It’s stating the obvious to say that the persecution of Christians isn’t taken seriously by elites, and the general public in the West.
The persecution of Christians worldwide, is taken about as seriously as the Egyptian authorities take the abductions, abuse and trafficking of Coptic Christian women.
Such abuses are either quietly acknowledged, well hidden, or don’t exist.
In a #metoo Western world, human rights abuses against Egyptian Coptic Christian women should be front page news. It’s not.
The #metoo movement melt into spectators whenever news reaches Western shores. Suggesting the ineffectiveness of a hashtag, and the docility of a complacent, selective activism.
A movement which appears more concerned with placating the “approved” image of Islam for the Muslim majority, than it is in ‘raising the visibility of violence against Coptic women in Egypt.’(CS)
2011-2013 (the infamous Arab Spring) saw some of the worst persecution of Egyptian Coptic Christians in decades. Religious freedom radically declined under the Muslim Brotherhood. Churches were burned, or bombed. Priests were gunned down, and monasteries were attacked.
In 2012 a United States Congressional Hearing into human rights violations in Egypt also heard of
‘…the disappearance, forced marriages and forced conversions
of Coptic women. [Noting that] the vulnerability and abduction of Coptic Christians is not new. Going back to the 1970s, there were many accounts of Coptic women and girls being abducted by Muslims, forcibly conducted and forcibly married.’
This was before the June 30 2013 revolution, tripped by mass protests calling for the ousting of President Mohamed Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood.
Accompanying this was the outlawing of the Muslim Brotherhood, who had been quietly backed by the then Obama/Biden/Clinton administration’s foreign policies. (By comparison the Trump administration has expressed interest in following Egypt’s lead in designating the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organisation, but is yet to act in any meaningful way on behalf of Egypt’s Coptic Christians).
Suspension, then reform of the 2012 Muslim Brotherhood’s Egyptian (Shari’a influenced) constitution followed. However, much of the law was retained.
As cited by Coptic Solidarity in their 2020 report, ‘while no apostasy law exists per say. The 2nd article of the Egyptian Constitution, states that Islam is the religion of the state and the principles of Islamic Shari’a are the main source of legislation.’
According to the report, the Egyptian government’s tactic is to ‘deny the extant of trafficking.’ Their official response is that the women freely chose to leave Christian families and convert to Islam.
The 2012, United States Senate Congressional hearing uncovered some legitimate cases where this had occurred, but even in those cases ‘legal hurdles made it extremely difficult for a woman to escape the marriage and convert back to Christianity.’
Despite government denial. Evidence, and testimonies collected by Coptic Solidarity from a range of reliable sources over many years, contradict the official Egyptian government party-line.
For instance, evidence provided by Christian Solidarity International to the 2012 Congressional hearing comes from ‘Egyptian lawyers, real life cases, family members, and police reports.’
Despite government denial. Evidence, and testimonies collected by Coptic Solidarity from a range of reliable sources over many years, contradict the official Egyptian government party-line.
For instance, evidence provided by Christian Solidarity International to the 2012 Congressional hearing comes from ‘Egyptian lawyers, real life cases, family members, and police reports.’
In addition, ‘attorneys, social workers and members of the clergy interviewed for this and the previous report all attested to organized and systematic planning in the cases of missing Coptic women.’
The 2012 Congressional hearing heard of how the human trafficking of Coptic Christian women occurred.
‘Many [Coptic women] were lured into false relationships through fraudulent means or forcible abductions. These women were coerced into converting to Islam and married to their abductors against their wills.’
The few Coptic Christian women who are found testify that they’d ‘been drugged and kidnapped or kidnapped with violence. Reporting forced conversion, rape, forced marriages, beatings and domestic servitude.’
According to Christian Solidarity International, ‘abductors target vulnerable women and girls, and girls in vulnerable and unprotected moments.’
‘Captors sever contact between victims and their families. The first task of the captor is to come between a young woman and members of her family. They can do this by force, by taking away her phone, by denying her any contact with her relatives. They lock her up. They deny her mobility. They threaten her by telling her that her family would disown her. Conversion is the ultimate goal of captivity.’
This includes married women, and married women with children. One significant reason for this is that under 2012 Egyptian law, if a woman converts to Islam, her children, by law would be considered Muslim.
Coptic Solidarity’s apt term for this is ‘jihad of the womb.’
The Christian Post published the report’s long list of trafficking victims, which included damning testimonials of widespread corruption, with law enforcement turning a blind eye, creating a culture of shame, silence, and powerlessness which enables Islamist people traffickers to carry out abductions with almost 100% impunity (p.8).
For instance, ‘if an adult married woman converts to Islam, courts immediately annul her existing marriage (unless the husband agrees to convert likewise) and the woman becomes free to marry a Muslim man.’ This law doesn’t apply if the married woman was a Muslim looking to marry a Christian man (p.7)
This isn’t just an issue for Egypt or the Egyptian Coptic Christian community.
In January, Ben Davis wrote of how British police have been accused of ‘turning a blind eye to the grooming of 57 young female children for sexual exploitation by a coordinated group of Muslim men.’ According to ‘former GMP detective Maggie Oliver, “girls were lost in the wind’ due to what the Daily Mail reported as being a concern from law enforcement that ‘arresting the perpetrators would result in the “incitement of racial hatred.”
The blasé response from the West has shown how naïve we’ve become. Like Chinese Communists, if the Egyptian government’s official party-line states that “no human rights abuse crisis exists”, then it must be true.
Any crimes committed under the banner of Islam is candy-coated for a gullible public, made numb by a decades long misinformation campaign that portrays Islam simultaneously as a “race” and a “religion of peace.”
It’s no wonder that widespread testimony, and any evidence that contradicts the well-built facade is easily dismissed as the fairy tales of racists, bigots and Islamophobes.
Crimes against humanity are hidden behind the gaslighting of the global community.
This is on par with what the 2020 Coptic Solidarity report – summarised here by Christian Headlines contributor, John Paluska – called the Egyptian Government’s ‘victim blaming’ (p.3).
Impunity for Islamists matches the free ride given to Communists by Western academics, some politicians and most of the mainstream media.
Tragically, like the Uyghur ethnic minority in China, this means that on the world stage, up to 12 million of Egypt’s approx. 80+ million people are essentially voiceless.
12 million people, who no matter how hard advocates scream in order to waken a docile, manipulated world, to their suffering, are left behind by the Western part of that world, because it’s paralysed by fear through the navel gazing of intersectionality (CRT) theory, and a toxic obsession with political correctness.
There’s now no plausible excuse for ignorance or inaction.
Coptic Solidarity’s 2020 report on the ‘Trafficking of Coptic Women & Girls in Egypt’ requires a response.
Related material:
https://www.c-span.org/video/standalone/?c4666101/user-clip-kio
First published on Caldron Pool, 24th September 2020.
Image credit: Vatican & Reuters.
©Rod Lampard, 2020
Gratia Veritas Lumen 