PrintJanuary 17, 2010
Mubarak Responsible for Copts' Blood
A couple of years ago, I wrote to the Egyptian ambassadors in Washington, D.C., Rome, and the Vatican. My open letter was published prior to the Copts' Christmas and contained an invitation to the Egyptian authorities to stop their farcical Christmas visits to the Coptic churches. Copts all over the world, and some Westerners, recognized those visits as propaganda in favor of the Egyptian regime.
This year, during the Coptic Christmas Mass, which was celebrated in Cairo at the Coptic cathedral known as St. Mark's, church leaders were honored with the presence of the future Egyptian dictator, Gamal Mubarak, son of the current dictator. Mubarak attended with other Arab Muslims who are members of the ruling class of Egypt with a 1,430-year history. Neither well-wishers nor honest participants in the Coptic feast, the visitors staged a familiar farce known as "Greet our Coptic Citizens and Friends," mostly for the benefit of the international community.
Gamal Mubarak is the current secretary of the ruling government party. The clan arrived at St. Mark's Coptic Cathedral to congratulate Copts in their celebration of the birth of Jesus. The mass, celebrated by Coptic Pope Shenuda III, terminated some hours after masses ended in all other churches located throughout the country.
While the Pope was celebrating the mass, another celebration of holy mass was ending in a small town located in Upper Egypt known as Nag Hammadi. Families were leaving the church and returning to their homes. Outside of that church, a group of Bedouin Arabs were waiting to congratulate Copts as they left church. Many try their best to follow in the footsteps of their ancestors. Carrying war weapons and apparently confident of protection by the regime's law enforcement, they started firing on those leaving the church, killing seven innocent people.
The group of killers was unsuccessful in achieving its main objective: the assassination of the local bishop, Kirllos. Earlier the bishop had received various threats, and he made certain that these were known to local law enforcement beforehand. Egyptian law enforcement obviously did not secure the area in response to these very serious threats.
Seven innocent people are slaughtered while leaving their church after celebrating mass, and at the same time, the son of the Egyptian president celebrates mass in the cathedral in Cairo. He offers greetings to the Copts inside the church on behalf of the ruling regime. As the next leader of Egypt and inheritor of his father's power, is he not indirectly responsible and inextricably linked to the killings outside the church in Upper Egypt, as well as all other persecution inflicted on Copts and sanctioned by his father's authority?
The occupation authority of Egypt immediately released information telling its own version of the massacre. The Egyptian regime follows Hitler's footsteps -- not only by giving false information, but also by its overall persecution of Copts. Hitler killed more than six million Jews, and Mubarak himself is following his predecessor in killing Copts! The real number of Copts massacred over the centuries under Arab occupation numbers well into tens of millions!
The current Egyptian dictator declared on various occasions that he is the president of all Egyptians, Christians and Muslims. The facts, however, reveal the dictator's real face and real heritage. Hosni Mubarak is a typical perpetrator in that his only goal is killing infidels (Christians and Jews) in order to cleanse Egypt of any mark of Christianity and generate an army of terrorists.
Mubarak's regime has executed thousands of Copts during his 28 years of rule.
He is also responsible for the economic, cultural, and moral disaster of Egyptian society. Because Mubarak acts one way with his people and behaves in a completely opposite way with the international community, he presents two opposing views of the regime. In Egypt, he is a dictator who cares only about himself and the thieves who surround him, while outside of the country he acts as a democratic defender! Mubarak arranges peace summits while training terrorists to attack those who discuss peace.
In all of Mubarak's rule of Egypt, we have never heard one official word of sorrow regarding any assassination made by his clan, starting with Al Kosheh (Upper Egypt), where twenty-one Copts were massacred on New Year's Eve in the year 2000. Then there are the three thousand innocent victims killed by another of Mubarak's terrorists, Mohammed Atta, who flew a civilian airliner into a civilian building. Let's not forget the Afghanistan resident, Aymen Al-Zwahery, another of Mubarak's terrorists, whose only joy is killing innocent people around the world.
Mubarak is the head of the international factory of terrorists. Actually, they are not terrorists, but jihadists, as declared by an Egyptian-American when arrested a few days ago in Pakistan. At the start of this new year, how will Western leaders and citizens plan to face the threat generated by their Egyptian leader-friend? Will we continue to hide behind our political correctness that causes terror to flourish? Or will we be courageous enough to call things by their real names?
It is time to stand up against those who ask us to remove crosses from our classrooms, hospitals, and courtrooms and hypocritically endorse international laws that condemn religious defamation while they themselves are the first to defame other religions. Governments that receive aid from taxpayer money are led by mere parasites -- unless we stop their ambivalence and force them to follow the civil international laws and system they supposedly promote.
Ashraf Ramelah is President of Voice of the Copts (voiceofthecopts.org).
