By Mark Steyn
December 12, 2016
Security forces examine the scene inside the St. Mark Cathedral in central Cairo, following a bombing, Sunday, Dec. 11, 2016. The blast at Egypt's main Coptic Christian cathedral killed dozens of people and wounded many others on Sunday, according to Egyptian state television, making it one of the deadliest attacks carried out against the religious minority in recent memory. (AP Photo/Nariman El-Mofty)
To the virtue-signalers of the post-Christian west, a victim of persecution is a Muslim male purporting to be a "refugee", a "Syrian" and a "child". The fraudulence of the "refugee" tide should not blind us to the fact that every day there are genuine victims of persecution in that benighted part of the world. For example, the 25 dead and many more wounded in St Mark's Cathedral in Cairo yesterday:
The explosion on Sunday, caused by a device containing at least 26 pounds of TNT, was carried out inside the chapel adjoining the main hall of the church, officials said...Cathedral worker Attiya Mahrous told The Associated Press, "I found bodies, many of them women, lying on the pews, it was a horrible scene."Reuters reports that although no group has yet claimed responsibility for the attack, supporters of the Islamic State terror group celebrated the deaths of the victims on social media."God bless the person who did this blessed act," one IS supporter wrote on Telegram.
I think you'll find he wrote "Allah bless the person", and, linguistically, it would be helpful if the likes of Reuters were to distinguish between "God" and "Allah". After all, this ISIS savage seems to think that, notwithstanding Jews, Christians and Muslims are all "people of the book", it's blessed for one people of the book to slaughter the other two people of the book - because the allegedly shared book is less important than the differences of style and garb and affect: you can judge a people of the book by their cover.
So the authorities have now identified the "blessed person" - and surpise surprise!
Egypt's president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi has named a 22-year-old man, Mahmoud Shafik Mohamed Mostafa as the suicide bomber behind the massacre at Cairo's Coptic cathedral complex on Sunday.
"Mahmoud Shafik Mohamed Mostafa": "Mostafa" and "Mahmoud" are in essence variations of "Mohamed". So that's like being called Mohammed Shafik Mohammed Mohammed. How many Mohammeds does a guy need? Canadian Immigration briefly (and unofficially) had a Three-Mohammeds-You're-Out rule, for when the occasional Mohammed bin Mohammed al-Mohammed turned up among the asylum seekers. That would seem minimally prudent.
But, no matter how many Christians Mohamed Muhammad Mohamot slaughters, we look the other way and worry about "Islamophobia". So the social-justice Pope issued a characteristically anodyne and generalized objection to "brutal terrorist attacks". It took a Jew, the former Chief Rabbi of the Commonwealth Lord Sacks, to get to the heart of the matter, addressing the House of Lords three years ago on the persecution of Christians. He quoted Martin Luther King:
In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.
Those "friends" are still silent. Unlike the pseudo-refugees of Mutti Merkel, these Copts and other Christian minorities do not want to head north and bilk Germans and Swedes for lifelong Euro-welfare. They want to stay where they are and prevent the extinction of their faith in the land where it was born. A couple of years back, I drew a contrast between them and their brethren across the Mediterranean in the ruins of Christendom:
It is hard not to admire those brave Christians in Egypt, Nigeria, Pakistan, their churches firebombed, their congregants attacked, but their hearts full and their faith strong.
That is even truer today, in yet another blood-soaked Advent.
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