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COMMENTARY
January 5, 2011
Alexandria
The first hard news of calendar 2011 was out of Alexandria, Egypt, where, moments after midnight a suicide bomber ignited more than 10 kilos of TNT -- impregnated with bolts and ball bearings -- into the crowd of Christian worshippers emerging from Mass in the Church of the Saints. A score of people were killed, including the Egyptian police officer who had prevented the bomber from entering the church, and of course the bomber himself. Dozens more were maimed in the blast.The rage one feels in watching one's fellow Christians butchered by Islamist psychopaths tends only to increase upon hearing the reactions of the "moderate" authorities, in countries such as the Arab Republic of Egypt. From what I can make out from reports, at this distance, the Egyptian police (who in Alexandria, especially, are notoriously infiltrated by Salafists and Muslim Brotherhood) quickly took the Muslim side in sectarian street clashes that followed the bombing. The Egyptian government in Cairo and the Alexandrian governate immediately and simultaneously said "foreign elements" were behind the attack, as if there were no Islamist fanatics within Egypt herself. Egyptian media, under close government supervision, began speculating that the Israeli Mossad might be behind the attack, and a leading spokesman for the Muslim Brotherhood was widely quoted wondering if al-Qaeda might be under the control of "the Zionists." What is more galling: these assertions are not contradicted, except by the occasional very brave citizen. Hani Shukrallah, who will be my example, wrote an extraordinary piece just after the bombing, which appeared -- to its credit, though only in its English-language weekly -- through the semi-official Al Ahram. In the old formula of Emile Zola's "J'accuse!" he excoriated not only Egyptian officialdom, but cowardly Egyptian intellectuals (Christians included) and all of Egyptian society for the equivocal denunciations of this latest atrocity, "variously nuanced so as to keep, just below the surface, the heaps of narrow-minded prejudice, flagrant double standards, and indeed bigotry" alive against Egypt's Copts. After ticking off his long list of hypocrites, class by class, he writes of Egypt's moneyed establishment: "I've been around, and I have heard you speak, in your offices, in your clubs, at your dinner parties: 'The Copts must be taught a lesson', 'the Copts are growing more arrogant', 'the Copts ... are preventing Christian women from converting to Islam, kidnapping them, and locking them up in monasteries.'" He refers, for example, to the huge public outrage at opposition to the construction of a mosque at ground zero in Manhattan, juxtaposing this with complete silence when the Egyptian police halted the construction of a modest staircase in an old Coptic church in Cairo. It is against this background that the physical persecution of Egypt's Copts is increasing. And Shukrallah adds Orwell's point, that those who will murder the language will finally murder a people, too: "I accuse you all because in your blindness you cannot even see the violence that you commit against logic and sheer common sense." As I mentioned above, this isolated article appeared in English only and in a weekly edition designed mostly for foreign readers. This is a "problem" we have noticed right across the Middle East, and has, for instance, everything to do with the "road-map to peace" with Israel. That state is "recognized" in English only, just as the human rights of Egypt's huge and ancient Christian community are "recognized" in English only for the enchantment of foreigners. The western media fail Christians, Jews and all other minorities in the Middle East, not so much by failing to report the atrocities that are committed against them, but by failing to inquire into the background of these atrocities. Readers outside the region need to understand what is being preached to the masses, by officialdom, in their own languages. Alas, such material is only available in translation through one specialized web-site, Memri. Worse, the flow of good information even to the U.S. White House and State Department has largely dried up. This is because the providers of it -- scholars who were actually reading and excerpting transcripts from Arabic, Persian, Turkish -- were successfully demonized as "orientalists" and "neo-conservatives" and successively pushed out of their (typically Pentagon) offices. So that at the highest levels of government in the West, the attitude is now, "We don't want to know." I have prayed in that Church of the Saints in Alexandria; I once interviewed a prominent Coptic churchman there (His Grace Bishop Moussa): a wise, learned, kindly, and magnificent man. I remain on the e-lists of several of the people who used to work at the Pentagon and who are still trying to inform anyone who will listen. And my own rage recedes into a deep sadness, for I am watching another of those "tragedies" unfold, of world-historical proportions. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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