Giulio Meotti
Published: Saturday, August 24, 2013 9:51 PM
"Dozens of churches were burned and destroyed in the largest attack on Coptic houses of worship since 1321", reports the Wall Street Journal about the latest persecution of Christians in Egypt.
A symbol of Egypt's national culture, the ancient churches of Minya, did not hold religious services for the first time in 1,600 years. The churches had been destroyed by supporters of ousted President Mohammed Morsi.
The Coptic Pope Tawadros II, who appeared at the side of General Al Sisi during the announcement of Morsi's dismissal, is now hiding in a secret location for fear of terrorist attacks.
Christian shops and homes have been marked by a black "X", while the Muslim buildings are marked with a red "X". At the end of the clashes, the black painted buildings were destroyed, while the red ones were left unharmed. It was an operation of religious cleansing.
Last July, a Christian was beheaded by Islamists and there have been least seven deaths among Christians in the last few days.
The guru of the Muslim Brotherhood, Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, gave formal approval for the attacks against Christians. In a video, Qaradawi says that "Christians" have been "recruited (by the military junta) to kill innocent Muslims."
Videos from Egypt show burned churches and Islamists who embrace and kiss each other, congratulating one another for the destruction of the buildings of "infidels." In the city of Sohag, Islamists raised the black flag of al Qaeda on a church and executed a Christian couple after asking for their identity cards.
An Islamic mob destroyed the Institute of Egypt in Cairo, founded by Napoleon and containing 192,000 books and documents from as far back as the XIX century. It’s simply gone.
Meanwhile, in the church of Mallawi, the statue of the mother of Jesus was literally decapitated.
Islamists are obliterating non-Muslim heritage in the Middle East. Their targets are Jewish shrines, Christian churches, monuments and cultural masterpieces.
In Timbuktu, Mali, Islamists destroyed the tomb of a Sufi saint, Sidi Mahmoud Ben Amar. Timbuktu is known as “the city of the 333 saints”, classified among the UNESCO World Heritage Sites. The UN cultural body didn’t raise its voice against this Islamic cataclysm.
An Islamic mob destroyed the Institute of Egypt in Cairo, founded by Napoleon and containing 192,000 books and documents from as far back as the XIX century. It’s simply gone.
Napoleon’s legendary “Description de l’Egypte” is lost (in 1822 Jean-François Champollion used this document to unveil the mistery of the hierogliphycs). UNESCO, again, stood silent.
As it stood silent when Egypt’s former cultural minister, Farouk Hosni, said he “would burn Israeli books in Egyptian libraries”.
The dream of Napoleon was to conquer the land of the pharaohs and the "wise general" surrounded himself with men of science. He wanted Egypt and its civilization to be recorded for posterity. There were well-known scientist friends of Napoleon, the physicist Gaspard Monge and the chemist Claude Berthollet (the inventor of bleach) whom he enlisted for the project.
The Institute of Egypt became the headquarters of the scientific expedition. The building was "the favorite mistress of the general," according to the mocking comments of the French military. The "Description", in twenty volumes, now burned forever, was their historical testament. It was burned just the way the Mongols burned the library of Baghdad in 1258.
Egypt's history came under attack this week when pro-Morsi terrorists looted more than 1,000 artifacts, burning mummies, breaking statues and hauling off ancient beaded jewelry from Malawi Museum.
Islamic salafists are trying to ban the ancient statues that dot Egypt and suggested that the pagan treasures “could be covered with wax”.
The sirens that embellish the fountain of Zeus in Alexandria have been deemed “inappropriate” by the Salafist party, which decided to “veil” them completely with a sheet.
In Israel, Palestinian Muslims torched the synagogues in Gaza’s Katif Bloc. It was an orgy of hate.
Twelve years ago, Arabs destroyed Joseph’s tomb, Judaism’s fourth holy site, smashing the stone structure and ripping it apart, brick by brick.
The arson attack on the Shalom al Yisrael synagogue in Jericho and the continuing gunfire at Rachel’s Tomb in Bethlehem are two other examples.
The Islamic Waqf is attempting to destroy all evidence of Jewish claims to the The Temple Mount in Jerusalem, while using terror and intimidation to impose its exclusive claim to the sacred site. The Waqf has proceeded on two fronts: de-Judaize the Mount by archeological destruction and Islamize it by preventing the Jews from praying there.
In 2000 the Taliban destroyed two wonderful Buddhas in Bamyan, Afghanistan. It was a turning point for a proto-Nazi ideology bent on the physical eradication of its enemies and their religious symbols. Like when a Greek garrison had to defend Athens' Acropolis against a Turkish siege in 1826.
Between 1999 and 2004 approximately 150 churches, monasteries and seminaries were attacked by Albanian and Bosnian Muslims. Many of the churches contained Byzantine frescoes dating as far back as the 13th century. These sites were reduced to rubble, in full view of the U.N. and the world's media.
We also witnessed the looting of the Baghdad museum during the US invasion in 2003. And in Nigeria dozens of churches have been destroyed by Boko Haram.
French philosopher Christian Godin wrote that Islamism is far more dangerous than either Nazism or Communism with regard to world culture, since the latter, despite their genocidal aberrations, presupposed their own preservation (Hitler's cultural chief, Alfred Rosenberg, travelled through the whole of Europe to collect books and masterpieces).
For the Islamists, it is the world itself that does not deserve to exist. These troglodytes would, if they had their way, take our civilization back to the 7th century.
Giulio Meotti
The writer, an Italian journalist with Il Foglio, writes a twice-weekly column for Arutz Sheva. He is the author of the book "A New Shoah", that researched the personal stories of Israel's terror victims, published by Encounter. His writing has appeared in publications, such as the Wall Street Journal, Frontpage and Commentary. He is at work on a book about the Vatican and Israel.
