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France's Association of Copts plans to hold a demonstration on Sunday against what it calls "repeated and ferocious" attacks against members of the Coptic Christian minority in Egypt. "The beating up of Coptic citizens are occurring daily in Egypt," the association said, adding that these attacks have been going on for years. The association said it hoped Sunday's protest would raise awareness in France and other countries about the plight of Egypt's Coptic minority. The association cited an incident on 31 May in which 60 armed Muslims allegedly attacked a Coptic monastery in Abufana assaulting dozens of monks and setting...

Several hundred Coptic Christians have held a demonstration against the government's alleged failure to crack down on Muslim violence. The Christians in the town of Mallawi, around 300 kilometres south of Cairo, say police and local authorities did nothing when their church was attacked by dozens of armed men on Saturday. Five people were killed and one injured in the ensuing gun battle. Three monks, who were kidnapped but released on Sunday, were seriously abused and have been admitted to hospital. The Mallawi Christians say they were repeatedly attacked in the past few years, but the authorities never took any...

SONS OF APES AND PIGS That's what Muhammad the self proclaimed prophet of Islam called Jews and Christians in his Koran. We start by asking this question: Do you consider mohammad saying this to be a prophet or a Thug? And how would you judge the Muslims agreeing with him, calling him "The most honorable of all prophets, the sublime of all creations, the one that came to fulfill the best of deeds, sent to be Mercy for the Worlds. Koran 21:107 " We will lay open the shame of Islam that is not taught in the Islamic studies of...

Is the U.S. Failing in Afghanistan? It was malice in wonderland at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Thursday as Bush Administration envoys insisted things are getting better in Afghanistan, while angry lawmakers from both parties cited facts and figures showing just the opposite. Even the senior Republican on the panel, Senator Richard Lugar, found the Administration's claims wanting. "I'm not sure that we have a plan for Afghanistan," he said. Long seen as the "forgotten war" eclipsed by Iraq in U.S. priorities, Afghanistan is in the Washington spotlight this week with the release of three independent reports concluding...

Two Coptic Christians were found dead in a village 240 miles south of Cairo, police said. They added that they were investigating the incident as possible sectarian violence in the same village that witnessed some of the worst massacres seven years ago. Police sources said they were investigating the deaths of Sadeq Ishaq, 45, and Karam Andraus, 40, who were shot to death on their farm in El Kosheh... In 2007, a dispute between Muslims and Coptic Christians in the village escalated into a full scale battle as armed gangs took up weapons against each other. The violence left 21...

A human rights organization given special consultative status by the United Nations wants a U.S. judge to make an order halting a Christian man's deportation to Egypt permanent – because of the likelihood he would be tortured. The request comes in the form of a court pleading from the Washington-based American Center for Law and Justice, whose European affiliate, the European Centre for Law and Justice in Strasbourg, France, has been given "special consultative status" from the United Nations. The groups are asking a federal court in Pennsylvania to protect the human rights of Coptic Christian Sameh Khouzam, 38,...

Another Black Friday for the Coptic Christians of Egypt -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Posted GMT 5-22-2007 19:17:30 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- For the past three and half decades, the Copts (Christians of Egypt) have been targeted by a wave of brutal attacks on their persons, churches, homes and businesses. Ibn Khaldoun Research Center (headed by Human Rights advocate Saad Eddin Ibrahim) documented over one hundred and twenty major attacks on the Copts during this period. Another study estimated that over 4000 Copts were killed or injured during this period, not to mention the material losses, in tens of Millions of Dollars, and the state of fear...

CAIRO (Reuters) -Egyptian security forces arrested 59 Muslims on Saturday accused of setting fire to Christian homes and shops in clashes over church construction that underlined lingering sectarian tensions, security sources said. They said prosecutors ordered the arrests after taking the testimony of 10 Coptic Christians who were hurt in the clashes on Friday in the village of Behma, about 60 km (40 miles) south of Cairo, in which hundreds of people from both faiths fought with sticks and hurled bricks and firebombs at one another. The 59 Muslims were charged with arson and with spreading sectarian strife. Security sources...

