Christians Under Attack, Part II

I asked the question here why Christians don’t seem to care about their fellow Christians who are subject to persecution abroad, including numerous instances of mass murder. Here is another such instance, which took place over the weekend in Egypt:

Muslims attacked a community center and burned several homes belonging to Coptic Christians in northwestern Egypt over the weekend, injuring 23 people, in a rampage that a local bishop said was incited by a radical Muslim preacher.
The rioting began Friday when a group of young men hurled rocks at the church community center in Marsa-Matruh, a city along Egypt’s Mediterranean coast. The attacks then spread to nearby homes and left behind destroyed cars and other property. …
The church’s local bishop, Father Bejemy, said…that the rioters were responding to a Friday prayer sermon at a nearby mosque calling for jihad against infidels, a reference to non-Muslims among extremists.
The bishop said the attackers broke the community center’s gate, several windows and destroyed trees. Later, they lobbed firebombs at Christian homes and destroyed cars, he said. A group of Copts took refuge in the community center and were holed up there for 10 hours while security forces brought the situation under control.
Of the 23 Copts wounded, three remained hospitalized in critical condition Saturday, Bejemy said.

For some reason, such attacks seem to baffle the observers and reporters who try to explain them. Thus, the AP quotes “human rights groups” who say that attacks on Christians are on the rise, “underscoring the government’s failure to address chronic sectarian strains in a society where religious radicalism is gaining ground.” The story does not make clear how this particular rampage was the fault of the Egyptian government, or how those “chronic sectarian strains” are manifested other than in attacks by Muslims on Christians.
A local security official offered the hypothesis that this weekend’s attacks “were provoked by a new fence built around the community center.” Huh? Christians build a fence and that somehow goads Muslims into trying to kill them? It makes one wonder why they built the fence in the first place. If I had neighbors that touchy, I’d build a fence too.
The last explanation offered by the AP is the most mysterious of all:

Nader Shokry, a researcher with the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, which tracks religious violence, said residents of the area also said the Muslim cleric’s sermon was inflammatory and probably in response to prayers held in the community center.

That’s the conclusion of the article, so the reader is left hanging. Someone apparently thought it made sense to “explain” that these Muslims tried to murder Christians because they had been praying. I don’t know; maybe no explanation is necessary. Maybe “jihad against infidels” says it all.

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