Persecution of Christian minorities in the Muslim world gets little attention in the worldwide press. For example, how many Americans do you think are aware of the New Year’s Day church bombing in Egypt that killed 21 Coptic Christians?

As yet we have not been able to find any news report that identifies who the perpetrators were. But the AP report below states that investigators are “scrutinizing homegrown hard-liners, known as Salafis, and the possibility they were inspired by al-Qaida.”

Brigitte Gabriel’s best-selling book Because They Hate gave Americans an eyewitness glimpse into how Christians are treated in many areas of the Muslim world. An estimated 100,000 Maronite Christians died in Lebanon at the hands of jihadists in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s.

Nations and societies throughout the Mideast and North Africa that were once majority Christian are today majority Muslim or near 100% Muslim countries, thanks in large part to centuries of jihad. This latest atrocity is just one more reminder that jihad against Christians in that part of the world is still a frightening reality.

Anti-Christian drumbeat loud before Egypt attack
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AP – Two Copts, left and right, fight with another man, center, who onlookers claimed was a Muslim, prior …

By MAGGIE MICHAEL, Associated Press – Tue Jan 4, 9:29 pm ET

CAIRO – In the weeks before the New Year’s Day suicide bombing of an Egyptian church, al-Qaida-linked websites carried a how-to manual on “destroying the cross,” complete with videos on how to build a bomb and the locations of churches to target — including the one that was attacked.

They may have found a receptive audience in Alexandria, where increasingly radicalized Islamic hard-liners have been holding weekly anti-Christian demonstrations, filled with venomous slogans against the minority community.

The blast, which struck Saturday as worshippers were leaving midnight Mass at the Mediterranean city’s Saints Church, killed 21 people.

President Hosni Mubarak has accused foreign groups of being behind the attack, which has sparked a wave of angry protests by Christians in Egypt.

But on the ground, investigators are searching in a different direction — scrutinizing homegrown hard-liners, known as Salafis, and the possibility they were inspired by al-Qaida.

Only two or three days before Saturday’s bombing, police arrested several Salafis spreading fliers in Alexandria calling for violence against Christians, a security official said. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the media.

According to authorities, the strong belief among investigators is that local extremists who knew the area and the nature of their target were behind the blast. The Egyptian weekly Al-Youm Al-Saba said police were examining photos of the Salafis’ weekly protests for suspects.

In the weeks before the attack, al-Qaida militants on the Web spewing calls for “jihad,” or holy war, on Egypt’s Christians laid out everything anyone would need to carry out a bombing.

One widely circulated posting includes a so-called “Jihadi Encyclopedia for the Destruction of the Cross,” with a series of 10 videos describing how to build a bomb.

In the videos, an unidentified militant in a white lab coat and a black mask is shown listing the ingredients to make TNT and mixing up the chemicals in beakers.

The site lists Coptic Christian churches in Egypt, along with phone numbers and addresses — including Alexandria’s Saints Church. “Blow up the churches while they are celebrating Christmas or any other time when the churches are packed,” it says.

Security officials say they were aware of the online “how-to manual” before the church bombing and are examining any links between it and the material posted on Islamic websites.

One main Salafi group, the Salafi Movement in Alexandria, issued a statement condemning the bombing, saying its preachings “reject such practices.”

The ultra-conservative Salafi ideology has been gaining followers throughout Egypt in recent years, preaching a return to the ways of early Muslims. It calls for strict segregation of the sexes and rejection of any religious “innovations,” such as permitting boys and girls to attend school together or collecting interest on bank loans.

The movement has spread across class lines, among wealthy businessmen, the middle class and urban poor. Men grow long beards and shave off mustaches, to imitate the Prophet Muhammad. Women wear the black niqab robes and veil, which envelop the entire body and face, showing only the eyes.

In many ways, it resembles the doctrine of al-Qaida, with one major difference — while it advocates jihad against “foreign occupiers” in Iraq or Afghanistan, it rejects holy war inside Egypt, at least for now.

But many observers warn that some members are growing more radicalized and have begun to advocate jihad within the country, providing fertile ground for al-Qaida influence.

They cite the group’s unprecedentedly fierce campaign against Egypt’s Coptic Christian Church.

It was sparked by the case of two Christian women who reportedly converted to Islam to get divorces from their husbands, since the church bans divorce. The Salafis accuse church officials of forcing the women to renounce Islam and return to Christianity, a claim the church denies.

At weekly protests attended by hundreds outside mosques in Alexandria and Cairo, Salafis have accused the church of holding the women against their will. Vowing vengeance and denouncing Coptic Pope Shenouda III as an “infidel,” the protesters accused Copts of trying to “Christianize” Egypt’s Muslims and stockpiling weapons in churches and monasteries.

In September, one Salafi cleric, Ahmed Farid, wept as he told worshippers at an Alexandria mosque that Muslims were being “humiliated” by Christians, chiding them for “giving up jihad.”

