Egyptian Islamicists target Christian bookshops

One of the Christian shops threatened in Cairo

Further to our recent report about the situation in Egypt, Islamicists have sent letters to 17 Christian bookshops threatening them, warning them to 'cease your foul trade, whereby you sell your filthy idols'.  This referred to the Coptic use of statues and icons, which the Islamicists incorrectly term idols.  The Christian shopkeepers rushed to the police for protection, and to try and discover the identity of the letter-writer(s), but unsurprisingly the official response has been somewhat lacklustre.  One security guard patrols in the mornings only.

Source

Salafists call for murder of Copts, seculars literally crucifixied

Picture from Dostor Watany

The Egyptian Jihad movement has issued leaflets openly calling on Muslims to attack and kill Christians, offering monetary rewards for those who do so.  Already one Christian shopkeeper was murdered in his shop by someone whom the eyewitness said was in Salafi attire.  Christians are living in even greater fear of their lives, and in at least one village, Muslims are openly beating up Christians, destroying their shops and ransacking their properties, and promising to kill any Christian who dares step outside their houses.  The police typically did not arrive until the damage was done.
According to one Copt who was beaten up, a known felon on the run came into the shop and after taking a pack of cigarettes, refused to pay for them, and instead demanded a large 'tribute' in payment, and when the Copt shopkeeper refused, the felon came back with various cousins and other thugs and seriously beat up the Coptic family, burned a number of stores or cars, ransacked homes and even stole the ownership deeds for Christian properties.  Local Christians are scared because thugs and felons in the area own machine guns.  The police did nothing.  Well, actually that's not true.  The police didn't arrest any of the perpetrators, but they did arrest and take away three of the severely injured victims before they were fully treated.  The village is 80% Christian, making it a target for extortion by kidnap and threats of violence.  After many requests for help, the villages demonstrated outside security / police buildings.

Sources 1, 2, and 3

In addition, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt has started systematically targeting their ideological opponents in the media - the secularists.  Despite assurances that no media outlets would be shut down, at least one TV station that exposed Islamicist agenda's and actions has been.  Mobs of supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood have surrounded TV stations and beaten up prominent journalists and prevented them from entering their workplace.  Even more horrifically, when secularists and opponents of the regime protested outside the Presidential palace, they were surrounded by busloads of Muslim Brotherhood supporters who attacked them.  Arabic Sky News reports - and other sources confirm - that the attack was with knives, sticks and molotov cocktails, and that the MB mob actually stripped some of their victims naked and crucified them on trees in the square, leading to two deaths and many dozens injured.
In addition the supposedly 'moderate' Al-Azhar Islamic university and authority has called for more suppression and violence, saying that it is a religious obligation to fight against and attack anti-Muslim Brotherhood demonstrators in a planned demonstration this Friday.

Source

Where it's even worse.....

In the last post we talked about the latest case of the kidnap of Christian girls and their rape, forced conversion and marriage in Pakistan, and noted that it was happening at the rate of (at least) one a week. Spare a thought for our brothers and sisters, the Copts of Egypt. After the 'Arab Spring' Wahhabi and Salafist movements have mushroomed with funding from Saudi Arabia. These groups are paying Muslims per convert. Unsurprisingly, the rate of abduction has shot up in past while. In one city alone the rate is 2-3 per day. Muslim University students are encouraged to get close to and sexually violate Coptic girls in the age range of 9 to 15. The tactic is to sexually blackmail them and shame them in front of their parents (photographs etc) to coerce them to run away and thus be more vulnerable. They are coerced into converting and marrying.

Salafist groups, police and state security combine to provide a strong infrastructure. The girls are held in houses procured especially for the purpose, the police refuse to pay attention to the girls families. And the Salafi groups have set up a group to deliberately counter and smear the efforts of the Coptic community to get the girls back. The Orwellian titled 'Alliance for the Support of New Muslim Females' has staged against the Coptic church, accusing it of kidnapping girls who have converted to Islam.

This new tactic explains why by far the highest proportion of 'converts' to Islam are from young and underage Coptic women. It can't even be (fully) blamed on normal Islamic practice, since it is deemed alright for the husband, the head of the house, to be a Muslim while his wife isn't. It is only deemed detestable if the 'subservient' wife is a Muslim and the husband is not. Thus these events cannot be about some kind of Romeo-Juliet romances across the religious divide. The goal is not the marriage of in love couples but the open promotion of sexual coercion and blackmail to induce conversion to Islam.

Elements of the security forces, courts, police, University officials and Muslim clergy are openly promoting and facilitating this policy. The supposedly 'pious' Muslims are engaging in mass rape and paedophilia and teaching their followers to do the same.

Even before the Revolution such practices were widespread, with tactics used including telling Christian women that their fathers were seriously ill in hospital and asking for them, and then snatching them off the street as they rushed to the hospital, or straight grabbing them from the street and aneasthatising them, marrying them in this condition, gang raping them for weeks, and then divorcing them. Fathers who protest have been accused of 'promoting sectarian strife' by the police and had their homes stolen from them.

Even where such girls are taken into state care homes (in one recent case it seems the girls claimed that they had freely converted to Islam because they feared retribution from their own families) there is intense intimidation, often with no Christian presence in such institutions, and the machinations of Sharia associations and threatening by Hijab encloaked social workers.

For more information see here, here and here.