Showing posts with label Copts. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Copts. Show all posts
Monday, October 21, 2013
Egypt Condemns Latest Deadly Attack On Coptic Christians
Monday, August 19, 2013
Coptic Christians Blamed for Violence in Egypt
Monday, April 08, 2013
THE DAILY TELEGRAPH: Violent clashes have erupted outside a Cairo cathedral after a Coptic funeral march came under attack, leaving one dead and at least 66 people injured.
Earlier in the day, hundreds of mourners had gathered to mark the death of four Coptic Christians killed in sectarian clashes on Friday night.
The emotional memorial service turned into a protest against President Mohamned Morsi's Islamist-led government, whom mourners accused of failing to protect Egypt's Coptic community.
Crowds chanted "Egypt is our country and we will not leave it" and "the blood of Christians is not cheap. Morsi, you villain".
After the mourners left St Mark's Cathedral in Cairo's Abbiseya district, local residents are reported to have pelted attendees with stones. Members of the predominantly Coptic crowd responded in kind, and gunfire was exchanged outside the cathedral grounds.
As night fell, crowds traded rock fire and molotov cocktails with Copts gathered inside the grounds of the building. The gates to the compound remained shut, opening only to ambulances and those who could prove their Coptic identity by flashing crucifix tattoos at the gatesmen. » | Louise Loveluck | Sunday, April 07, 2013
Thursday, February 21, 2013
FOX NEWS: A group of Christian priests from a local Coptic church in Egypt were told to convert to Islam or face death, according to an Arabic news site.
The incident, which comes in the midst of continued persecution and pressure on Egypt’s Christian community, took place this week in the town of Safaga, near the Red Sea, the El Balad site reported.
According to El Balad, the threats are from a new group in Egypt, Jihad al-Kufr, whose name translates to Jihad against non-believers or non-Muslims. The group targets non-Muslims, and reportedly pressures them to convert to Islam. » | Lisa Daftari | FoxNews.com | Thursday, February 21, 2013
Friday, January 18, 2013
THE GUARDIAN: Associated Press, LUXOR, Egypt (AP) — Police have fired tear gas to disperse hundreds of Muslim protesters outside a church in southern Egypt. They were demanding an investigation into allegations a Christian man sexually assaulted a 6-year-old girl.
Residents in the city of Qena say four stores owned by Coptic Christians were torched overnight after villagers accused one of the store owners of molesting the young girl.
The clashes took place in the village of Marashda in Qena. » | Haggag Salama | AP foreign | Friday, January 18, 2013
Sunday, January 13, 2013
Coptic Christian churches in the United States say they are having to expand to cope with new arrivals, as priests in cities like Cairo and Alexandria talk of a new climate of fear and uncertainty.
"Most of our people are afraid," Father Mina Adel, a priest at the Church of Two Saints in Alexandria said. "Not a few are leaving - for America, Canada and Australia. Dozens of families from this church alone are trying to go too."
Father Mina's church has an important place in the history of the Arab Spring. It was struck by a car bomb on New Year's Eve 2010, Egypt's worst sectarian attack in recent decades, in which 23 people were killed.
After the bombing, liberal Muslim groups staged protests in support of Christians, printing posters showing the cross and the crescent interlinked which then went on to be symbols of inter-faith unity during the Tahrir Square protests three weeks later.
But the victory of the Muslim Brotherhood in parliamentary and presidential elections has changed the mood - particularly as the biggest opposition party is the even more hardline Salafist movement which wants strict Sharia law implemented.
"Salafis meet Christian girls in the street and order them to cover their hair," Father Mina said. "Sometimes they hit them when they refuse." » | Richard Spencer, Alexandria | Sunday, January 13, 2013
Sunday, December 02, 2012
THE SYDNEY MORNING HERALD: An Egyptian court has convicted in absentia seven Egyptian Coptic Christians and a US pastor, sentencing them to death on charges linked to an anti-Islam film that had sparked riots in parts of the Muslim world.
The case was seen as largely symbolic because the defendants, most of whom live in the United States, are all outside Egypt and are thus unlikely to ever face the sentence.
The charges were brought in September during a wave of public outrage in Egypt over the amateur film, which was produced by an Egyptian-American Copt.
The low-budget Innocence of Muslims, parts of which were made available online, portrays the Prophet Mohammed as a fraud, womaniser and buffoon. » | Sarah El Deeb | Thursday, November 29, 2012
NBC BAY AREA: Anti-Islam Film to Stay on YouTube: Judge – A federal judge denied a woman's request to get "Innocence of Muslims" taken of[f] the Internet » | Jason Kandel | Saturday, December 01, 2012
Thursday, October 04, 2012
THE HUFFINGTON POST: CAIRO -- Two Coptic Christian boys have been put in juvenile detention after locals accused them of urinating on pages of the Islamic holy book, an Islamic cleric and prosecutors said Wednesday, in the latest in a series of legal cases in Egypt against alleged contempt of religion.
