Blessed be Egypt My People from Charles Kim on Vimeo.
“You’re blessed when your commitment to God provokes persecution. The persecution drives you even deeper into God’s kingdom” (Matthew 5:10). Pray for Egypt, North Africa and other Arab countries. Stories of what God is doing in Egypt and how we are to join in prayer for those who are courageously living out their faith in the middle east.
But… but… we shouldn’t forget the Crusades!
They’re massacring every Christian they see and we face extinction, the oldest Christians in the world. Early today I spoke with White House officials and I told them if they keep not doing anything to protect Christians around the world, they’re sentencing my people to death. And, they’re not acting, so we have to put the pressure on… The American government and the White House are not doing enough… This is a Christian holocaust. …The absence of leadership in the White House is leading to more and more Christians to be persecuted and beheaded. Our churches are being bombed. Nobody’s acting. This is, as we keep saying, a full-blown Christian genocide and Washington isn’t doing anything. This is a Christian holocaust.
The President of Egypt, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, made a surprise visit St. Mark’ Cathedral on the Nativity Feast. WOW.
Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi visited the main Coptic Christian cathedral Tuesday during its Christmas Eve mass (Coptic Christians celebrated Christmas yesterday), “the first such visit by an Egyptian president in history” according to First Things writer Mark Movsesian. “It’s important for the world to see this scene, which reflects true Egyptian unity, and to confirm that we’re all Egyptians, first and foremost. We truly love each other without discrimination, because this is the Egyptian truth,” Sisi told service attenders.
Coptic Pop al-Tawadri thanked Sisi for his visit, calling it “a pleasant surprise and a humanitarian gesture.”
It isn’t the first such gesture that Sisi has made—in a speech celebrating the birth of Mohammed on New Year’s Day, he called on Muslim religious leaders to help fight against extremism: ”I say and repeat, again, that we are in need of a religious revolution,” he said, according to CNN. ”You imams are responsible before Allah. The entire world is waiting on you. … We need a revolution of the self, a revolution of consciousness and ethics to rebuild the Egyptian person—a person that our country will need in the near future.”…
Huge news via Breitbart! On the one hand you have people on Bill O’Reilly defending the Muslim Brotherhood, but the inserted leader of Egypt may be the beginning of what we should hear from leaders in Islamic countries. Again, this is the first leader of an Islamic country who has said publicly that Islam needs to reforms:
One of the most controversial, and yet indisputable, observations that can be made about the current state of global affairs is that Islam has problems with violence and aggression. (That’s not redundant – cultural and political aggression without physical violence are possible, and troublesome.)
This observation does not imply that all Muslims are universally violent or aggressive – that’s the straw-man argument apologists for Islam and critics of the West would rather deal with. But there are aspects of Islamic practice that make it useful to those who would pursue the path of violent domination. It doesn’t take much effort to find passages in the Koran that can serve as signposts along that path.
Contrary to the endless harangues of their domestic critics, people in the West are not comfortable with the notion of a “bad religion.” Religious tolerance is an important value across the European diaspora, and it was written into the ideological DNA of the United States. Granted, this ideal of tolerance has not always been observed with the greatest fidelity, but everyone gets the general idea that their neighbors should be respectfully allowed to pursue whatever religious faith they choose. Criticism of any faith from the outside is uncomfortable.
But here we are, looking back over quite a bit of Islamic violence around the world, unable to find parallel behavior in any other contemporary religious practice. (It’s telling that the nearly universal responses to a discussion of Islamic violence are What about the Crusades? or What about the Inquisition? Whatever else one can say about those chapters of history, they indisputably took place a long time ago.) Something is different with Islam, and not in a good way. It’s so obvious, and yet so politically incorrect to point it out, that it has reached elephant-in-the-room status.
Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi is willing to talk about the elephant in the room, and he didn’t mince words when he spoke on the topic of Islamic violence in Cairo on New Year’s Day:
It’s inconceivable that the thinking that we hold most sacred should cause the entire Islamic world to be a source of anxiety, danger, killing and destruction for the rest of the world. Impossible!
