Julia Atef, a 21-year-old Coptic Christian
woman, was kidnapped by Islamists in broad daylight on her way to a
church event near Cairo on Oct. 26. As the Coptic Solidarity reported on Nov. 2: “The girl’s family went and filed a report with the Shubra El-Kheima
Second Police Department, No. 29760 for the year 2024, Shubra El-Kheima
Administrative Department, and her fate has not yet been revealed.”
Julia’s is not an isolated case. Within the past decade, hundreds of Coptic girls have been kidnapped, raped and forcibly converted to Islam.
As Raymond Ibrahim, an expert on the history of Egypt and the Middle East, reported:
“On Jan. 22, 2024, Irene Ibrahim
Shehata, 21, disappeared in between mid-term exams at the Faculty of
Medicine at Assyut National University, where she was a second-year
student. Her frantic family immediately went to the police. Although
charges were eventually brought against a man whose identity is
concealed, from the start police were uncooperative and even hostile to
the family.”
About four months later on May 10, another Coptic Christian woman, Martina Mamdouh (22 years old), was taken
by a Muslim man from Cairo University. The culprit sent Mamdouh’s
father a certificate to demonstrate her “conversion: to Islam. While in
tears, Mamdouh’s mother appeared in a video
circulated on social media, where she asked the Egyptian authorities
and President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi to intervene in her return. She was
then rescued.
Lindsay Rodriguez, director of development and advocacy of the organization Coptic Solidarity, told JNS:
“It is hard to get exact statistics
because so many families are pressured to retract their reports under
threats. If a girl is returned, the families almost never speak out
because it is a sort of informal trade to not create more awareness and
expose the crimes in exchange for the return of the woman.”
Tragically, the American
administration—and nearly all the cultural institutions in the West ––
are silent about these horrors while it could act powerfully on behalf
of the women captives. According to Coptic Solidarity:
“The U.S. Embassy in Cairo and the
State Department should be raising these cases of abductees, urging the
immediate return of abducted Coptic women, that the perpetrators are
brought to justice … ”
“These cases should be included in the
annual Trafficking in Persons Report (TIP), published by the State
Department. The U.S. and other governments should raise this issue
during Egypt’s Universal Periodic Review as well to apply pressure on
the Egyptian government to stop ignoring crimes against the
indigenous Coptic women of Egypt.”
The problem is that America and its
human-rights groups are generally silent when it comes to the treatment
of non-Muslims in Muslim-majority countries. This is so even when the
minorities are the very people—blacks, women, religious minorities and
LGBT+—that we go to great lengths to protect in our own society. And it
remains U.S. policy even in cases that would normally tug at the heart.
In Egypt, for example, minority Coptic
Christians have for centuries experienced severe persecution. Their
historic churches are often degraded or destroyed.
Permission to build new churches is obstructed. Many Copts have been
killed for faith-related reasons or arrested on “blasphemy” charges.
Egyptians are forbidden to change their religious faith from Islam to
Christianity. The current constitution of Egypt specifies Islam as the
state religion and the principles of Sharia as the main source of
legislation. Yet nowhere in American educational institutions will
students learn of such matters, and they remain invisible in American
foreign policy and are of little interest to our human-rights behemoths:
Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch.
Yet they are the sort of underdogs that Americans typically warm to: Copts are the indigenous people of Egypt. According to the Coptic Solidarity,
“Copts are Egypt’s ethno-religious
population that identifies as the descendants of ancient Egyptians,
demonstrated by their DNA, their undeniable link to the land of Egypt,
unique language, calendar and traditions that root back to the ancient
Egyptian civilization. There’s been a historical continuity of
discrimination against Copts since the first Arab invasion of Egypt in
693 C.E. and how their situation has evolved until current times.”
Islamic conquests of vast areas of
the Middle East and Africa, and Islam’s treatment of those conquered are
mostly unknown to Americans because they are forbidden topics to
American educators and government spokesmen. Yet the basic historical
facts about these conquered peoples have shaped the modern world. Egypt
was once a Christian country with a sizable Jewish community. It was
part of the Roman and Byzantine (Eastern Roman) Empires from 30 C.E. to
642 BCE.
The Islamization and Arabization of Egypt
mirrors that of many conquered African nations, where the same American
and Western silence prevails. In Egypt, these processes started the
moment Arab Muslims invaded in the seventh century. Demographic changes
then began through the (mostly forced) conversions of the Christian
Egyptian populace to Islam. Arabic became the lingua franca following
the Arab invasion.
From 1517 to 1914, Egypt was under Ottoman Turkish occupation. The Minority Rights Group notes:
“The Copts were persecuted by their
Muslim rulers, in turn Arab, Circassian and Ottoman. Churches were
destroyed, books burnt, and elders imprisoned. By the time the British
had taken Egypt in 1882, Copts had been reduced to one-tenth of the
population, mainly as a result of centuries of conversion to Islam.
“Arab Muslims governed Christians and
Jews according to the rules of Islamic Sharia. According to Islamic law,
they were viewed as dhimmi, i.e. non-Muslims granted a special status
in return for paying a heavy poll tax. They had to wear different colors
and clothes from Muslims, could not build new places of worship or
repair old ones without permission, or construct them in such a way as
to overshadow those of Muslims.”
Christians and Jews lived throughout the Muslim world as dhimmis—subjugated second-class people “protected” from violence by the majority as long as they paid a poll tax, the jizya,
which is still demanded by radical Islamists today. Since the founding
of Egypt, Copts have experienced this systematic discrimination, leading
to their exodus from the country. Christians comprised around 20% of
the Middle East and North Africa population a century ago. However,
today, because of the decades-long persecution, they are less than 4%.
The life and suffering of the Coptic
minority in Egypt is due to the Islamic invasion, dominance and ongoing
persecution that occurs under Islamic rule. But it continues
unchallenged because the entire matter remains a taboo subject in the
West.
Julia Atef, Irene Ibrahim Shehata, Martina Mamdouh and who knows
how many others are victims of the West’s self-inflicted blindness. For
shame. 