Accusations of insulting Islam have increased in Egypt – particularly against Christians – since last month's fury over an anti-Islam film produced in the United States. Such cases occurred in the past, but the flurry to prosecute in recent weeks has raised concerns over freedom of speech and over the power of ultraconservative Islamists in the country.
The new case is a rare instance of minors being accused. The boys, ages 9 and 10, were detained Tuesday in a southern town, to be held for 15 days while prosecutors investigate the accusations. » | Sarah El Deeb | Wednesday, October 03, 2012
Friday, June 01, 2012
TIMES 24|7: According to the popular Egyptian website El Bashayer, Muhammad Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood presidential candidate, just declared that he will "achieve the Islamic conquest of Egypt for the second time, and make all Christians convert to Islam, or else pay the jizya," the additional Islamic tax, or financial tribute, required of non-Muslims. » | Raymond Ibrahim | Wednesday, May 30, 2012
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Saturday, March 24, 2012
Tuesday, March 20, 2012
Sunday, March 18, 2012
Egyptian Christians have gathered to pay their final respects to Pope Shenouda III, who sought to soothe sectarian tension in his four decades leading the country's Orthodox church but saw escalating clashes in the last months of his life.
Shenouda served as the 117th pope of Alexandria from November 1971, leading the Orthodox community who make up most of Egypt's Christians. He died on Saturday aged 88 and his funeral will be held on Tuesday, Egyptian state media reported.
Barack Obama offered his condolences and Pope Benedict, leader of the world's Roman Catholics, offered prayers.
After Hosni Mubarak was ousted as president last year, Shenouda regularly called for harmony and met Muslim and other leaders. Christians comprise about a tenth of Egypt's population and have long complained of discrimination, stepping up their protests in the past year including calling for new rules that would make it as easy to build a church as a mosque.
Thousands queued in Cairo's Abbasiya district overnight and on Sunday morning at the cathedral where Shenouda's body was initially laid in a coffin and later seated on a ceremonial throne wearing gold and red embroidered religious vestments, a golden mitre on his head and holding a gold-topped staff. » | Reuters in Cairo | Sunday, March 18, 2012
Related »
Saturday, January 07, 2012
The Coptic Orthodox celebration follows an escalation in violence against the minority, an estimated 10 per cent of Egypt’s 85 million people, over the past year.
Many Christians blamed a series of street clashes, assaults on churches, and other attacks on radical Islamists who have become increasingly bold after Mr. Mubarak’s downfall.
Celebrations of Orthodox Christmas began with a late night Friday Mass at Cairo’s main cathedral, which was attended by prominent figures from across Egypt’s political spectrum. They included leaders of Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist group whose associated political party has won nearly half the seats in parliament. » | Sarah El Deeb | The Associated Press | CAIRO | Saturday, January 07, 2012
Sunday, October 16, 2011
THE AUSTRALIAN: EGYPT'S Coptic Christians are understandably terrified. And as a reality check for those who naively ignored all the warnings about Islamic extremism and insisted enlightenment and tolerance would follow the Mubarak dictatorship's downfall last February, their fate could hardly be more telling.
Sadly, the question that inevitably arises is whether, as a community, the Copts will survive the overblown hype of the Arab Spring. A new report from the Egyptian Union for Human Rights Organisations show that nearly 100,000 Christians have fled in the past six months - 14,000 of them to Australia. Copts are not emigrating voluntarily, according to the human rights group. They are coerced by threats and intimidation of hardline Salafists and a lack of protection from the Egyptian regime. An estimated 250,000 members of the Coptic community, which comprise 10 per cent of Egypt's 80 million people, will have fled by year's end. And who, given the way the ruling military junta has shamefully kow-towed to the Muslim Brotherhood and ultra-extremist Salafists and failed to protect the Copts, can blame them for fleeing? » | The Australian | Monday, October 17, 2011
Tuesday, October 11, 2011
THE DAILY TELEGRAPH: Egypt's military leaders are under intense international pressure to explain the deaths of more than 20 Christian protesters after the army was accused of deliberately fostering sectarian hatred to disguise a power grab.
Video footage and independent testimony that emerged on Monday called into question army claims that its soldiers acted in self-defence when they killed 26 protesters, the vast majority of them Christian Copts, in central Cairo on Sunday evening.
Although Coptic protesters threw stones at soldiers during the confrontation, a number of witnesses, many of them Muslim, claimed that the army's response was either wholly unwarranted or grotesquely disproportionate.
A number of the dead were crushed to death by an armoured car that ploughed into a group of protesters as they sang hymns and held aloft the Cross, according to several accounts that were given additional credence by the condition of several corpses in a Coptic mortuary.
