U.S. Copts Association

Muslim neighbors strike converts from Islam with bricks, clubs; extremists say they will kill two.

DUBLIN, June 28 (Compass Direct News) - Muslim villagers armed with bricks and wooden clubs savagely beat 10 Christian converts in Nilphamari district, Bangladesh, on Tuesday (June 26) and threatened to burn down their homes if they did not leave by today. The mob gave the Christians an ultimatum on Wednesday (June 27) to leave the village within 24 hours, threatening more beatings along with home burnings; Muslim extremists also threatened to kill two Christians. After receiving news of the beating, a human rights advocate traveled to Durbachari Bhatiapara and Laksmirdanga villages to find that the mob had bound both male and female converts with ropes in their homes and “seriously wounded” them. Several victims required hospital treatment, and one house was destroyed in the attack. Police rejected the Christians’ attempt to file a complaint, instead threatening to arrest them for “converting Muslims.”

Interior minister demands execution of Christian ‘apostates.’

ISTANBUL, June 25 (Compass Direct News) - Egypt’s Supreme Administrative Court heard a final appeal last week for 45 Coptic Christian citizens who were denied their attempt to legally reclaim their Christian identities after officially converting to Islam.

Of the 45 plaintiffs, half were adults when they changed the required religion section on their national identity cards from Christian to Muslim. The remainder were children whose Coptic parents had become Muslims. All have declared they want to return to their Christian faith.

Arguing before presiding Judge Essam Eddin Abdel-Aziz on June 18, Coptic lawyer Naguib Gabriel declared that a lower administrative court’s April ruling against his 45 clients’ joint-action suit had “embarrassed the Egyptian government at an international level.”
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Written by Joseph Puder   

Dr. Monir Dawoud is an affable physician and surgeon from Hudson County, N.J., who has become increasingly angry in recent weeks with the United Nations and the governments of the Western world for deliberately ignoring the dire human rights situation facing the Coptic community in Egypt.
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Priest says university students, faculty targeted for their faith, money.

ISTANBUL, June 22 (Compass Direct News) - Christian university students and faculty kidnapped two days ago on their way home from exams at Mosul University were released today, an Iraqi satellite TV channel reported. According to Ashtar TV, two university teachers and six students from the predominantly Syrian Catholic village of Qaraqosh were released in Mosul city around noon today. A priest from Qaraqosh requested that Compass not publish the names of the eight for security reasons. According to one priest, the families gave a total of $250,000 for the group, which he said consisted of only one teacher and seven students. “First of all, they were kidnapped for money, and secondly, they were kidnapped because they are Christians,” the priest said. “The minorities are vulnerable.”

Demonstration in West Java calls for closures; two congregations attacked.

JAKARTA, June 21 (Compass Direct News) - Muslim extremists demonstrating on June 14 in West Java threatened to close down churches operating in private homes, and a pastor on Sunday (June 17) received an anonymous letter promising to destroy his home if it is “still functioning as a church.” The protest and threats followed two attacks on churches in West Java in early June. Some 150 protestors from the Mosque Movement Front (FPM) and the Anti-Apostasy Alliance joined the mid-June march, The Jakarta Post reported on June 15. By law, Indonesian church groups must have a worship permit - but strict terms of a Joint Ministerial Decree revised last year make it virtually impossible to obtain one. At the close of the June 14 march, FPM head Suryana Nur Fatwa warned officials that if they failed to close down illegal churches, FPM would take matters into its own hands: “Every violator must stop their activities or the FPM will be forced to close them down.”

by Raymond Ibrahim

Lest you think that the U.S. court system has made humanitarian considerations its first priority, as evidenced by the recent court ruling to release from military custody Ali Saleh al Marri - an al-Qaeda sleeper agent who was trained in Osama bin Laden’s training camps - one need look no further than to the equally recent court decision to deport Sameh Khouzam, a Copt who (like many before him) fled the notorious religious persecution and torture chambers of Egypt nine years ago to seek asylum in the U.S., only to find that the legal system that is humane enough to release al Marri, a man whose sole purpose for being in the U.S. was to kill Americans,  plans on sending him, Khouzam, back to Egypt where he faces certain torture, if not death.   “It’s particularly outrageous when the record is replete with evidence that he [Khouzam] has been repeatedly tortured,” per one ACLU lawyer.
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In the last fortnight, two Coptic Orthodox Christian Communities in northern Egypt have been attacked by rioters following arguments between Christians and Muslims.

According to the Coptic newspaper, Watani, and news agency Compass Direct, a group of Muslims attacked the Christian quarter of Zwyet Abdel-Qader on 8 June 2007, looting shops and vandalizing homes. The rioting was eventually broken up by police after 90 minutes.

The incident allegedly resulted from an argument which took place the previous day between a Christian truck driver and a Muslim teenager who refused to move out of the way to let the truck pass.

Four days later, on 12 June 2007, the Holy Virgin’s Church in Dekheila was attacked after a fight broke out between Christians and Muslims. The fighting started from an argument between a Coptic Christian, 16 year old Bassem Mikail, and 21 year old Muslim Abdel-Dayem, who were both construction workers. The rioters threw bottles and stones at the Church, although serious damage was prevented by the immediate response of local police.
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Egyptian MP Murtadha Mansour has filed a lawsuit against Egyptian civil rights activist Sa’d Al-Din Ibrahim, who heads the Ibn Khaldoun Center in Cairo, for treason and for conspiring against the homeland.

Mansour stated that Ibrahim received millions of dollars from the U.S. Embassy in Egypt and from the wife of Qatar’s emir to disseminate false information about Egypt’s domestic situation, and to harm its good name.

Source: Al-Masryoon, Egypt, June 18, 2007

Government forces act quickly to halt second incident in one week.

ISTANBUL, June 15 (Compass Direct News) - Muslim rioters attacked two Coptic Orthodox churches, damaged Christian-owned shops and injured seven Christians in two unrelated incidents in northern Egypt during the past week, local Christians said.

Witnesses said that a mob in Zawyet Abdel-Qader, 20 miles west of Alexandria, had freely vandalized the town’s Christian quarter for 90 minutes the night of June 8 before police intervened.

In a second incident in Dekheila, six miles west of Alexandria, police immediately halted a mob attack on the Church of the Holy Virgin on Tuesday night (June 12), preventing all but minimal damage from occurring.

Local Christians confirmed that each attack was triggered by a fight between a Muslim and a Christian, but Akram Anwar Bekheed, a local member of the National Democratic Party in Zawyet Abdel-Qader, laid partial responsibility on the government.
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Two children entered St Mary’s church in Dakhlia during a church meeting and started to throw rocks at the congregation. Shortly after, there were calls from the surrounding mosques urging Muslims to act. A number of Muslims armed with rocks, knives and small weapons as well as bottles filled with acid, congregated around the church and threw the rocks and bottles at the church building.
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