The Christian Exodus From Egypt: For Copts, A Persecuting Dictator Was Preferable To The Islamist Mob

By SAMUEL TADROS, The Wall Street Journal – “Visit any Coptic church in the United States and you immediately recognize the newcomers. You see it in their eyes, hear it in their broken English, sense it in how they cling to the church in search of the familiar. They have come here escaping a place they used to call home, where their ancestors had lived for centuries.

Waves of Copts have come here from Egypt before, to escape Gamal Abdel Nasser’s nationalizations or the growing Islamist tide. Their country’s transformation wasn’t sudden, but every year brought more public Islamization. As the veil spread, Coptic women felt increasingly different, alien and marked. Verbal abuse came from schoolteachers, bystanders in the bus station who noticed the cross on a wrist, or commentators on state television.

But life was generally bearable. Hosni Mubarak crushed the Islamist insurgency of the 1980s and ’90s. He was no friend to the Copts, but neither was he foe. His police often turned a blind eye when Coptic homes and shops were attacked by mobs, and the courts never punished the perpetrators—but the president wasn’t an Islamist. He even interfered sometimes to give permission to build a church, or to make Christmas a national holiday.

To be sure, Copts were excluded from high government positions. There were no Coptic governors, intelligence officers, deans of schools, or CEOs of government companies. Until 2005, Copts needed presidential approval to build a new church or even build a bathroom in an existing one. Even with approval, state security often blocked construction, citing security concerns.

Those concerns were often real. Mobs could mobilize against Copts with the slightest incitement—rumor of a romantic relationship between a Christian man and a Muslim woman, a church being built, reports of a Christian having insulted Islam. The details varied but the results didn’t: homes burned, shops destroyed, Christians leaving villages, sometimes dead bodies. The police would arrive late and force a reconciliation session between perpetrators and victims during which everything would be forgiven and no one punished. What pained the Copts most was that the attackers were neighbors, co-workers and childhood friends.

Then came last year’s revolution. Copts were never enthusiastic about it, perhaps because centuries of persecution taught that the persecuting dictator was preferable to the mob. He could be bought off, persuaded to hold back or pressured by outside forces. With the mob you stood no chance. Some younger Copts were lured by the promise of a liberal Egypt, but the older generation knew better.

The collapse of the police liberated the Islamists, who quickly

Canada: Muslim Father Killed Wife Because Children Were Too Western, University Professor Tells Gov’t To End Muslim Immigration

By Joe O’Connor, National Post – “Randjida Khairi was stabbed five times in her chest and back. She had her throat cut, a wound so ugly and deep that it sliced through her neck muscles, voicebox and windpipe — stopping only at her spine.

She was stabbed with two different knives. She drowned in her own blood; a process a pathologist would later determine took between five and 10 minutes. Police discovered Ms. Khairi’s body lying on a bloody cot in her family home, a 16th floor apartment in the northwest corner of Toronto, otherwise all tidy and neat, with a kitchen full of pots.

The victim was the mother of six. The victim was married to her killer for 30 years.

On Wednesday, Peer Khairi, a silver-haired man and an Afghan immigrant, sat in the defendant’s box of a downtown Toronto courtroom following the proceedings through a Dari interpreter, fingering a parade of gruesome crime scene photographs of his dead wife, taken by police on March 18, 2008, and presented to the court as evidence.

The 65-year-old jabbed at some photos with his index finger, and turned others this way and that, uttering a few words to his lawyer, rubbing his chin with his hand. Mostly he sat with his legs crossed, tracing his left thumb across his fingertips…

Mr. Khairi doesn’t dispute that he killed his wife. On that the Crown and the defence agree. At issue is how, precisely, her death occurred and what was going through her husband’s mind when he killed her. The accused has pleaded not guilty to second-degree murder.

The Crown has told the court that, as a new arrival to this country, Mr. Khairi struggled with Canadian ways, often fighting with his wife over how she allowed their children to dress, to become more Western — to drift from the ‘culture and the rules of their birth place.'” Read more.

Canada: Muslim Political Scientist Tells Government To Close The Borders To Muslim Immigrants – “… The flow of immigration into Canada from around the world, and in particular the flow from Muslim countries, means a pouring in of numbers into a liberal society of people from cultures at best non-liberal. But we know through our studies and observations that the illiberal mix of cultures poses one of the greatest dilemmas and an unprecedented challenge to liberal societies, such as ours, when there is no demand placed on immigrants any longer to assimilate into the founding liberal values of the country to which they have immigrated to and, instead, by a misguided and thoroughly wrong-headed policy of multiculturalism encourage the opposite… I would like members to note I come before you as a practicing Muslim who knows out of experience from the inside how volatile, how disruptive, how violent, how misogynistic is the culture of Islam today and has been during my lifetime, and how greatly it threatens our liberal democracy …” Read more.

Saudi Arabia Calls For Global Internet Censorship To Prevent ‘Insults’ To Islam And Mohammed

By Christopher William, The Telegraph – “In a submission to forthcoming international talks on internet governance, the Gulf state said ‘there is a crying need for international collaboration to address ‘freedom of expression’ which clearly disregards public order’.

During the controversy over a 14-minute clip posted on YouTube and purportedly a trailer for a feature film called ‘The Innocence of Muslims’, Google resisted pressure, including from the White House, to remove it.