That thinking – I am not saying “religion” but “thinking” – that corpus of texts and ideas that we have sacralized over the centuries, to the point that departing from them has become almost impossible, is antagonizing the entire world. It’s antagonizing the entire world!
Is it possible that 1.6 billion people should want to kill the rest of the world’s inhabitants – that is 7 billion – so that they themselves may live? Impossible!
This is all the more remarkable because al-Sisi was addressing a gathering of Islamic scholars and clerics. He went on to tell them a “religious revolution” was needed, and “the entire world” was waiting for it…
[….]
It is nevertheless remarkable to hear a leader of al-Sisi’s prominence and devout religious background to call for a worldwide Islamic reformation. Note that he’s not using the “hijacked by a tiny minority of extremists” dodge, or saying that violent jihadists are aberrations bound to wither away on the “wrong side of history.” He’s calling for revolutionary action across the Muslim world, and calling out fundamentalists who believe Islamic law and tradition were chiseled in stone centuries ago…
Two of Cairo’s largest Churches were burned to the ground last night by Salafist Muslim mobs. There are reports that the Egyptian Army stopped firefighters from entering the premises of one church until it was completely burned down. Other reports that the fires started by Muslim Youth throwing molotov cocktails.
As described the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (via the AP):
Muslim mobs set fire to a church and a Christian-owned apartment building in a frenzy of violence that killed 12 people and injured more than 200.
Muslim youths attacked a large crowd of Coptic Christian protesters…
Hours earlier, mobs of ultraconservative (sic) Muslims attacked the Virgin Mary Church [also known as the Hanging Church] in the slum of Imbaba on the opposite side of the Nile. The attack was fueled by rumors that a Christian woman married to a Muslim man had been abducted by the church. Residents said a separate mob of youths armed with knives and machetes attacked an apartment building several blocks away with firebombs.
Libertarian Republican points out well that since the fall of the government in Egypt, Christians have been under increasing attack. There was video of an attack by the Egyptian military I highlighted from LR a while ago that seems to be becoming the norm.
About 15,000 Muslims attacked Coptic Christians in a suburb near Cairo on Wednesday. 9 Christians were killed.
The LA Times called the violence, the “deadliest unrest since President Hosni Mubarak’s ouster.”
From AINA:
According to Father Abram Fahmy, pastor of St. Simon the Tanner Monastery in Mokatam Hills, on the outskirts of Cairo, Copts were killed and injured today in a fresh attack by Muslims. It was reported the Egyptian army fired live ammunition on Copts. The attack has claimed until now the lives of 9 Copts and injured 150, 45 seriously.
Muslims threw fire balls at the Monastery from the top of the hills. Coptic youth have arrested five of them, who are now being held within the Monastery grounds, waiting to be handed over to the authorities.
The Wall Street Journal reports:
CAIRO—A bomb detonated outside a church in the northern port city of Alexandria early Saturday, killing more than 20 and injuring dozens.
The attack struck Christian worshippers as they were leaving midnight mass at the Church of Two Saints in Alexandria. The death toll shot up Saturday morning, from an early estimate by officials of just seven.
By midday, Egypt’s state media reported 21 dead and nearly 80 injured. Egypt’s interior ministry said the bombing was a suicide attack…..
An angle — a truth actually — I hadn’t thought of. Before building a Mosque in order to introduce Islam to the American people in a new fresh way (propaganda)… why not stop killings Christians in Muslim nations first. Thus introducing a new and fresh way (action) of introducing Islam not just to Americans, but the world at large. Of course they should go beyond just my faith, Christianity, and stop killing Hindus, Sikhs, Arabs/Muslims, Jews, atheists, homosexuals, and the like. Then after they attack their own phobias, then we can deal with Americas “Islamophobia.”
Warning: Graphic image at the 1:50 mark (or so).
From Libertarian Republican:
Stop the Killing of Coptic Christians in Muslim Coutries
Joseph Nasralla, a Coptic Christian from Egpyt:
“I know the truth because I am from Egypt. They came and conquered our country. It’s the same way they intend to conquer America. I need to say something. Believe me… if they build this Mosque here, in 10 years, it will be too late. They will have Islamisized this country. It will be too late!”
Here is a great site, however, you need to have Google translate it: