the teacher and detained him for questioning over four days, the Muslim mobs threw rocks at the homes of the youths in a bid to force their parents to hand their children over to the authorities, Coptic media reports say.
Blasphemy is a crime in Egypt, but human rights activists say the authorities have traditionally used the law to persecute minorities, among them Christians.
Thabet said the children remained detained by the authorities, as were other Christians who’d been victims of Muslim assaults.
“We have five Coptic children charged with blasphemy and insulting Islam,” he said. “We still have other open cases where Christians are charged with inciting violence as if they were the perpetrators, but where they were the victims.”
FoxNews.com reported last month how a Muslim mob attacked Christians in the Minya village of al Our, which had been home to 13 of the 21 Christians whose murder by ISIS in February was captured in a gruesome video appearing to show them being beheaded on a Libyan beach.
The Muslim protesters had opposed the Christians’ plan to build a new church to honor the 21, and had pelted them with rocks as they chanted they would never allow construction to begin.
This occurred despite President el-Sisi having personally given the official permission Egyptian law requires for work on a church to proceed – in contrast to no such permission being required for mosque construction….