At a Salafi protest in Cairo in October, some raised the flag of al-Qaida in Iraq — a black banner emblazoned with the phrase “there is no god but God and Muhammad is God’s prophet.”

Two days later, al-Qaida in Iraq attacked a church in Baghdad in a siege that left 68 Christians dead, the worst attack ever against Iraq’s Christian minority. The group issued a statement vowing a campaign against Christians unless the two women in Egypt were freed, and several other attacks on the community in Baghdad have followed.

Since then, calls on al-Qaida-linked websites for attacks on Egypt’s Christians have grown to a fever pitch.

A statement posted with the videos decries the failure of Muslims to act to free the two women.

“Will we keep on dreaming and dreaming, or is it time to wake up to the echoing boom and the flying torn limbs that will please the faithful and scare the infidels?” the statement reads. “Of course, it is better to act as a group, but that must not be an impediment between you and action. … Move forward on your own.”

The threats raise the question of why security officials did not do more to protect churches. On New Year’s, Saints Church had only three or four policemen outside and cars had easy access to the street.

Copts, who make up about 10 percent of Egypt’s nearly 80 million people, accuse the government of ignoring threats against them and doing nothing about growing anti-Christian sentiment.

Experts say the government has tacitly allowed the growth of Salafism because it is not anti-government and does not get involved in Egypt’s politics, as opposed to the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood, which is the regime’s main political rival.

“The Egyptian regime is harvesting the sour fruits for letting this extremist thought to grow and recruit thousands of young Egyptians,” said Rifaat Sayyed Ahmed, an expert on Islamic groups.

DUIN: Coptic girls being abducted

Ten years ago, I was in Egypt interviewing Coptic Christians who described how persecution by Muslims had become a way of life for them. The situation is worse now because of increased abductions of Coptic girls, who are forced into a sham marriage with a Muslim, raped, forced to convert to Islam and separated for good from their families.

These are girls as young as 12 who are being grabbed off Egyptian streets. Photos are taken while the girl is being raped to blackmail her into converting, says Mary Abdelmassih, a Coptic activist.

“She’s told the pictures will go to her family,” she told me. “They’d rather die than have that happen.”

Today (Jan. 7) being the Coptic Christmas, this as good a time as any to describe how these kidnappings are at epidemic levels in Egypt and how the plight of these poor women has become Christian sex slavery.

Because local police are more often than not in collusion with the kidnappers, the families have to come up with enormous sums to get their daughters back. If the family is poor, their daughter is gone forever. The Assyrian National News Agency says very few of the girls who have been kidnapped since the 1970s ever get returned to their families and none of the kidnappers have been brought to justice.

For instance, after Myrna Gamal Hanna, a 20-year-old Christian woman, called her family Sept. 30 to ask them to rescue her from a forced marriage to a Muslim, her father and five other men showed up at her Alexandria apartment and rescued her. Instead of punishing the husband, police tortured Myrna’s family until they revealed where they had hidden the daughter. Then the family had to cough up several thousand dollars for those who had kidnapped the girl.

And last October, Samria Markos, a single mother living in Alexandria, said her 17-year-old daughter, Amira, disappeared while on her way to work at a plastics factory. She got a call from “Sheikh Mohammed” who told her Amira was converting to Islam. When she showed up at a local mosque to look for her daughter, she was told to keep silent or her 9-year-old son would be killed. The woman and her son fled the area. Amira has not been heard from since.

Many groups have criticized Egypt for this. On Nov. 10, Christian Solidarity International sent an open letter to President Obama reminding him of his human rights speech in Cairo last June and pointing out the Egyptian government’s tacit approval of this scandal.

And late last month, the Pew Forum specifically mentioned the kidnappings and pinpointed Egypt as one of the world’s most religiously repressive countries.

I called the Egyptian Embassy Tuesday for a response but got none. Judging from past responses, the government will say these girls ran away with Muslim men then claimed they were kidnapped to escape the ire of their families.

But Al Ahram, an Egyptian weekly, said in September that relations between Christians and Muslims in Egypt are at a “boiling point” over this. The latest trend, Ms. Abdelmassih says, is that women are being mined for organs, as happened to an American University student who was kidnapped two years ago.

“The kidnappers said to get back his daughter, he had to pay 600,000 Egyptian pounds,” she said. “When he protested, he was told both of her kidneys are worth more than that.”

Egyptian law forbids the conversion of minors to another religion but that doesn’t seem to apply to these hapless Coptic girls. Ms. Abdelmassih said the abductions are part of a campaign to Islamicize Egypt’s Christian community.

“It’s a business,” she said. “For each Christian girl who gets ‘converted,’ there are Islamic charities that give out money to the husband and the dealers who obtained her.”

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/jan/07/duin-coptic-girls-being-abducted/