My note: An unstable, poor and desert country of Egypt which always exists at the Mercy of Ethiopia (Nile Waters) is showing an interest to join the club of emerging economies, BRICS, whose leaders have just reached a deal to create a development bank that will rival Western-backed institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and World Bank.
Egypt, which exhibits evil acts of committing genocides and other despicable atrocities against its Christian population, has been blocking financial aids to Ethiopia from such international organizations as the IMF and World Bank. Now it is aiming to manipulate the BRICS nations by expressing its willingness to join them. I hope these nations will be wise enough not to be tricked into giving such a desperate state like Egypt, even as a candidate for BRICS status.
Egyptian mosque turned into house of torture for Christians after Muslim Brotherhood protest
Islamic hard-liners stormed a mosque in suburban Cairo, turning it into torture chamber for Christians who had been demonstrating against the ruling Muslim Brotherhood in the latest case of violent persecution that experts fear will only get worse.
Such stories have become increasingly common as tensions between Egypt’s Muslims and Copts mount, but in the latest case, mosque officials corroborated much of the account and even filed a police report. Demonstrators, some of whom were Muslim, say they were taken from the Muslim Brotherhood headquarters in suburban Cairo to a nearby mosque on Friday and tortured for hours by hard-line militia members.
“They accompanied me to one of the mosques in the area and I discovered the mosque was being used to imprison demonstrators and torture them,” Amir Ayad, a Coptic who has been a vocal protester against the regime, told MidEast Christian News from a hospital bed.
“It will only get worse,” said Gabbay. “This has been a longstanding conflict, but now that the Muslim Brotherhood is in power, it is moving forward to implement its ideology – which is that Christians are supposed to become Muslims.
Christians slaughtered, world yawns
Across our world in which 7.1 billion people dwell, 2.2 billion (or 31 percent) are Christians. They pray in mega-churches across America, in isolated villages in China, and in thousands of places in between.
More and more, they pray in fear. That’s because, as the Hudson Institute’s Paul Marshall, Lela Gilbert, and Nina Shea outline in detail in their new book, Persecuted, Christians are under “global assault.”
Christian persecution occurs across Asia, Africa, and the Greater Middle East; it ranges from restrictions on worship to assassination for owning a Bible; and it occurs due to government sponsorship (e.g., in North Korea, Vietnam, China, Burma, Saudi Arabia, and Iran), social intolerance (in Nigeria and Iraq), or acts of terrorism from Muslim extremists (e.g., in Somalia and Afghanistan).
(Additional note: Two years ago, 35 Ethiopian Christians working in Saudi Arabia were arrested and detained by the kingdom’s religious police for holding just such a private prayer gathering in Jeddah Saudi officials strip-searched all the women and subjected them to an abusive body-cavity search, and assaulted the men. In a remarkable prison interview with the Voice of America’s Amharic-language service, one of the women, who contracted an infection from the search, attested: “We are traumatized by the strip search. They treated us like dogs because of our Christian faith. While talking about me during a recent visit to the prison medical center, I overheard a nurse telling a doctor ‘if she dies, we will put her in a trash bin.’”)
Though the world’s remaining Communist countries persecute the most Christians, the authors write, “It is in the Muslim world where persecution of Christians is now most widespread, intense, and ominously increasing.”
“Among those assaulted with violence on a horrific scale have been the young, fast-growing churches of Nigeria and South Sudan, which are seen as a threat to Muslim hegemony. Individual converts from Islam, such as Pastor Youcef Nadarkhani in Iran, are particularly at risk of being put to death or otherwise harshly punished by either the governments or extremist elements within society in significant parts of the Muslim world. They are denounced as apostates.”
But ancient churches, including Iraq’s Chaldean and Assyrian churches and Egypt’s Coptic churches, are under attack as well.
In some places, governments are increasingly tightening the screws on Christians or stepping aside while extremist groups do it for them. In others, like Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan, there are hardly any screws left to tighten because the governments don’t even allow churches in which Christians might worship.
As remarkable as the global assault, however, is the relative silence by global leaders and the media. Though Christians are overwhelmingly the leaders of governments across the West, no national leader has seen fit to call much attention to the horror.
How many more Christians around the world must die before global leaders, the media, and others of influence gives this horror the attention it deserves?
Saudi Arabia destroying Muslim heritage of Mecca
There is a veritable industry out there producing an endless stream of “reports” about imaginary Israeli efforts to destroy, damage or defile Muslim sites, in particular the Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem. I have repeatedly written about this vicious campaign that goes back to the days of Haj Amin al Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem, who later gained notoriety as a Nazi collaborator. Many recent examples of this ongoing incitement have been compiled by Palestinian Media Watch (PMW), and for the very latest installment, you can always turn to the website of Quds Media Center.
The manufactured outrage that usually accompanies the false reports on invented Israeli transgressions against Muslim holy places stands in stark contrast to the docile silence that has allowed Saudi authorities to transform Islam’s holiest places into glitzy luxury destinations.
However, by now several reports highlighting the destruction of historic Islamic sites in Saudi Arabia have appeared in the media. A CNN report includes some fascinating photos dramatically illustrating how much reckless construction has transformed the area of Islam’s holiest site.
The Independent asked “Why don’t more Muslims speak out against the wanton destruction of Mecca’s holy sites?”
Addis Ethiopia Weblog 