Egypt is not allowing 2,000 Coptic Christians to make their annual Easter pilgrimage to Jerusalem due to trumped-up spying charges. Will the world rise up against this religious discrimination the way they do when Israel refuses to allow terrorists to travel to Mecca?
Of course not.
Some 2,000 Coptic and Greek Orthodox Christians in Egypt have been forbidden from making a pilgrimage to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in east Jerusalem this coming Easter.
Egyptian travel agents have informed their Israeli counterparts that the authorities in Cairo have decided not to allow this year’s pilgrimage, Yedioth Ahronoth has learned.
The decision is apparently not related to the uproar in Egypt surrounding the Israeli documentary film “Shaked Spirit “, but rather to the arrest of Mohamed Essam Ghoneim el-Attar, who is currently standing trial for allegedly spying for Mossad.
Will the wire services run story after story about how these Egyptian Christians are being denied their religious rituals, the way story after story about the lack of Christmas in Bethlehem are run each year?
I don’t think so.
Will the major church groups release outraged statements regarding this discrimination?
Probably not.
What time is it, kiddies? That’s right. It’s Israeli Double Standard Time!
Meryl,
Why don’t they just get themselves smuggled in like the terrorists????
-Dave
$2 billion a year in foreign aid does not buy you as much as it used to.
Joel,
very true.And why are we still doing this?To keep Jimmy CArter happy?
Joel, how crude of you…we only mention foreign aid to the Middle East when we’re talking about money we give to Israel. That’s a frequent trope: Israel does thus-and-so and we’re subsidizing its evil to the tune of whatever. No one ever mentions Egypt in this context and you’re not supposed to either.
And as is occasionally the case, Meryl, you’re being unreasonable. There is only so much time in the day and the Episcopalians and Presbyterians are already occupied detailing and denouncing Israel’s sins. You can hardly expect them to add to their already burdensome workload by protesting about persecution of their co-religionists.
Besides, the root cause of the Copts’ problems is that Israel won’t withdraw from the territories. That’s the root cause of everything, isn’t it?
Contrast the silence with the idiocy of the German Catholic bishops who declared that the Palestinians in Ramallah are in a Warsaw-type ghetto:
http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/2007/03/moral_inversion.html
chsw
Does the Wahhabist Entity allow Israeli Muslims to make the Hajj? I know they forbade it in the past.
Everywhere Muslims rule the non-Muslims are being persecuted. Very few Westerners pay attention. ROPMA. To quote Nero Wolfe, pfui.