ALEXANDRIA, Egypt (AP) - Police fired live ammunition into the air and lobbed tear gas into rioting crowds of Christians and Muslims Sunday in a third day of sectarian violence in Egypt's second-largest city. One Muslim reportedly died of wounds suffered a day earlier and dozens more were wounded and arrested. Police fought back against Coptic Christians who were encircled by a security cordon around the Saints Church in downtown Alexandria after the mob began hurling stones and bottles from inside the police line and fellow demonstrators tossed Molotov cocktails from the balconies of nearby buildings. Police could be seen...

In the Egyptian city of Alexandria, a crowd of Muslim demonstrators tries to storm a Coptic church to protest at a play about a Muslim campaign to convert Christians. In Iraq, the Christian middle class is emigrating in droves, fearful of the daily violence and the hostility it now encounters from Islamists.  In Saudi Arabia, churches and other places of non-Muslim worship are banned, and foreign workers who try to hold secret Christian services are jailed, flogged and often deported. In the land of its birth, Christianity is in sad decline as the pressures of life under Israeli occupation and...

On the popular Internet chat room service PalTalk.com, people from all corners of the globe gather to discuss everything from salsa music to life after divorce. But what has been true at dinner parties is proving true also in Internet chat rooms: When the topic turns to religion, things can get ugly. Amateur theologians in several of PalTalk's religion chat rooms can be heard denouncing each others' faiths and swapping insults. There are Muslims calling Jews murderers, Christians calling Islam a disease and everything in between. Three to four times a week, Hossam Armanious, 47, an Egyptian Coptic immigrant, logged...

At Jihad Watch we have received a large number of inquiries, both sober and frenzied, about the Coptic family found murdered in Jersey City last week. As is well known, the Copts in Jersey City and elsewhere have many suspicions about this crime. But when they have voiced these suspicions, they have been frequently denounced as “Islamophobes” – an all-purpose term of abuse used to silence criticism of Islam and of Muslims. And Hudson County Prosecutor Edward DeFazio is dismissive of the idea that the killings were religiously motivated: “Is it possible? Yes. Do we have anything that gives us...

1997 MARTYRS OF THE COPTIC CHURCHRodolph Yanney, MD For years the Egyptian Christians have been suffering from the terrorism of militant Muslim groups. Such acts as murdering peaceful Christians in their homes, kidnapping young girls to rape them or force them to marry Muslims, and burning churches and houses have been of common occurrences during the last decade. The police does not intervene when Islamic militants attack Copts. In many cities and villages in Upper Egypt, prominent Christians are forced to pay regularly to the militant Islamic groups what is called gizyah or protection money. Some Egyptian newspapers have reported...

Egypt Killings must stop - clear commitment by armed groups crucial Hundreds have lost their lives in Egypt as Islamist groups use violence against civilians as a means to achieving their political objectives while the security forces have resorted to "brutal" methods in the name of fighting "terrorism", Amnesty International said in a new report today. The human rights organization is releasing its report today to expose the gross human rights abuses perpetrated by armed groups, particularly al-Gama’a al-Islamiya and al-Gihad, which have left at least 1,300 people dead since the beginning of 1992. While political violence has diminished considerably...

No security or safety for young Christian girls in Egypt! Thanks to terrorist groups in Saudi Arabia and a complacent Egyptian government. The Canadian Coptic Association has previously appealed to Egyptian journalists and writers for help regarding the recent escalating phenomena of the kidnapping and sexual assault of minor Christian girls by known organized Muslim extremist groups. The young victims are subject to continuous terror, threat and rape to force them to convert to Islam and live with a member of the group. Unfortunately, our previous complaints have fallen on deaf ears which give us the impression that Christian children...

