MidnightWatcher – Prophecy in Motion

‘This is the second in a series of posts about dwindling Christian communities in the Middle East’ by Global Post …

By Lauren E. Bohn, Global Post – “It’s been close to two years since Evon Loga Gabrieul’s 17-year-old son died, but she can’t step into his pristine gray-scale bedroom without breaking down.

‘They murdered him, and nothing’s changed. The country, my family…they both will never be the same,’ she weeps, peering at the charcoal log of grades the meticulous high-schooler used to chart his progress and a possible way out of his rundown, forgotten village in rural Egypt.

Ayman Labib, a Christian, was beaten to death by Muslim classmates in a murder case that punctuates the protracted sectarian tension between Christians and Muslims in southern Egypt, where a bulk of Egypt’s Christians live. Two boys have been convicted of his death and are now serving three-year prison sentences. But for a forgotten community in Egypt’s hinterlands, there’s a feeling that justice has not been served.

Since the uprising that ousted Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, sporadic but intense sectarian demonstrations across Egypt reflect rising fears in Egypt’s Coptic community (which make up an estimated 5 to 10 percent of Egypt’s total population) that the uprising has empowered a predominantly Muslim Egyptian society that is at best indifferent to the Christian minority’s concerns.

With a president who staunchly hails from the Muslim Brotherhood and a new constitution that critics say offers religious minorities, especially Copts, little to no assurances, existential fear has pervaded villages like the Labib family’s.

Christians in Egypt, especially in the rural south, have long complained of systemic discrimination and violence. Among a laundry list of grievances, critics say Copts are woefully underrepresented in Egypt’s military, judiciary, diplomatic corps, academia and almost all electoral bodies. Christians face state-imposed restrictions on the right to build and maintain churches, regulations that Muslims don’t face when building mosques.

In some extreme publicized cases, Christians have claimed that fundamentalists have wrongly accused them of forced conversions and kidnappings of Muslim women. Some conflicts have violently escalated into rioting and church burnings, such as one a year and a half ago on a Christian center in Aswan. The incident triggered protests in Cairo outside the government’s television center known as Maspero, which the military brutally put down, leaving 27 dead. 26 of the victims were Christian.” Read more.

Flashback: Christian Persecution From ‘Arab Spring’ Insurgents In Syria Is Deliberate and Growing, ‘It Will Never Be the Same Anymore’ – “Nearly 100,000 Christians so far have fled from Homs and other cities being targeted by government forces, but it is no longer just to escape the crossfire. Now, more reports are revealing that a new wave of persecution is deliberate and growing… ‘It is over; we can’t get back what we lost,’ said one discouraged Christian refugee here in Jordan. ‘It will never be the same anymore for me or my family. We’ve lost hope.’ He said he had to flee with his family at night, because anti-Christian persecution in Syria is becoming a steadily growing reality.” Read more.