Hillary Clinton Promises to Save Egypt’s Christians?
Raymond Ibrahim ("Front Page Mag," October 17, 2011)
Cairo, Egypt - Soon after Sunday’s Maspero massacre, where the Egyptian
military slaughtered Christians demonstrating over the destruction of their
churches—including by running them over with armored vehicles—some Egyptian
media began reporting that U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, having
seen enough, declared that the U.S. plans on directly intervening in Egypt.
Of course, Hillary said no such thing. According to Al Ahram:
Reports that US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced that the US
plans to intervene to protect Egypt’s Copts are false, a US State Department
source has revealed. Yesterday, several internet sites circulated quotes
attributed to Clinton that the US plans to send Special Forces to protect
Egyptian churches after the attacks directed at Copts yesterday in front of
the State TV building in Maspero.
Any American must instinctively recognize such rumors as false: our
political leaders do not say or do such things. But alas, some Christians in
the
Middle East, who have no direct experience of the West, still think of the
U.S. as a “Christian” nation that will surely empathize with their plight
and take action—hence why this rumor began and resonates.
The real question, of course, is: Would direct U.S intervention in Egypt
even help the Copts?
First, we must understand the context wherein the U.S. would justify
intervening in a country: to promote “democracy.”
So how have the first manifestations of “democracy”—in the guise of the “
Arab spring” and “people-power,” all hailed and supported by the U.S.—
worked for religious minorities in the Arab world?
In post-revolutionary Egypt alone, Christians are suffering more abuses
today, including from the state, than under ousted president Hosni Mubarak.
After all, Egyptian military crushing the heads of Christian civilians with
tanks, opening fire on them, and reportedly even dumping their bodies in the
Nile to cover their deeds—all of this occurred under Field Marshall
Mohamed Tantawi’s command, not during Mubarak’s 30 year reign.
But to return to our question—whether U.S. intervention would help the
Copts in Egypt—the deplorable fact is, the Christians who have it worst are
precisely those living in Muslim nations where the U.S. has intervened and is
spending billions to create “democracies.”
Consider the silent extermination of Iraq’s “Christian Dogs.” Ever since
the U.S. overthrew Saddam Hussein, beheading and crucifying Christians are
not irregular occurrences; messages saying “you Christian dogs, leave or die,
” are typical. Muslims threaten to “exterminate Iraqi Christians” and
authoritative clerics issue fatwas asserting that “it is permissible to spill
the blood of Iraqi Christians.” As John Eibner of Christian Solidarity
International put it:
The threat of extermination is not empty. Since the collapse of Saddam
Hussein’s regime, more than half the country’s Christian population has been
forced by targeted violence to seek refuge abroad or to live away from their
homes as internally displaced people. According to the Hammurabi Human
Rights Organization, over 700 Christians, including bishops and priests, have
been killed and 61 churches have been bombed. Seven years after the
commencement of Operation Iraqi Freedom, Catholic Archbishop Louis Sako of
Kirkuk
reports: “He who is not a Muslim in Iraq is a second-class citizen.”
In other words, Christian persecution has increased exponentially under
U.S. occupation. As one top Vatican official put it, Christians, “
paradoxically, were more protected under the dictatorship” of Saddam Hussein.
As for Afghanistan, earlier this week, CNS News reported that
There is not a single, public Christian church left in Afghanistan,
according to the U.S. State Department. This reflects the state of religious
freedom in that country ten years after the United States first invaded it and
overthrew its Islamist Taliban regime. In the intervening decade, U.S.
taxpayers have spent $440 billion to support Afghanistan’s new government and
more than 1,700 U.S. military personnel have died serving in that country.
The last public Christian church in Afghanistan was razed in March 2010.
The State Department’s report makes it clear that the Afghan government—
which the U.S. helped install—is partially responsible: “The lack of
government responsiveness and protection for these groups and individuals
[persecuted religious minorities] contributed to the deterioration of
religious
freedom”; “the right to change one’s religion was not respected either in law
or in practice.”
Even so, the State Department report concludes with the requisite yet
meaningless jargon: “the United States continues to promote religious freedom
in
Afghanistan”—this even as the nation just saw its last church destroyed.
And then people wonder why Syrian Christians are backing autocratic Bashar
Assad: they have seen the fruits of “democracy” in Afghanistan, Iraq,
Egypt, and anywhere else “people-power” is burgeoning, whether organically, or—
if not especially—under the auspices of the U.S.
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