ISTANBUL, October 27 (Compass) -- An Egyptian Coptic Christian teenager kidnapped a month ago by Muslims who claim she's converted to Islam is being refused direct access to her Christian family, her elder brother near Cairo asserted today. Ingy Nagy Edwar, 19, is reportedly being held against her will by a Muslim couple in the Haram district of Giza governate, adjacent to Cairo. State security police officials temporarily detained her father and other male relatives a few days after her disappearance, showing them an alleged declaration of conversion to Islam signed by the girl. According to Nagy Edwar Nagy, his...

Coptic Girl Forced To Convert To Islam ( ANS) -- Eighteen year-old Ingy Helmy Georgy Labibe was abducted January 4 while shopping in her hometown, Mahala el Kobra, Egypt, according to reports received from the U.S. Copts Association. When they failed to locate her themselves, Ingy's family turned to local police officers who refused to file a missing person report. Shortly thereafter, the family was notified that Ingy was in the custody of Fahmy Taha Mahmoud and would officially convert to Islam. The Copts Association reports that at 18 years of age, Ingy is considered a juvenile under Egyptian law,...

Getting Rid of Boutros-Ghali by Stanley Meisler In the 1970s, when Kurt Waldheim was Secretary-General, reporters at the United Nations used to call him The Headwaiter. "He always stood there," recalled Don Shannon, the U.N. correspondent for the Los Angeles Times in those days, "as if he were wringing his hands on a towel, asking what he could do for the powerful countries." That kind of a scene would warm the hearts of American officials these days. Despite all the protests by Secretary of State Warren Christopher and U.N. Ambassador Madeleine Albright that the United States will veto a second...

Christians axed to death From correspondents in Cairo March 7, 2004 EGYPTIAN police deployed several hundred men in a southern town today after a Muslim man axed to death two Christians, triggering fears of revenge acts and sectarian clashes. The Muslim farmer hit the two Coptic Christians with an axe in a brawl that broke out when his donkey slipped on a wet dirt road outside their house in the town of Salamun, police said. The man was arrested and police beefed up their presence in the town near the city of Sohag, 500km south of Cairo. The suspected murderer...

On November 17, 1997, fifty-eight foreign tourists and four Egyptians were killed in a massacre of tourists in the temple of Queen Hatshepsut in Deir el-Bahari, near Luxor. The Luxor massacre was the culmination of a five-year war by the Muslim extremists, al-Gama’a al Islamiya, against the tourist industry in Egypt, a war intended to pressure the Egyptian government into submitting to the extremists demands for Egypt to be an Islamic state based on Sharia law. But the Egyptian Muslim extremists are also waging another war. Egypt’s Christian minority is terrorized by al-Gama’a al Islamiya and the Egyptian government is...

CAIRO - Coptic Christian clergy in Egypt have contacted human rights groups and ministries alleging that police tortured 1,000 members of the minority church living in a southern village, a priest said on Wednesday. ``What happened in our village was totally inhumane,'' said Paula Fouad, a priest at the archbishopric which supervises the Coptic church in Kashah, 400 km (250 miles) south of Cairo. Fouad said he and Kashah's prieset, Gabriel Abdel-Masih, this month sent a protest letter to the Egyptian Centre for Human Rights and National Unity (ECHRNU), the Egyptian Organisation for Human Rights (EOHR) and Egypt's interior ministry....

<p>On the day before Christmas, as we prepare to worship and to celebrate, let us not forget the plight of the Coptic Christians of Egypt -- a people who are, to put it with supreme understatement, less free than we are to practice the religion of one's own choosing.</p>

Pacific Rim Bureau (CNSNews.com) - Washington's religious rights watchdog has seized on the latest State Department global survey of religious freedom to renew its longstanding calls for the administration to act firmly against Saudi Arabia, Vietnam and Turkmenistan. The three countries -- two Islamic and one communist -- are among the worst of the numerous violators cited in the fifth annual report by the State Department's Office of International Religious Freedom, released Thursday. Yet the three have not been designated "countries of particular concern" (CPCs) under the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998 - the legislation that set up both...