The soldiers were also accused of opening fire at the protesters, prompting accusations that orders had been given to kill without discrimination.
Coptic leaders yesterday called on their followers to observe a three-day fast, but in many parts of Egypt's Christian community, mourning has already given way to anger. Continue reading and comment » | Adrian Blomfield, Middle East Correspondent | Monday, October 10, 2011
Sunday, October 09, 2011
THE SUNDAY TELEGRAPH: At least six people were killed as fierce clashes erupted between Christians protesting over a recent attack on a church and the Egyptian military on Sunday night.
The dead included four protesters and two soldiers, state media reported, and 40 people were injured in the riots outside the state television building along the Nile in the capital Cairo.
Witnesses said some of the protesters may have snatched weapons from the soldiers and turned them on the military. The protesters also pelted the soldiers with rocks and bottles.
The clashes spread to nearby Tahrir Square and the area around it, drawing in thousands of people. At one point, a group of youths with at least one riot policeman among them dragged a protester by his legs for a long distance.
The protesters, Coptic Christians angry over a recent attack on a church, said their demonstration began as a peaceful attempt to sit in at the television building. But then, they said they came under attack by thugs in plainclothes who rained stones down on them and fired pellets.
"The protest was peaceful. We wanted to hold a sit-in, as usual," said Essam Khalili, a protester wearing a white shirt with a cross drawn on it. "Thugs attacked us and a military vehicle jumped over a sidewalk and ran over at least 10 people. I saw them." » | Sunday, October 09, 2011
AL MASRY AL YOUM: Live Updates: Death toll rises as Copts clash with military » | Sunday, October 09, 2011
THE GUARDIAN: Cairo riots claim 19 lives: Christians protesting attack on church in southern Egypt attacked by armed mobs in latest unrest to hit country » | Associated Press in Cairo | Sunday, October 09, 2011
REUTERS.COM: Twenty three killed as Egyptian Christians, police clash: Twenty three people were killed in Cairo Sunday, the health ministry said, when Christians, some carrying crosses and pictures of Jesus, clashed with military police in the latest sectarian flare-up in a country in political turmoil. » | Dina Zayed and Patrick Werr | Sunday, October 09, 2011
LE MONDE: Egypte : une manifestation de Coptes dégénère au Caire – Une manifestation de Coptes a dégénéré au Caire, dimanche 9 octobre, provoquant la mort de trois policiers selon la télévision publique, et d'au moins seize manifestants selon l'AFP. Les Coptes, qui représentent 10 % de la population égyptienne, accusent des islamistes radicaux d'avoir partiellement démoli une église dans la province d'Assouan la semaine dernière. Ils ont manifesté pourdemander le renvoi du gouverneur à qui ils reprochent de n'avoir pas su protégerleur lieu de culte. » | LEMONDE.FR avec Reuters | Dimanche 09 Octobre 2011
WELT ONLINE: Viele Tote bei heftigen Kopten-Protesten in Kairo: Tausende Christen demonstrieren in Kairo gegen die Zerstörung einer Kirche in Assuan. Bei Zusammenstößen mit Sicherheitskräften kommen mindestens 21 Menschen ums Leben. » | Autor: Maggie Michael | Sonntag 09. Oktober 2011
Tuesday, June 28, 2011
LOS ANGELES TIMES – BABYLON & BEYOND: A picture of Mickey Mouse with long beard and Minnie with a full-face veil posted on businessman Naguib Sawiris’ Twitter account has enraged Muslims and prompted 15 lawyers to file a lawsuit against him for blasphemy and insulting Islam.
The Christian Copt telecommunications mogul, who has emerged as a provocative voice in post-revolutionary Egypt, apologized on Twitter, saying that he meant the picture to be humorous, not an affront to the country's majority population of Muslims. "I apologize for those who don’t take this as a joke. I just thought it was a funny picture no disrespect meant! I’m sorry,” the magnate tweeted.
Nonetheless, Sawiris’ apology wasn’t enough to halt the fury and criticism from many Muslims, especially the ultraconservative Salafis, whose lawyers have already sued the billionaire. A Facebook group launched under the name “we are also joking, Sawiris” gathered no less than 90,000 members in recent days, calling for boycotting products or services sold by any of the businessman’s companies, especially the Mobinil mobile phone company.
"If you’re a real Muslim ... boycott his (Sawiris’) products if you love your religion. We have to cut the tongue of any person who attacks our religion,” the group writes. Several other Facebook groups under the same name or the moniker “we hate you Mickey Sawiris” also collected thousands of members angry at what the called “Sawiris’ mockery of and disrespect to Islam.” » | Amro Hassan in Cairo | Tuesday, June 28, 2011
Thursday, June 02, 2011
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