Attacks On Middle East Christians

Voice Of America - News/Mideast

Concern Over Attacks on Middle East Christians Grows in Washington

“After all, a large number of Iraqi Christians were forced to leave Iraq, when we as Americans had 150,000 men and women in Iraq,” he says.
There are fears of a similar decline in Syria, where the kidnapping of a group of Greek Orthodox nuns raised fears in the minority Christian community that they were being targeted by extremists among the anti-government fighters. They were released in March.
At the National Prayer Breakfast in February, President Barack Obama devoted his speech to religious freedom abroad.
“No society can truly succeed unless it guarantees the rights of all its peoples, including religious minorities, whether they’re Ahmadiyya Muslims in Pakistan, or Baha’i in Iran, or Coptic Christians in Egypt,” he said.
“We were really encouraged because at the prayer breakfast, he came out with a very strong statement,” said Jeff King of International Christian Concern, which runs the website persecution.org.
“But you look at the follow up to that and there hasn’t been any,” he adds, noting that the president did not even bring up discrimination against Christians in his recent meeting with King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, where churches are banned.
King says President Obama “is very vocal on the subject of the persecution of the gay community” in other countries, even though he says Christians have been more frequent targets of killings.

At St. Mark Coptic Orthodox Church in suburban Washington, many churchgoers were alarmed at the latest report from Egypt of a young Coptic woman who was murdered by a Cairo mob who saw a crucifix hanging in her car windshield.

Reports of Coptic women being kidnapped and raped worry Sandy Salamon, who immigrated to the U.S. at the age of eight. She says they are meant to humiliate the Copts as a people.

“It’s a weapon that - when that piece of your humanity is attacked, it’s very hard to …  fight back,” she said, adding that the humiliation is part of daily life.

She recalls visiting Cairo just after the revolution, being out on the street with her mother and aunt.

“I’m not veiled. So, I’m walking down, clearly a Christian,” she said. “The looks, the language, even the body language is very threatening.”

Copts are the largest Christian minority in the region, and they say their church predates the arrival of Islam in the 7th century. According to Coptic tradition, it was established in the first century by Mark the Evangelist - a disciple of Jesus.

American-born priest Paul Girguis says that since the beginning, Copts have known martyrdom and suffering.

“There was an emperor that said, ‘I’m going to massacre the Christians until the blood in the streets reaches to the knees of my horse.’”

Still he says Copts are “a very resilient people,” and if they survived 20 centuries, they will overcome the hardships of the 21st.

---

Jerome Socolovsky

Jerome Socolovsky is the award-winning religion correspondent for the Voice of America, based in Washington. He reports on the rapidly changing faith landscape of the United States, including interfaith issues, secularization and non-affiliation trends and the growth of immigrant congregations.

My comments: President Obama is an anti-Christ as demonstrated by his polices and actions. He will do little or nothing to stop Christian persecution abroad. At home he is a persecutor of Christians. He will only do what is politically opportunistic.