An entire community – the Christian community in the new Egypt – is under attack, warns Micah Halpern in The Australian “Coptic Christians slaughtered in Egypt as the world looks away” (16/5)
“And the world remains relatively silent,“ he adds. “There has been no significant religious outcry, political redress or diplomatic pressure to stop the attacks. There has been almost no media coverage as Egypt's Muslims systematically, over the past few months, set about massacring Egypt's Christians.”
He writes that twelve Christians have been murdered, two hundred and thirty-two people wounded and two churches in Cairo burned just in recent days.
” Over the past few months church property has being gutted, vandalised and violated with graffiti,” he adds. “Churches have been blown up.”
He says that Egypt's Christians are a minority, a very successful minority. Yet when the constitutional monarchy was overthrown by the republicans the Copts were 10 per cent of the population but owned 50 per cent of the wealth. Egypt and its great cities were cultured and cosmopolitan with large numbers of Jews, Greeks and other minorities, as well as the Egyptian Copts.
The republic brought the expulsion of Jews, Greeks and others, and the persecution of the Copts. For all of them, the republic was a disaster. For the great majority, the republic has been a terrible disappointment.
[ For more reports on constitutional monarchy in the Muslim world, see the ACM section on this subject. Click here]