Apparently her Muslim mother divorced her father and fled to Italy with an Italian man, taking the girl with her when she was 5-years-old. The man later left the mother, who took Kariman to a convent in Rome and left her in the care of the nuns before reportedly committing suicide.

Four years later, when Kariman was nine, her Muslim grandfather began demanding that the girl be returned to him in Egypt. So Nabila Makram, the Coptic minister, played an “important role,” as she boasted in the interview. After explaining how difficult it was to extradite the girl from Italy, as Kariman did not want to leave the convent where she was happily living with the sisters, Makram went on to say that “Kariman was flown [to Egypt] wearing a cross, because of course she had grown in a convent — actually, she was raised at the hands of nuns, even though she was a Muslim.”

As a result, Makram — the Christian—“explained to the girl that, sure, faith is in the heart, but you need to take off the cross for you’re returning to your grandfather, to a new life, or rather, your old life.” The young girl reluctantly complied even though, as Makram admitted, she was immensely upset — so much so that Makram feared she’d take her life in the airplane on the way to Cairo and arranged for an Egypt Air airline attendant to accompany her and keep watch over her during the flight.

Thus Nabila Makram sheds light as to how she, a Coptic Christian, sees her role as a minister in the Egyptian government: to happily behave as one of the dhimmis, third class non-Muslim citizens who know their place. Instead of letting this young girl remain in safety with the Italian sisters who cared for her, she extradited the girl back to her grandfather—who only seemed to show interest in the girl when she reached the age of nine — all while forcing the girl to cast aside the crucifix.

Such is the Islamic Hate for the Christian Cross.