Islamic State Cites 'Grievances' Against Slaughtered Christians
https://pjmedia.com/culture/raymond-ibrahim/2021/04/29/islamic-state-cites-grievances-against-slaughtered-christians-n1443538
The Islamic State in Sinai recently executed another Christian on video. In a clip recorded before the execution, the slain Copt, Nabil H. Salama, 62, “confessed” to his crime: building the only church in Bir al-Abd in Sinai—a church that was supposedly “cooperating with the Egyptian army’s and intelligence’s war on the Islamic State.”
Although Salama offered this “confession” only after being tortured—after his front teeth were busted out of his mouth—the charge that Coptic churches are actively and nefariously working to undermine the Islamic order is as widespread among Egypt’s Islamists as it is constantly morphing in absurd directions.
Thus, in an unrestrained tirade back in 2010, Muhammad Salim al-Awwa, former secretary-general of the International Union for Muslim Scholars, appeared on Al-Jazeera and accused the Copts, not of “cooperating” with the Egyptian military, but of “stocking arms and ammunitions in their churches and monasteries”—imported from Israel no less, “the heart of the Coptic Cause”—and “preparing to wage war against Muslims.” He warned that if nothing is done the “country will burn” and incited Muslims to “counteract the strength of the [Coptic] Church.”
In reality, all that ever “burns” are Coptic churches at the hands of Muslims—as when nearly 70 churches were attacked and many destroyed following the ouster of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Muhammad Morsi. This is to say nothing of all the Coptic churches that have been bombed, leaving scores of Christian worshippers dead, by terrorists. To name just some of the more notable incidents: on Palm Sunday, 2017, two Coptic churches were bombed and 50 worshippers killed; on Sunday, December 11, 2016, a Coptic church was bombed and at least 27 worshippers killed; on New Year’s Eve of 2011, another church was bombed and about 23 Christians killed; and on Christmas Eve of 2010, seven Christians were shot dead while leaving their church.
The fact is, Muslim terrorists are notorious for offering any number of pretexts—many of which border on the absurd—to justify their cowardly targeting and murdering of Christians, in and out of Egypt. The Islamic State cited “grievances” to justify its grisly slaughter of 21 Christians—20 Copts and one Ghanaian—on the shores of Libya in 2015. An article in Dabiq, the Islamic State’s online magazine in English, titled “Revenge for the Muslimat [Muslim women] Persecuted by the Coptic Crusaders of Egypt,” claimed that the 21 Christians were slaughtered in “revenge” for two Coptic women who, back in 2010 and according to Islamic propaganda, were compelled by Egypt’s Coptic Orthodox Church to recant their conversion to Islam and return to Christianity.
Indeed, the late Coptic Pope Shenouda III, who was then nearly 90 years old and immobile, was portrayed as “a U.S. agent, an abductor and torturer of female Muslim converts from Christianity, who was stockpiling weapons in monasteries and churches with a view to waging war against the Muslims and dividing Egypt to create a Coptic State.”
The Islamic State also cited the 2010 bombing of Our Lady of Salvation Church in Baghdad as a product of “revenge” for those same supposedly forced-to-reconvert-back-to-Christianity women in Egypt. Then, armed jihadis had stormed the Iraqi church during worship service, opened fire indiscriminately, before detonating their suicide vests, which were “filled with ball bearings to kill as many people as possible.” Nearly 60 Christians—including women, children, and even babies (pictures of aftermath here)—were slaughtered.
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