Egypt’s Mythical ‘Foreign Hands’
A Coptic church near Aswan in Upper Egypt was attacked and burned by a Muslim mob, inflamed by the fiery words of their imam. This has happened with increasing frequency since the February revolution in Egypt.
The church, originally built in the 1940s, was undergoing badly needed renovations and some expansion. According to Sharia, it is forbidden to build or repair a Christian or Jewish religious building in a Muslim-ruled state. Some local Muslims demanded that the new building could not have either domes or a cross. When the rebuilding went ahead according to plan, they set the church on fire.
That is not so unusual. What happened next, however, was quite different. When Christians in the capital Cairo demonstrated in protest, they were attacked. At least 27 were killed; more than 250 were injured. Rather than investigate — including the question of whether soldiers had committed many of the murders — the government rushed to blame foreign provocateurs, declaring they were seeking to divide Egyptian society.
This is an old theme in Egypt, and one that is certainly surviving the overthrow of the Mubarak regime.
As a child growing up in Cairo I was taught to fear those unidentified hands, sometimes called fingers, messing with the internal harmony of Egyptian society. I was warned not to pick up toys or candy from strangers or things left on the streets, because they might be placed there by those hands. Later, I heard that any unrest, protest, demonstration, and even rise in prices of goods was the action of those hands. Even the failed attempts at steps toward democracy in Egypt were always destroyed by those foreign hands because, we were told, that would bring the inevitable escape of Egypt’s sovereignty from the firm grip of foreign colonizing forces.
Those hands knew no limits. They were even accused of sending women stricken with HIV to lure Egyptian youth into acquiring the disease; of directing sharks to swim across the Red Sea from Eilat to Sharm El Sheikh; of blowing up tourist sites in Sinai to scare away tourists; and even of starting the Egyptian revolution in January 2011.
Inconsistently, they were blamed for keeping Mubarak in power for thirty years to maintain Egypt’s failed state in perpetual limbo, and afterwards for bringing him down to tinker with Egypt’s stability.
In other words, those hands were omnipotent, ruthless, and determined to destroy Egypt’s present in order to guarantee its gloomy future. The reward, of course, was the predominance of the ever-greedy imperialistic forces of the West, or more recently of the Judeo–Christian alliance against the ever-victimized Islamic states.
But lately, and since the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) took over both the legislative and executive branches of the government, we have been incessantly hearing about those “foreign hands that mess with our transitional period.” It has become the common refrain in the almost daily announcements or decrees.
Those hands have gone as far as to incite hatred between Muslims — who constitute the overwhelming majority of Egyptians — and the Coptic Christian minority in order to fracture the internal peace of the country.
It’s because Muslim countries are obsessed with conspiracy theories, Islam promotes paranoia & other mental illnesses.
They sound like Democrats talking about Bush.
“Islam promotes paranoia & other mental illnesses.”
The cult of islam, properly called mohammedanism IS a mental illness.
I’m taken back to when I was a twelve year old and was reading about the Salem witch trials. This is the same thing. Irrational ignorance. The shame of it is that it is still being sown and cultivated as if it were an annual crop. I don’t want to ascribe it to Islam but is there a choice? For the life of me, I cannot think of ONE Islamic country where the leadership doesn’t use it as a tool of control.
Unless those clerics are marginalized to extinction, it is over for them. Yes, their societies may have the trappings of modernism (neon lights, the internet, automobiles, etc.) but they have no concept of enlightenment, of freedom. Ignorance will always be used and abused by raw power.
The CULT of Islam is built on totally unsubstantiated stories. After all you have to BELIEVE that Mohammad actually SAW and HEARD the angel Jibril and that the HEARSAY that Jibril was bringing actually came from Allah. No one else saw or heard Jibril talking to Mohammad and certainly no one saw and heard Jibril getting the HEARSAY from Allah for Mohammad to pass on as HEARSAY to his followers. So all of Islam rests on trusting in the word of honour and the Chinese Whispers of a misogynistic, polygamous, paedophilic , anti semitic, slave owning, thief , and warlord . So no problem there then LOL
Maybe it was Satan LOL.
Puts me in mind of the Russian proverb, this “Satan no alien agitator” jazz does: “The chicken is not a bird; Bulgaria is not a foreign country.”
Happy days.
Something else to ask a Muslim “Why didn’t God talk DIRECTLY to Mohammad after all he did to all those JEWS who preceded Mohammad . So why was Mohammad not good enough to warrant direct contact’ Another good question is why do they call Mohammad a PROPHET when he never made any prophecies?
this is great info
thank you so much
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There is but one antidote: A Classic Liberal education. No, I’m not referring to the silliness that infests our colleges, but a proper study of philosophy, literature, mathematics, and critical thought.
People simply believe what they see on TV and hear in the Mosque because it is pervasive and they have little other information. The Google translator doesn’t work too well with Arabic.
This is the face of a cult. It may be founded upon Islam, but it could have been founded on just about anything. I hope they come to their senses before they do something we all will regret.
Great article cuz!
