Egyptian Islamism

Those old sex or blood-libel tropes, used time and again, and likely in various manifestations from time immemorial between competing tribes and/or religious sects or ethnic groups whose detestation of one another invariably leads them to view one another as less worthy, less human and therefore fair game for attack, continue to make their incendiary mark in human relations.

Nothing was as certain to enrage white Americans as the maliciously bogus claim that a young black 'buck' had raped a white woman. Whites liked to believe, wholly disparagingly, that black men had a more marked sex drive and nothing consumed black males more than a wish to couple with a white woman. Miscegenation was a crime in the U.S. Consorting between the colours was socially forbidden.

It was no trouble to put together a lynching mob of responsibly-outraged white citizens claiming it was their god-driven duty to protect home, hearth and white women from the sexual depravity of black men. Too many helplessly vulnerable black men were hanged as despoilers of white women in America's past for the lesson to have been forgotten.

The blood-libel among anti-Semites - and there's one of the world's most largest contingents of racists to reckon with; no other racial, ethnic, religious group of human beings has ever faced the virulent challenges to life and liberty as have the world's Jews - insisting that the unspeakable crime of draining a Christian child's blood for use in Passover matzos was the cause of many bloody pogroms.

And now it seems to be the turn of the dwindling number of Christians being charged by Muslims in the Middle East, of the double offence of rape and child molestation. A report out of Egypt speaks of police firing tear gas to disperse hundreds of offended Muslims in their attempt to storm a Coptic Christian church in Southern Egypt, enraged at such a rumour.

Christian women and children in Muslim countries have been accused of mocking the Prophet. For that unforgivable sin, hysterical hordes of Muslims attempt to take the 'guilty' into their custody. To assign them to hell by tearing them limb from limb in the fear that justice will not sufficiently discipline them for their heretical sin.

Canada is on the cusp of repatriating a Yemenite, a former diplomat who represented Yemen in the United States, then had a falling out with the regime he represented, and deserted the mission to seek refugee asylum in Canada. In the process he converted from Islam to Christianity, an acknowledged capital offence in many Muslim countries, including Yemen. He is fearful of what awaits him in his home country.

And on Friday, a Christian merchant in Marashda, a village in the province of Qena has been accused of sexually assaulting a six-year-old Muslim girl. Witnesses say several shops and cars owned by Coptic Christians were torched in the belief that the sixty-year-old molested the six-year-old. Violence flared after Friday prayers.

It seems every time Muslims attend to their faithful Friday prayers they are exhorted by their imams to hasten to do the good works of Allah.

Egyptian Christians gather outside the Abu Fam church after witnesses say protesters surrounded the village's church, hurling stones and trying to storm it, in Marshada, Qena, Egypt, Friday, Jan. 18, 2013. Police fired tear gas to disperse hundreds of Muslim protesters trying to storm a Coptic Christian church in southern Egypt Friday, after a word spread that a Christian man sexually assaulted a 6-year-old girl.

Muslims surrounded the village's central Abu Fam church, hurling stones and attempting to storm the building. A cross sitting atop the church was destroyed when some climbed the church walls. The situation for Coptic Christians was fraught enough in Egypt traditionally. Now that the intolerance of radical Islam has been given a boost by the election of Muslim Brotherhood's Mohammed Morsi to the presidency, their situation has taken a turn for the worse.