Spotlight on the Maspero Massacre
An especially egregious example of how Muslim governments exonerate Muslim persecutors of Christians, and also brutally punish those same Christians for standing up for their basic human rights, is Egypt’s Maspero Massacre, in which the military killed twenty-eight Christians and injured several hundred.
Days after the destruction of St. George Church in Edfu—which at the time was only the latest of several churches Muslim mobs had attacked and destroyed in Egypt—thousands of frustrated Christian Copts staged a protest in Maspero near Cairo on October 9. In response, the military—earlier hailed by the Western media for its patriotism and “gentleness” towards protesters calling for Mubarak’s ousting—brutally punished Egypt’s Christian citizens. Among other atrocities, Copts were chased and literally run over by armored vehicles; many gruesome images of flattened people were caught on tape. Death squads of snipers were deployed atop buildings the night before the planned protest to kill and terrorize demonstrators.23 Eyewitnesses, including Muslim bystanders, attested that they saw soldiers hurling the mutilated bodies of slain Christians into the Nile to cover up the evidence.24
Anti-Christian animus clearly fueled this attack. Videos record soldiers screaming “Allahu Akbar!” (Islam’s primordial war cry) and cursing “infidels” as they approached and attacked Christian protesters. A soldier boasting that he shot a Christian in the chest is greeted with shouts of “Allahu Akbar!” from the crowd around him.25
Christians were so hunted that some Muslims, in “Schindler’s List” fashion, even helped hide the Christians from the military. An Arabic report titled “Egypt’s Schindler” recounts the story, a splendid exception to the general rule of Muslim indifference to hate crimes against Christians. A Muslim owner of a company based in Maspero near the site of the Christian massacre had to struggle to get past the dead and wounded who filled the entrance of his company’s building. When he went up to his office, he saw the look of “horror on the terrified faces” of his employees and of some forty Copts, including a priest, who had sought shelter there. The staff told him how the military police, armed with machine guns, had broken into the company’s headquarters searching for Christians, who hid in the restrooms. Some Muslim employees in the company gave their ID cards to the Christians to hide their true identity from the military during the carnage.26
Notwithstanding the overwhelming evidence of the atrocities, Egypt’s Military Council, ruling at the time, held a news conference after the massacre in which senior official Mahmoud Hegazy spun lie after lie. The military, he said, would “never, never” run over civilians. That very idea was “impossible, impossible! . . . Shame on those who accuse the Egyptian military of such things! . . . Never has our military run over a single person, not even when combating the Enemy [Israel].”27
Hegazy portrayed the unarmed Christian protesters as aggressors who had attacked and killed “honorable” soldiers. To prove his point, he showed an image of a protester on top of a stalled armored vehicle throwing a rock at the soldier inside and a video of a military vehicle, which he claimed had been hijacked by a protester, driving wildly into the Christian crowd. However, an investigative report on the Arabic-language program Al Dalil, which focuses on Islam and Christianity, including in current events, showed that the vehicles in both images had the same identification number. In other words, when the vehicle in which a soldier was chasing and running over protesters was finally stalled, the protesters then attacked it. Egypt’s military willfully manipulated the footage to exonerate its brutality and demonize the Copts for trying to defend themselves.28
Instead of trying the soldiers who intentionally ran over and opened fire on Egyptian citizens, Egypt’s military prosecutor detained thirty-four Christians, including three teenagers under sixteen years old, on charges of “inciting violence, carrying arms and insulting the armed forces.” Many of the detainees were not even at the scene but were simply collected from the streets for “‘being a Christian.’” One Copt was arrested and accused of stealing a machine gun to kill fellow Copts.29
Later in 2012, two Coptic priests, Father Matthias Nasr and Father Filopateer Gameel, were also forced to stand trial in connection with these events. Father Mathias commented, “I wonder about the conditions prevailing in Egypt now, whereby victims are being investigated, while the real perpetrators are ruling the country and continuing with their crimes against the Egyptian people and peaceful demonstrators everywhere.... We all saw who ran over the demonstrators and who shot at them, all Egyptians saw that on videos and photos.”30
On April 24, 2012, the panel of judges appointed by the Egyptian Minister of Justice to investigate the Maspero Massacre closed the case, citing “lack of identification of the culprits.” Commenting on the panel’s report, attorney Said Fayez said that a biased judiciary had denied the rights of those killed: “We said all along that it was just a show and this is the outcome we got, but the families of the victims will never forsake the rights of their children.”
The fiancée of one of the Copts flattened under an armored vehicle called the entire proceeding a “farce,” adding that the Maspero case should have been taken to an international court—which is what Copts had called for from the beginning—“because in Egypt we are unable to get justice for those who were martyred.” The sister of another Christian protester who was fatally wounded by a sniper said she had expected such an outcome: “You can expect anything from whoever kills with such brutality. This case is being handled by the killer [the Egyptian state] and of course it would be impossible for the killer to condemn himself.”31
Meanwhile, Egyptian media incited hatred against Egypt’s Christians. Muslim clerics, including Dr. Burhami, the popular Salafi leader, blamed the massacre on the Christians themselves, arguing that St. George Church had been burned because it did not have a permit and calling down “Allah’s curse” on the Christians.32 Egyptian state TV had incited Muslims against Christians even as the Maspero Massacre was unfolding. Minutes after the military went on its rampage, one news anchor asserted that armed Christians were on the offensive, killing three soldiers, injuring twenty, and burning state property—all charges that were proven to be lies. Thus, even as armored vehicles were mowing down protesters, Egyptian TV broadcasted footage of reporters saying, “Help, the Copts are killing our heroic, patriotic soldiers and burning Korans!” One segment on Egyptian TV showed an outraged reporter condemning Christians for killing “our noble protectors [soldiers], who never once fired a single shot.” As a result of such incitement, many Muslims naturally took to the streets attacking Christians and their property.33
Egyptian TV officials later confessed to fabricating the story of the killing of the three soldiers by Christians—but that did not stop a barrage of op-ed pieces blaming the Christians for their own massacre.34 Indeed, because of Egyptian TV’s wanton lies, several Egyptian reporters and journalists later condemned the state TV station. Anchor Dina Rasmi said, “‘I am ashamed that I work at this despicable TV channel.... Egyptian TV was effectively calling for civil war between Muslims and Christians. . . . Egyptian TV has proven that it is a slave to those who rule.’”35 Another news anchor, Mahmoud Yousif, announced that he “washes his hands of what Egyptian TV is broadcasting.”36
Even so, Egyptian TV’s lies were quickly picked up and disseminated by an uncritical Western mainstream media. The BBC’s initial headline on the massacre, for example, was “Egypt troops dead after Coptic church protest in Cairo.” The report’s opening sentence highlighted Christian protesters “clashing with security forces as army vehicles burned outside the state TV building,” suggesting that the protesters were the aggressors. And according to an Agence France-Presse (AFP) report, “State television reported that three soldiers were shot dead and dozens of their comrades wounded as angry Copts wielding batons protested over the burning of a church in southern Egypt last month.37
The Western mainstream media, which had ear
lier extolled the Egyptian military as the “guardian” of the Tahrir Square revolution against Mubarak, praising it for not attacking or hurting Egyptian citizens, apparently could not believe that this same military would now engage in such brutalities against its own citizenry at Maspero, and so gullibly swallowed Egyptian state media’s distortions. The difference, of course, was that Maspero was an exclusively Christian protest. Despite any formal guarantees of religious equality for citizens on paper, Christians under Islam are increasingly seen as undesirables who should be thankful for being allowed to exist—and hence as ungrateful when they actually protest, standing up for their human rights.
The Maspero Massacre and the events surrounding it illustrated all the elements of institutionalized anti-Christian sentiment in Egypt, showing how the Islamic doctrine of “Loyalty [to Muslims] and Enmity [for Christians]” permeates Muslim society from top to bottom. First police looked the other way when a Muslim mob destroyed and burned several churches. Then, when frustrated Christians protested, calling for justice, the military slaughtered them in a particularly gruesome way. Egypt’s rulers and media—in accordance with the Muslim prophet’s logic that “war is deceit”—tried to deceive the world by portraying the victims as the aggressors. And finally, the judiciary punished no Muslims, including none of the soldiers who intentionally drove armored vehicles over Christians—even as Christians, the victims, were harassed and imprisoned.
MUSLIM MOB MENTALITY
Muslim governments encourage hatred of Christians with anti-Christian education and impunity for Muslims who act on that hatred. The Muslim mob is representative of those Muslims who often know little about Sharia, who are not necessarily observant, but who nonetheless—thanks to the education they received and the culture they imbibe—are hostile to Christians. They know one thing: Muslims are superior to Christians. This sense of supremacy manifests itself in various ways, from a tendency to extreme outrage and violence in response to the smallest slight, to “altruistically” forcing Christians to convert to Islam, to treating Christian women as objects of sexual gratification to be used and discarded at will.
Collective Punishment
One of the most “natural” forms of Christian persecution under Islam, one apparently embedded in the Muslim psyche, is collective punishment. If any Christian for any reason grieves any Muslim, the nearest most accessible Christians must bear the brunt. Such collective punishment of Christians takes on many forms—from punishing the immediate family members of an offending Christian to punishing local Christians for offenses committed by (or imagined to have been committed by) Western nations, which Muslims tend to conflate with Christianity.
Collective punishment is largely a cultural impulse rather than a legal principle—the mob is often unfamiliar with the particulars of Sharia law—but it certainly has parallels in Islamic doctrines, stretching back to The Conditions of Omar. After agreeing to a number of debilitations in order to be allowed to exist under Islamic rule, Christians had to vouchsafe for one another’s behavior: “We guarantee all this to you upon ourselves, our descendants, our spouses, and our neighbors.” If any Christian broke any of the Conditions, the pact became null and void, and all Christians became, once again, targets of the jihad—that is, subject to enslavement, rape, plunder, and death: “if we change or contradict these conditions imposed upon ourselves in order to receive safety, we forfeit our dhimma [covenant], and we become liable to the same treatment you inflict upon the people who resist and cause sedition.”
