Egypt - Another Terrifying Case of Anti-Christian Persecution
Westerners prefer not to notice.
The 21st century inhabitants of the West treat the life that they enjoy as a given. This is especially true of Americas.
What they fail to grasp is that as far as the history of the human race is concerned, and even relative to how much of the world continues to live, their civilization is an anomaly. This is both a blessing and a curse: While their achievements have been nothing short of miraculous, it is precisely because of the incalculable benefits that they’ve reaped from having constructed this envy of the world that they have become spectacularly forgetful of the realities of the human condition.
The Western world is the planet’s version of Disney World. And the thinking that informs the former’s residents is no less wishful and fantastical than that which overcomes visitors to the latter.
Even today, though, most human beings on the Earth haven’t the luxury of fabricating such ideologically-useful fantasies as “micro-aggressions” and the like over which to be aggrieved. They can’t afford to deny the self-evident tenuousness of the social order in which they find themselves and the ubiquity of the inhumanity with which all too many people treat others. The pseudo-sophistication that permits affluent Westerners to dismiss Good and Evil as the imaginary preoccupations of the superstitious and uneducated most of the rest of the planet, if they thought about it at all, would recognize as both demonstrably stupid and a fast track to certain death.
Oppressed peoples—genuinely, truly oppressed peoples—are particularly astute when it comes to these matters.
And, regardless of how politically inconvenient, from a contemporary Western perspective, it is to acknowledge this, the truth of the matter is that, globally speaking, there is no group of people more oppressed at the present moment than Christians.
In Egypt, back in August of last year, 68 year-old Bakhit Azis Georgi and his 35 year-old nephew, Youseff Samaan Girgis, were at Georgi’s place of business when several Islamic men kidnapped them at gunpoint. Upon forcing uncle and nephew into their truck, their Muslim abductors threatened to murder their Christian captives if they communicated at all with one another.
Once darkness arrived, Georgi and Girgis were blindfolded. The truck continued moving along upon uneven terrain for the next two hours as their abductors called them “infidels” and accused them of having “defiled” themselves and their land.
Georgi’s and Girgis’ family, you see, is the only Christian family in their town. And this is not the first time that their family has been targeted, for Osama, one of Georgi’s sons, had been kidnapped four years earlier. He hasn’t been seen or heard from since.
Girgis spent the next 13 days in captivity blindfolded and bound. The only time at which the ropes around his wrists were loosened is when he was fed, once a day, a varying diet of bread, cheese, some water, and lentils. He slept on the ground.
Given that he had no way to differentiate the day from the night, Girgis lost track of all time. His first night he spent crying and praying for deliverance. That Girgis is among millions, billions of human beings for whom evil is something that only one accustomed to the quality of life characteristic of Western societies could question is evident by the prayer that first sprung from his lips:
“Oh God, be with me and my uncle, strengthen us, protect us, and rescue us from the hands of these wicked people. You are our protection.”
Girgis’ faith sustained him as he was relentlessly mocked and insulted. “Every day was a nightmare. I couldn’t distinguish the day from the night. They insulted me continuously and treated me very badly. Plus, I was far from my family, I missed my children so much.”
When Girgis asked if he could contact his children, “they refused and insulted me.”
After 13 days, though, his prayers were answered. Girgis was driven to a desert not from his village and released. His uncle would be released 113 days after that.
They and their family are convinced that they are targeted by Islamic militants because they are Christian. They are just as convinced that their attackers had no reservations about targeting them for the same reason that they have no reservations about attacking any of the Christians that they’ve targeted: This never a price that Muslims must pay for mistreating Christians.
After all, as was already noted, Osama, one of Georgi’s sons and Girgis’ cousin, was kidnapped four years earlier. The police never did a thing.
Moreover, throughout Egypt, Christians are subjected to the most brutal persecution. Within recent months, an Egyptian Christian woman named Jihan was besieged by no fewer than four men, her Muslim neighbors. The low lives were captured on video as they dragged her through the streets while pummeling her. All of the while, they hurled epithets at Jihan and threatened her with rape.
Evidently, Jihan had been tormented prior to this. The local police urged her to install surveillance cameras at her home in order to deter any future attacks. This plan obviously backfired, for it was when her neighbors learned of it they became enraged and unleashed on her.
The point is that they were about as deterred from treating Christians as non-persons as were the attackers of Georgi, his son, and his nephew.
Evil is real. While it comes in a variety of forms, many of which are sufficiently subtle to legitimize debate over they are present in any given set of circumstances, for those on the receiving end of its most blatant manifestations—like Christians, the most oppressed group in the world today—it makes as much sense to debate its existence as it does to debate whether the moon is made of green cheese.
Catholic Leaders Betray Mary’s Honor for Muhammad’s Approval
The latest folly in the name of “Abrahamism.”
