A 12-year-old Muslim girl was abducted and raped by a Coptic Christian Egyptian in November. The attacker was arrested. But the rule of law wasn’t enough. First, Muslims murdered Christian shoppers.
Attackers in a car raked a crowd of shoppers in a south Egypt town with gunfire, killing a policemen and six Coptic Christians on the eve of their Christmas celebrations, a security official said on Thursday.
Then they rioted, excuse me, “protested”, in AFP-speak:
In November, hundreds of Muslim protesters torched Christian-owned shops in the town of Farshut, near Nagaa Hammadi, and attacked a police station where they believed the suspected rapist was being held.
Here in America, we call people who burn shops “rioters.” At least the AP used the right term:
He said Muslim residents of Nag Hamadi and neighboring villages rioted for five days in November and torched and damaged Christian properties in the area after the rape.
But that was long after the AP, in the fourth paragraph, explained how there is generally peace between Muslims (who riot, murder, forcibly convert Copts, and burn Christian shops) and the Copts, the oldest Christian sect in Egypt:
Christians, mostly Coptics, account for about 10 percent of Egypt’s predominantly Muslim population. They generally live in peace with the Muslim majority although clashes and tensions in the south do occur, mostly over land or church construction disputes. In recent years, the clashes have begun seeping into the capital.
That’s the fourth paragraph. Your local paper’s world news section generally prints only the first three to five paragraphs of wire stories, and of course, the wire services know this. Here are paragraphs nine, ten, and eleven:
As Islamic conservatism gains ground, Christians have increasingly complained about discrimination by the Muslim majority.
Coptic Christians are limited in where they can build churches and must obtain government approval before expanding existing facilities. The government insists Christians enjoy the same rights as Muslims.
Vendetta killing is also common among southern Egyptians, and is usually over land or family disputes.
Every time the AP writer discusses anti-Christian actions by Egyptian Muslims, he feels compelled to explain that it may not just be religious bigotry. And yet, Muslims keep on killing Christians in Egypt. And even the AP acknowledges that Egypt refuses to let Copts build churches freely at the same time it insists that Christians are not discriminated against.
It’s funny how this topic never seems to come up when Obama talks about Muslims. Go figure.
Let me see if I understand things correctly. If a Muslim man rapes a christian woman, she is a whore who asked for it. If a Muslim man rapes a Muslim woman, she is whore who asked for it. If a Christian man rapes a Muslim woman, it is a crime worthy of 5 days of riots and looting against the people who did not commit the crime but happen to share the same religion. In my mind rape is a heinous crime no matter the religion of the victim or the perpetrator but that must be my “western” values seeping through. Am I really supposed to have a more “worldly” view on rape? We’ve come a long way baby.
Certain groups, such as some among the Methodists, Episcopalians, and Presbyterians, waste no occasion to excoriate Israel for its misdeeds, incuding those it hasn’t committed. About the persectuion of their co-religionists they say nothing at all. Perhaps there is some delicate sensitivity of their souls that is activated only by Jewish sins.
I remember how recently the western media got so inflamed over Switzerland’s decision to limit the amount of Muslim minarets in their country, not mosques. But completely ignored the lack of worship rights for Christians, mush less Jews in all of the Muslim controlled countries.
“In November, hundreds of Muslim protesters torched Christian-owned shops in the town of Farshut, near Nagaa Hammadi, and attacked a police station where they believed the suspected rapist was being held.”
What those Muslims were doing used to be called lynching when practiced by whites in the Jim Crow South. This is the sort of tolerance Muslims have extended to religious minorities throughout the last 1300 or so years. They tell Christians and Jews “Be subservient and grovel, and pay huge poll taxes, and we’ll let you live, until some Imam gets up on the wrong side of the bed and calls for a pogrom against you. But don’t worry, that will be only temporary and will kill only a few of you. Unless somebody powerful decides you need to convert or else.”
It was a forced conversion threat that led Maimonides to leave the land of his birth in Al-Andulus. He had to travel to Egypt, ruled by a different dynasty, before he found refuge again.
Today people under threat in the Muslim countries have to come to the West to escape it. But the threat is folowing them.