‘This video – which is widely available on the web – is clearly within our guidelines and so will stay on YouTube,’ Google said last month.

The Saudi government has now told the World Telecommunications Policy Forum, a UN body, that the incident was ‘an obvious example’ of the need for greater international cooperation to restrict content online.

‘Any reasonable person would know that this film would foment violence and, indeed, many innocent persons have died and been injured with this film as a root cause,’ the Saudi submission said…

The submission highlights increasing interest in internet governance discussions from nations that do not share Western liberal values, as access to and the influence of the web grows.” Read more.

Flashback: Thinking They Can Change Western Laws, Muslim-Led Nations Seek To Implement Global Ban On Insults Of Muhammad – “As the U.N. General Assembly convenes this week in New York, several leaders of mostly Muslim nations are suggesting that the world body consider sanctions on blasphemy, amid widespread protests against an amateur movie that denigrates Islam’s Prophet Muhammad. Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has said he will focus at least part of his remarks on the film when he addresses the U.N. General Assembly on Tuesday.” Read more.

‘Kill Christian Infidels’: Muslim Mob In Pakistan Ransacks Christian Home, Burns Belongings After ‘Blasphemy’ Accusation

BBC – “A 16-year-old Christian boy has been held on blasphemy charges in the Pakistani city of Karachi.

The boy, named by police as Ryan Stanten, is said to have forwarded a text message which allegedly contained offensive material on Tuesday.

The following day an angry crowd ransacked his family home, setting fire to their belongings on the street…

Police say the boy told the leaders he had forwarded the message without reading it to others in the middle-class compound for employees of the local gas company where he lived.

His mother was employed by the gas company and reports say she has since been dismissed from her job.

Blasphemy is a highly sensitive issue in Pakistan, where 97% of the population are Muslim. Critics say the laws are often used to settle personal vendettas.

In the past, accusations of blasphemy have led to vigilante killings by mobs.

Rights activists have long urged Pakistan to reform the laws, under which a person can be jailed for life or sentenced to death.

In March 2011 Shahbaz Bhatti, the minister for minority affairs, was killed after calling for the repeal of the blasphemy law.

His death came just two months after the murder of Punjab Governor Salman Taseer, who also spoke out about the issue.” Read more.

Ransacking Muslim Mob: ‘Kill Christian Infidels’ – When Muslim mob not found Ryan and her mother at home they broke in apartment and set on fire furniture chanting slogans ‘Death to Blasphemer’ ‘Kill Christian Infidels’. The mob marched to other Christian home in vicinity that fled after news spread that Muslims have set on fire home of a Christian on defiling name of Prophet Mohammad. Dr. Nazir Bhatti said ‘Government have failed to protect Christians from misuse of Blasphemy law from Muslims on petty personal issues'” Read more.

Spain And The Islamic Republic Of Catalonia

By Soeren Kern, Gatestone Institute – “A successful push for independence in the Spanish autonomous region of Catalonia would lead to the establishment of a country with the third-largest percentage of Muslims in Western Europe, just behind France and Belgium, and far ahead of Britain and Germany.

An independent Catalonia, with its capital in Barcelona, would also be home to the largest concentration of radical Islamists in Europe; it would emerge as ground-zero for Salafi-Jihadism on the continent and become one of the top incubators for Islamist terrorism in the West…

On September 25, Mas announced a snap election in Catalonia (to be held on November 25), which is being viewed as a plebiscite to gauge popular support for his pro-independence platform. The Catalan parliament also approved a resolution to hold a non-binding referendum on secession once the new legislature is installed.

The ruling parties of Catalonia have also sought guidance from Brussels on the legality of secession from Spain, requesting a ‘roadmap’ for membership of the European Union, along with the use of the euro, as an independent state.

Catalonia has 7.5 million inhabitants, including an estimated 450,000 Muslims, who account for 6% of the total Catalan population. In some Catalan towns and cities, the Muslim population now reaches up to 40% of the population.

As a result of mass immigration from Muslim countries, which began in the 1980s, Catalonia has emerged as ‘a major Mediterranean center for radical Islamists,’ and the United States has even proposed setting up an intelligence hub at the U.S. Consulate in Barcelona to counter the growing threat, according to American diplomatic cables that were obtained by Wikileaks and published by the Madrid-based El País newspaper.

A five-page cable, dated October 2, 2007, for example, describes the link between mass immigration to Catalonia and the rise of radical Islamism in the region.

The document, which is classified ‘secret’ and apparently authored by then-Ambassador Eduardo Aguirre, states: ‘Heavy immigration — both legal and illegal — from North Africa (Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria) and Southeast Asia (Pakistan and Bangladesh) has made Catalonia a magnet for terrorist recruiters. … The Spanish National Police estimates that there may be upwards of 60,000 Pakistanis living in Barcelona and the surrounding area; the vast majority are male, unmarried or unaccompanied, and without legal documentation. There are even more such immigrants from North Africa. … They live on the edges of Spanish society, they do not speak the language, they are often unemployed, and they have very few places to practice their religion with dignity. … Individually, these circumstances would provide fertile ground for terrorist recruitment; taken together, the threat is clear.’…

Salafism is a branch of radical Islam that seeks to forcibly re-establish an Islamic empire (Caliphate) across the Middle East, North Africa and Spain, which Salafists view as a Muslim state that must be reconquered for Islam.” Read more.