MINYA, Egypt (AP) – Coptic Christians in the Egyptian city of Minya prepared to bury their dead on Saturday, a day after militants ambushed three buses carrying Christian pilgrims on their way to a remote desert monastery, killing seven and wounding 19.
EL-ARISH, Egypt (AP) — Egyptian security officials say gunmen have shot dead a Christian man in the turbulent north of the Sinai Peninsula, the latest attack to target members of the country’s Christian minority.
CAIRO (AP) — Hundreds of Muslim demonstrators assaulted an unlicensed church south of Cairo, an Egyptian Coptic Christian diocese said on Saturday, in the latest assault on members of the country’s Coptic minority.
The support offered by the Coptic Church to Egyptian President Abdel Fatah Sisi ahead of his trip to the U.S. has been used by Islamists and other opposition groups to criticize the Egyptian leader.
TEL AVIV – Elements of the Egyptian press are slamming the country’s supreme religious authority, Al Azhar institutions, for continuing to cultivate extremism despite the authority’s claim that it welcomes President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s call for a religious revolution to combat extremist Islamist ideology.
JAFFA, Israel – Christians in Egypt have protested their government’s foot-dragging on passing a new law regulating church building in the country.
Christians in the Egyptian village of Al Our are looking to build a new church in honor of the Coptic Christians beheaded by ISIS in Libya, a mass-murder outrage captured in a viral video circulated by the Islamic State. 13 of the 21 Christians slaughtered in the video hailed from Al Our; they had gone to Libya in search of employment. A church in their hometown would seem like a fine way to remember them.
The European Parliament passed a resolution on Thursday calling for the protection of Christians, Yazidis, and other religious minorities in the Middle East from the depredations of the Islamic State. A call for the establishment of safe havens for ethnic and religious minorities in the Nineveh Plains is part of the resolution.
On Sunday, ISIS released a video titled “A Message Signed With Blood To The Nation Of The Cross.” It contained the beheading of 21 Egyptian Christian Copts who had been kidnapped in Libya. The spokesman for ISIS, his face sheathed in black cloth, states:
Oh people, recently you have seen us on the hills of Al-Sham and Dabiq’s plain, chopping off the heads that have been carrying the cross for a long time, and today, we are on the south of Rome, on the land of Islam, Libya, sending another message….And we will conquer Rome, by Allah’s permission, the promise of our Prophet, peace be upon him.
