U.S. Copts Association

By Michelle Vu

WASHINGTON - A Middle East Scholar living and teaching in Lebanon made an appearance at a senate office Tuesday to inform religious freedom experts, human rights advocates, and people interested in the Middle East situation about the accelerating population decline of Christians, Jews and other non-Muslims and the adverse affect of the lost on Islamic moderation.

Dr. Habib Malik, professor of history and cultural studies at the Lebanese American University in Beirut, shared his expertise about the situation of religious minorities in the Middle East during a briefing hosted by Freedom House’s Center for Religious Freedom and the Congressional Working Group on Religious Freedom.
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By Sally Bishai

June 19th marked the first day of the Fourth International Coptic Conference. The event was attended by many great thinkers and writers, both “Middle Eastern” and American, both “Coptic” and not.

In fact, one of the discussions swirling about during the coffee breaks was “What is a Copt, anyway?”
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Christian outpost remains in Muslim area five years after violence erupted.

June 20 (Compass Direct) - For the Gangare area congregation of the Evangelical Church of West Africa (ECWA) in this central Nigerian city, the first Saturday in June brought yet another difficult day of fending off Muslim opposition. Church members were trying to erect a protective fence around the church when a large number of Muslims on June 3 stormed the facility and forcibly halted the work. Previously Muslims had built a house on part of the land belonging to the church. The Christians took them to court, which ruled in favor of the church. “To avoid a situation that will ignite a conflict between us and the Muslims, we had to stop the work,” church elder Dauda Mshelia told Compass. “Even now, there are plans by the Muslims to attack us anytime we are in the church and to burn the sanctuary - that is why you see the police keeping watch over the church.” Church members are well acquainted with fierce opposition; Muslims destroyed the church’s original building after conflict erupted into widespread violence in 2001.

By Harry de Quetteville
President Hosni Mubarak has long known the face of the main opposition to his regime in Egypt. Bearded, dressed in long Islamic robes, it belongs to the religious conservatives of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Manal Hassan does not look like that at all. The secular 23-year-old, with her dark curls and cavernous eyes unhidden by any veil, is part of a new and potentially powerful dissident movement in Egypt.

Like the Muslim Brotherhood, she wants to see greater political freedoms and an end to the draconian Emergency Law under which Mr Mubarak has ruled the country since the assassination of Anwar Sadat in 1981.
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Following are excerpts from a children’s program hosted by Egyptian cleric, Sheik Muhammad Nassar, which aired on Al-Nas TV on June 15, 2006. Sheik Nassar is identified by Al-Nas TV as a preacher at the Egyptian ministry of religious endowment:

Sheik Muhammad Nassar: Let’s listen to a very beautiful story to learn about the courage of a child, and how, when a child is brought up in a good home, and receives proper education in faith, he loves martyrdom, which becomes like an instinct for him. He can never give it up.
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Detainees held at Jeddah’s deportation jail.

June 15 (Compass Direct) - Ten Saudi Arabian police armed with wooden clubs raided a private Christian worship meeting in the coastal city of Jeddah on Friday (June 9), arresting four East African citizens leading the service. At press time, the two Ethiopian and two Eritrean Christians remained in the city’s deportation jail. More than 100 Eritreans, Ethiopians and Filipinos were gathered for worship in a home in Jeddah’s Al-Rowaise district at 11 o’clock last Friday morning. Startled worshippers brought chairs to seat the policemen, who sat and waited with clubs in hand for the three-hour worship service to conclude before arresting Ethiopians Mekbeb Telahun and Masai Wendewesen and Eritreans Fekre Gebremedhin and Dawit Uqbay. One Christian who spoke with them by telephone reported they were “doing fine, with okay morale.” But he said he did not know how they were being treated.

By Michael Hirst
LONDON (America) - Christianity has a rich cultural seam in the Middle East. On the first Pentecost, when the disciples were blessed with tongues to tell the good news, one of the languages spoken was Arabic. So successful was the spread of Christianity across a region that now includes parts of Iraq, Syria, Palestine and Egypt that by the sixth century it had 15 million followers.
The number of Christians in the Fertile Crescent is roughly the same today and comprises some 20 different churches, including Catholic, Coptic and Orthodox. But while 15 centuries ago Christians made up 95 percent of the region’s population, that figure has slumped to 5 percent. And it is dropping fast.
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Canadian police foiled a homegrown terrorist attack by arresting 17 suspects, apparently inspired by al-Qaida, who obtained three times the amount of explosives used in the Oklahoma City bombing, officials said Saturday.

The FBI said the Canadian suspects may have had “limited contact” with two men recently arrested on terrorism charges in Georgia. About 400 regional police and federal agents participated in the arrests Friday and early Saturday.
“These individuals were allegedly intent on committing acts of terrorism against their own country and their own people,” Prime Minister Stephen Harper said in a statement. “As we have said on many occasions, Canada is not immune to the threat of terrorism.”

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police arrested the suspects, ages 43 to 19, on terrorism charges including plotting attacks with explosives on Canadian targets. The suspects were either citizens or residents of Canada and had trained together, police said.
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By Jonathan David Carson
Western apologists for Islam are wont to say that the Islamic world of a thousand years ago was far advanced of Christendom, militarily, economically, and culturally. This is a curious claim because the implicit standard of judgment is that of modern secularism, a standard that neither the Islamic world nor Christendom could accept, then or now, which, of course, does not prevent Islamists from opportunistically making use of their useful idiots in the West and their useful secular judgments.

In truth, military superiority has alternated between the Islamic world and Christendom in the millennium since Mohammed’s immediate successors conquered most of Christendom. The conquered lands being among the most prosperous and many of the remaining Christian territories being relatively poor, the Islamic world began with a great economic advantage over the European hinterlands, which it proceeded to squander. So now the Islamic world is weak and poor and reduced to living in an imagined past and future.
Since Western apologists come from a class that ordinarily associates military and economic strength with evil and since the United States and even Europe are far more powerful militarily and economically than their Islamic adversaries, apologists prefer to celebrate the alleged cultural superiority of the Islamic world to its contemporaries in medieval Europe, especially the vaunted “Islamic philosophy” of the time.
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By ‘Sandmonkey’
CAIRO - As I write this, I am watching Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak give his speech at the World Economic Forum, being held in the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh. The usually pro-US Mubarak has just delivered what can only be described as a fiery anti-US speech, criticizing the American push for democratic reforms in Egypt. He informed the world that he was confident his government was “on the right path” when it comes to democratic reforms, but he cautioned that changes should be gradual to avoid “chaos and setbacks.”This guy gets funnier every single year he stays in power, I swear.

Mr. Mubarak has every right to be angry. During the month of May alone the US State Department has criticized Egypt three times for its treatment of protesters. The Egyptian police have broken up several peaceful demonstrations, held in support of two pro-reform judges who questioned the legitimacy of Egypt’s 2005 parliamentary elections. Protesters were brutally beaten, and then thrown in jail for an indefinite period of time for shouting slogans that “defame the government” and “insult the president in public.”

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