Raymond Ibrahim is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
The same folks to bring you "Abrahamism"—the idea that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are intricately connected—have narrowed their sights on promoting Mary, the mother of Christ, as "a Jewish, Christian and Muslim woman," in the words of Catholic priest Fr. Gian Matteo of the Pontifical International Marian Academy. In a ten-week webinar series titled "Mary, a model for faith and life for Christianity and Islam," the academy will seek to present Mary as a bridge between the two religions.
This may be easier said than done — at least for those still interested in facts. For starters, the claim that Mary was a "Jewish, Christian and Muslim woman" is only two-thirds true: yes, she was a Jew by race and background; and yes, she was a Christian in that she literally birthed Christ(ianity); but she was most certainly not a Muslim — a term and religion that came into being 600 years after Mary died.
Worse, far from being the Eternal Virgin, as she is for 1.5 billion Christians of the Catholic and Orthodox variety, Islam presents Mary, the Mother of Christ, as "married" to and "copulating" with Muhammad in paradise — a depiction that would seem to sever rather than build "bridges."
In a hadith that was deemed reliable enough to be included in the renowned Ibn Kathir's corpus, Muhammad declared that "Allah will wed me in paradise to Mary, Daughter of Imran," whom Muslims identify with Jesus's mother. (Note: The Arabic word for "marriage" (نكاح, or nikah) denotes "legal sexual relations," connotes the "F" word, and is wholly devoid of Western, "romantic," or Platonic connotations.)
Nor is this just some random, obscure hadith. None other than Dr. Salem Abdul Galil — previously deputy minister of Egypt's religious endowments for preaching — affirmed its canonicity in 2017 during a live televised Arabic-language program. Among other biblical women (Moses's sister and Pharaoh's wife), "our prophet Muhammad — prayers and be upon him — will be married to Mary in paradise," Galil said.
If few Christians today know about this Islamic claim, medieval Christians living in Muslim-occupied nations were certainly aware of it. There, Muslims regularly threw this fantasy in the face of Catholic and Orthodox Christians who venerated Mary as the "Eternal Virgin." Thus, Eulogius of Cordoba, an indigenous Christian of Muslim-occupied Spain, once wrote, "I will not repeat the sacrilege which that impure dog [Muhammad] dared proffer about the Blessed Virgin, Queen of the World, holy mother of our venerable Lord and Savior. He claimed that in the next world he would deflower her."
As usual, it was Eulogius's offensive words about Muhammad — and not the latter's offensive words about Mary and any number of other things — that had dire consequences: he, as well as many other Spanish Christians vociferously critical of Muhammad, were found guilty of speaking against Islam and publicly tortured and executed in "Golden Age" Cordoba in 859.
One expects that all of these "inconvenient" facts will be quietly passed over during the Pontifical International Marian Academy's webinars. And if they are raised, no doubt Christians will somehow take the blame, as almost always happens in academic settings. As one example, after quoting Eulogius's aforementioned lament against Muhammad's claim of being married to Mary, John V. Tolan, a professor and member of Academia Europaea, denounced it as an "outrageous claim" of Eulogius's own "invention." He then railed against the martyr — not against his murderers or their prophet:
Eulogius fabricates lies designed to shock his Christian reader. This way, even those elements of Islam that resemble Christianity (such as reverence of Jesus and his virgin mother) are deformed and blackened, so as to prevent the Christian from admiring anything about the Muslim other. The goal is to inspire hatred for the "oppressors[.]" ... Eulogius sets out to show that the Muslim is not a friend but a potential rapist of Christ's virgins. (Saracens: Islam in the Medieval European Imagination, p.93)
As already seen, however, it is Muhammad himself — not any "Christian polemicist" — who "fabricates lies designed to shock," namely that Mary will be his eternal concubine.
This, incidentally, is the main problem the purveyors of Abrahamism fail to acknowledge: Islam does not treat biblical characters the way Christianity does.
Christians accept the text of the Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament, as it is. They do not add, take away, or distort the accounts of the patriarchs that Jews also rely on. Conversely, while also relying on the figures of the Old and New Testaments — primarily for the weight of antiquity and authority attached to their names — Islam completely recasts them with different attributes that reaffirm Muhammad's religion as the one true and final "revelation," as opposed to Judaism and Christianity, whose biblical accounts on these figures are then seen as "distorted" because they are different from Islam's later revisions.
Far from creating "commonalities," it should be clear that such appropriation creates conflict. By way of analogy, imagine that you have a grandfather whom you are particularly fond of, and out of the blue, a stranger who never even met your grandfather says: "Hey, that's my grandfather!" Then — lest you think this stranger is somehow trying to become your friend — he adds: "And everything you thought you knew about grandpa is wrong! Only I have his true life story."
Would that create a "bridge" between you and this stranger who is trying to appropriate and recast the image of your grandfather?
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