Islam is not a cult. Islam is a device used by a primitive warlord to justify his staying in power and to control his followers. What better way than to tell them God spoke to me and if you don’t believe then I will have to kill you because that’s what God told me to do? Get enough people in on this scheme at first and the people will have to obey or die. You have to remember that Mohammad ruled a primitive, uneducated, nomadic society. There was no justice system. They were goat herders living off the land and whatever they could steal from others. Mohammad justified killing and stealing by blaming God. This is what God told him to do. His was the only true religion and all others were infidels that did not share God’s blessings. If they had “it” and Mohammad wanted “it” then God told him he could just take “it” because he deserved it for believing in him and they didn’t.
Write down enough rules and ramblings so that no one can repudiate them because no one can really understand them. Someone finds two passages that contradict each other? Oh, no problem, God was talking about this situation then but this later one is about this. So, which one do we follow? Oh, either one. It depends on how I see it. Since God speaks to me I must be right and if you question me again I will have to kill you because that’s what God told me to do. After a while, no one questioned anymore.
Like the big lie, tell it often enough and soon you will find someone to believe it. They start telling it and they find more to believe it. Mohammad started the biggest lie ever invented.
Sorry Perry, mohammedanism IS a cult, with mo as their cunning leader. Would other PJM readers care to ponder on this idea, prompted by Perry:
This was the granddaddy of all Ponzi schemes. Mo tells his followers to rob passing caravans (against societal norms) and (obviously) keep the booty, sharing equally, less HIS 20% Chief Pirate’s share. As he was a successful brigand, (and later role model for the Barbary Pirates), anyone joining him saw a good return on investment. Of course, as the number of companions increased, so did the size and distance of the attacks.
Gork is right: Egyptians and muslims in general have no tools for self-criticism and although fairly bright people, their eyes glaze over when you talk about Israel or anything that requires fair play, context and proportion to parse – in other words: Islam is always right.
I talked to a bright young Egyptian recently about Israel and he said that they covet all of Iraq and Egypt too. I asked how he knew and he said an Israeli politician said so. Even if true a politician said that, one guy? Plus, the idea of how 5 million Israelis would take over 130 million people or that Jordan is on a map was of no account in his calculations nor why Israel would want Iraq and Egypt. It is well known that many muslims think the whole Iraqi invasion was to hand it over to Israel.
When it came to video of an armored car running over Christians during the Maspero riots, suddenly the one man (remember the Israeli politician), the driver, didn’t matter and didn’t represent the Egyptian military but was a lone wolf. My friend even suggested someone might’ve stolen the armored car to make the military look bad. These people are delusional.
I happened to be watching Alhurra TV when it was reporting live on the riots and Egyptians soldiers, off-camera but you could hear them, came in and told the commentator to stop broadcasting. Hilariously he said, “I’m an Egyptian.” The plug was pulled some minutes later and the screen went to a pattern. I was watching with a Christian and he was ecstatic the man had stood up to the military and we were laughing like crazy. At the time we didn’t know about all the deaths which, when later reported, were said to be entirely soldiers, later retracted by the gov’t.
The incessant lies and conspiracy theories of Arabs is the ultimate ‘elephant in the room’ of Middle East politics. Nobody is allowed to say it – because they would be accused of being racists – but telling lies is what Arab leaders do when they speak to the West. Just look at what ‘new’ Libya’s acting PM Mahmoud Jibril has been saying:
http://edgar1981.blogspot.com/2011/10/arab-lies-elephant-in-room.html
“The church, originally built in the 1940s, was undergoing badly needed renovations and some expansion. According to Sharia, it is forbidden to build or repair a Christian or Jewish religious building in a Muslim-ruled state. Some local Muslims demanded that the new building could not have either domes or a cross. When the rebuilding went ahead according to plan, they set the church on fire.”
It’s my old “apples to oranges” analogy. My religion (or my apples) is better than your religion (or your orages), so you need to die. People are have been killing each other over apples and oranges for well over 2,000 years now. Don’t people ever get sick of it? And when Iran gets it’s nuclear bomb, we may even have the first destruction of an entire race of people simply because the Iranians think their apples are much, much, better than Israel’s oranges. How pathetic to think that the world may come to an end over an argument that is over 2,000 years old, whether my apples are better than your oranges.
I’d say those hands belong to Satan and he seems to have willing helpers in the guise of a religion, Islam.
Indonesian Muslims are Sunni’s so its strange to see HUSSEIN the Affirmative Action, Anchor Baby, Teleprompter Kid and USURPER POTUS giving Shi’ ite Iran so much free rein with its Nuclear Weapons and its Client State of Syria and its Terrorists groups Hamas and Hezboallah. He has also just opened up Iraq for the Iranians by withdrawing all US Troops and in effect, and certainly in Mohammedan minds, RUNNING AWAY. So why is the Community Organizer betraying his Sunni CULT who knows maybe he buys in to the whole Shia Armageddon BS and the take over of the world by Islam. But what he certainly is not doing is acting in the best interest of Western Civilization but then he never was a WESTERNER was he.
It sound a lot like Obama anything that is wrong is someone elses fault, wasn’t he the son of a muslim? Maybe that would explain everything especially the fact that he seems to think that everything he has done has been the correct thing to do, even though we all see disastrous results!