Islam’s authorities have been unambiguous about the consequences if even one or some Christians defy the conditions. The Yemeni jurist al-Murtada, for example, stated, “The agreement will be canceled if all or some of them break it.” At the other end of the Arab world, the Moroccan jurist al-Maghili taught that “the fact that one individual (or one group) among them has broken the statute is enough to invalidate it for all of them.”38
This principle applies to all non-Muslim groups—Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, and so forth—living in Muslim countries. Yet collective punishment falls on Christians in the overwhelming majority of cases, mostly for two reasons. First, unlike other religious groups, which exist only in a limited number of Muslim countries (Hindus in Pakistan, animists in Sudan), Christians are the “common denominator” infidels present in every Muslim country. Also, most Muslims see the hated West as “Christian,” so any time Western nations or Western culture offends Muslims—whether by military actions, offensive cartoons, You Tube videos, or papal speeches—Christians in Muslim countries are punished in retaliation.
Egypt’s Christian Copts make up the largest Christian bloc in the Middle East, so they are easily identified and quickly punished whenever one of their number angers Muslims. In fact, many of the aforementioned attacks on Egypt’s Coptic Christian churches were initiated as a form of collective punishment in response to the perceived transgressions of individual Copts:• The March 2011 attack on the Church of the Two Martyrs—in which Muslims burned the church and played “soccer” with the martyrs’ relics—was prompted by the accusation that a Christian man was involved with a Muslim woman, which is banned in Islam.
• The May 2011 Imbaba riots—when some three thousand Muslims fired guns and set several Coptic churches and homes on fire—were prompted by the rumor that a Christian girl had converted to Islam and the Coptic Church was supposedly torturing her into renouncing Islam (the usual projection, since this is precisely what Islam requires Muslims to do to female apostates who convert to Christianity).
• The February 2012 attack on the Church of St. Mary and St. Abram in Sharqia province, when thousands of Muslims surrounded the church demanding the death of its pastor—who, along with nearly a hundred terrorized Copts, sought refuge inside the church—came about because a Christian girl who, according to Sharia, automatically became a Muslim when her father converted to Islam, had fled her father and was said to be hiding in the church.
The collective punishment of Coptic Christians is a regular feature of the Egyptian landscape. More recent examples include the case of a Christian woman who was “severely sexually harassed” by Muslims in the presence of her husband at a bus terminal in al-Minya province in July 2011. When her husband tried to defend her, he was violently beaten. Soon afterwards, thousands of Muslims in the region began looting and torching Christian property, screaming “Allahu Akbar!” and “cursing the cross.”39
In July 2012 in the village of Dahshur, a Christian launderer accidentally burned the shirt of a Muslim customer, leading to a brawl between the two Egyptians. The next day the aggrieved Muslim went with approximately twenty fellow Muslims to the Christian’s home to attack him. In the ensuing melee—the Christian had climbed up to his roof and was hurling projectiles at his besiegers—one Muslim man was injured; he later died in a hospital. Soon thereafter, thousands of Muslims went on a rampage, causing 120 Christian families to evacuate the village. The mob looted Christian businesses and homes. Eyewitnesses report that security sent to the village did next to nothing to protect Christian property. Family members of the deceased Muslim still insist that the Christians must pay with their lives. 40
In January 2012, a mob of over three thousand Muslims attacked Christians in an Alexandrian village because a Muslim had accused a Christian of having an “intimate photo” of a Muslim woman on his phone. Terrified by the accusation, the Christian, who denied having any such photo, turned himself in to the police. Regardless, Coptic homes and shops were looted and torched; three Christians were injured; and “terrorized” Christian women and children were rendered homeless. As usual, authorities were remarkably slow to arrive on the scene. It took the army an hour to drive one mile to the village. “This happens every time. They wait outside the village until the Muslims have had enough violence, then they appear,” said a witness. None of the perpetrators was arrested.41 Later, in an effort to empty the village of its sixty-two Christian families, Muslims attacked them again, burning more C
optic property. According to police, the Muslim woman concerned has denied the whole story, and no photos were found.42
In November 2011, after a Muslim torched a Christian’s home, leading to a fight between the two men which left the Muslim aggressor dead, thousands of Muslims attacked the Christians of the village. Two Christians not party to the altercation were killed; others were stabbed and critically wounded. As usual, “after killing the Copts, Muslims went on a rampage, looting and burning Christian owned homes and businesses.” Again, as in the Dahshur example, “Muslims insist they have not yet avenged” the death of their slain co-religionist; there were fears of “a wholesale massacre of Copts.” Once again, many Christians fled their homes and went into hiding.43
In April 2011, when Muslims falsely blamed the deaths of two Muslims on a Christian in Abu Qurqas, mass riots ensued. One Christian was killed, ten were hospitalized, “an old woman was thrown out of her second floor balcony,” and at least twenty Christian homes and properties were plundered and torched.44 And in November 2010, when a Coptic teenager was accused of dating a Muslim girl, twenty-two Christian homes were set ablaze to Islam’s war cry of “Allahu Akbar.” “During the attack the Muslim mob threw fireballs, gasoline, and stones at Coptic homes and detonated butane gas cylinders.”45
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