Right Wing Nut House

My latest is up at FPM and it’s about the discomfiting reality facing Christians in Egypt and the Middle East at large.

With the advent of the “Arab Spring,” radical Muslims have been unleashed from decades of their own oppression and allowed to rampage through Christian communities burning churches, murdering, and destroying Christian homes.

In Egypt, the Copts have watched as a systematic effort to destroy their churches and terrorize their communities has been underway since the fall of Mubarak. A riot on Sunday killed nearly 20 and wounded 400. And the hell of it is, the authorities are ignoring the persecution, currying favor with the radicals.

A sample:

On September 30, “some three thousand Muslims rampaged the church, torched it, and demolished the dome; flames from the wreckage burned nearby Coptic homes, which were further ransacked by rioting Muslims.” Predictably, the Governor of Aswan blamed the Christians for the violence, pointing out that the Copts were building the roof of the church 3 meters too high. “Copts made a mistake and had to be punished, and Muslims did nothing but set things right, end of story,” said the governor.

Coptic Christians were second class citizens under the Mubarak regime, but their churches were protected and radical Islamists were reined in. But since the “Arab Spring,” the authorities have turned a blind eye as Muslims have run wild, burning churches, murdering Christians, and rampaging through Christian communities.

According to the Associated Press, here’s a partial list of attacks on Copts since the beginning of 2011:

• A New Year church attack left 23 dead.
• On February 23, a Coptic priest was found murdered. The assailants reportedly shouted “Allahu-Akbar” upon leaving the dead priest’s house.
• In March, a Muslim-Christian love affair led to the burning of a church south of Cairo. When Copts protested the church attack, a mob of Muslims wielding knives and clubs attacked killing 13 and injuring 140.
• In April, thousands of Muslims in Qena protested the appointment of a Coptic governor. The authorities caved in and appointed a Muslim.
• In May, another church was burned, this time in Cairo, by a mob angered over another Christian-Muslim love affair. Twelve were killed.

There have been no prosecutions relating to any of these attacks. In fact, as Ibrahim reports, “Even if sometimes the most rabid church-destroying Muslims get ‘detained,’ it is usually for show, as they are released in days, hailed back home as heroes.”

These scenes of destruction and murder have been repeated all over the Middle East. Whatever one can say about tyrants like Saddam Hussein and Hosni Mubarak, they feared the Islamists and kept them from causing the kind of mayhem that is afflicting Christian populations across the region. And the destruction of churches and murders of Christians are not isolated incidents. There has been a systematic targeting of Christians in Iraq, Lebanon, Sudan, Iran, as well as Egypt. The attacks are inspired by extremist clerics, and condoned to one degree or another by authorities.

Despite Christians living and worshiping in the Middle East for 2,000 years, those communities are now in danger of disappearing. A report by the Egyptian Federation of Human Rights reveals that 100,000 Christians have fled Egypt since March, with 250,000 expected to leave before the end of 2011. In Iraq, it’s even worse. A State Department report last year on religious freedom around the world showed that 50% of Iraqi Christians had left the country since the US invasion. And in Sudan, tens of thousands of Christians in the Nuba Mountains are being bombed daily by Sudanese military forces and suffer house to house raids at the hands of President Bashir’s forces.

One is forced to confront an uncomfortable reality: if any other minority group — racial, ethnic, or tribal — was suffering from government-condoned persecution carried out by out of control mobs, the outrage in the Western press and from Western governments would be loud and sustained. So why don’t Christians in the Middle East rate that kind of concern?