Muslim apartheid pushing Christians to Houston

Houston Chronicle:

When Marise Saweris left Egypt for the United States, she was a 19-year-old newlywed who didn't speak English or have a college degree. She considered herself fortunate to find a job in the Merrill Lynch mailroom.

Today she is a senior marketer at the AIG insurance company in Houston. And that's not all. Her daughter is a pediatrician, her eldest son is a project manager and her youngest boy is getting ready for law school.

So it's no wonder that Saweris believes the future is bright for the growing number of Egyptian Copts who are moving to Houston and other parts of the United States to get free of Egypt's rising sectarian tensions and chronic economic woes.

"This country gives you opportunity," she said with conviction. "There is no excuse not to be a success here. If you work hard and earn it, you get it. I was never stopped in my career because I'm a foreigner and I have an accent. So this really is the country of freedom."

She and her husband were pioneers when they moved to Houston in 1977, but today a sizable Egyptian Christian community calls Houston home. More than 600 Coptic families have settled here since the first handful arrived in 1968.

The conservative, close-knit community is growing steadily. Three Coptic churches have opened just to keep pace. The largest, the impressive St. Mary and Archangel Michael Coptic Orthodox Church, has brought a touch of Egypt to northwest Houston with its traditional domes and elaborate icons.

When hundreds gather for the traditional four-hour service on Sunday mornings, it is almost like being in Egypt. Part of the service is in Arabic, some of the hymns are in the venerable Coptic language and the music is Middle Eastern.

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Coptic church leaders concede that they do not mingle easily with the rest of the large Christian community in the Houston area, in part because they are not used to speaking freely about their religious beliefs because of the problems they faced in Egypt.

Father Younan Labib, the priest at the St. Mary church, said this reluctance to reach out is keeping the Copts isolated despite their many successes here.

"We still lack a way to go outward and be open to others," he said. "We don't feel comfortable sharing our faith with non-Coptic people. It's very hard for us. Keep in mind that we came from a community where you only share your faith with people that believe like you. So we cannot say we are interacting with other churches here."

He said the persecution Copts faced in Egypt was a unifying factor that helped keep the community together. In the United States, where there is no external threat to Copts, he said the danger is that people will wander from the church because of the temptations of secular life.

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It is not just Egypt where Christians are being driven out of the middle east. It is in Iraq, Lebanon and Bethlehem. Muslim apartheid is worse than South African apartheid, because it is comes with the threat of not only discrimination but death and torture. Muslim religious bigotry is the root cause of terrorism in the world today and it is getting worse. It is now pushing the survivors of the Christian faith from there homes.

Many Lebanese Christians came even earlier to Texas and settled in the lower Rio Grande Valley. Since there were no Greek Orthodox churches there, they became Episcopalians because of the similarity in rituals.

This story explains a lot about why the Christians left Egypt.

The old man was already bleeding to death on the pavement outside the Church of the Saints when the attacker with the two daggers turned on Michael Adib and started to slash.

"When he came to kill me, he said: 'Accept the Prophet Muhammad," said Adib, a Coptic Christian who had just walked out of the church after a Friday Mass. "I was trying to see how to save my life and defend the others. It was an organized plan to kill all of us in the church."

The 22-year-old reacted fast, parrying the dagger thrusts with his rucksack. He managed to deflect the two blades aimed at his heart into the fleshy parts of his left arm, where they severed muscles and left two gaping wounds.

Then the attacker, a Muslim, knifed a third victim, who also survived, before going to another Coptic Orthodox church to use his knives on other worshippers.

The blood-soaked panorama outside the church in this aged port city in April resembled a gory scene from a medieval religious war. The Alexandria clashes followed even more severe Muslim-Christian riots last year and a series of attacks on Coptic churches in rural parts of Upper Egypt.

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John Watson, a priest and professor who wrote "Among the Copts" and "Listening to Islam," said that radical Wahhabi Islam is elbowing out more tolerant forms of the religion throughout Egypt and the rest of the Middle East, pressuring Christians and other minorities.

"Copts are leaving en masse," he said. "It's part of an alarming departure throughout the Middle East. I see the attacks on the Copts as part of an extremist element in Islam. There is a powerful fundamentalist element that is small but quite militant. I regard them as a minority, but they are making life unpleasant for the Copts."

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It is in fact any non Muslim. It is at the root of the war the religious bigots have with Israel and the Jews. These intolerant religious bigots want to destroy every non Muslim in the world and they are just demonstrating their will in the middle east where there is no effective resistance to their objectives. This is just a brief excerpt from a very long story.

Earlier post on Muslim apartheid here, here, here, and here.

Meanwhile, Gateway Pundit reports that Muslims are demanding the right to worship in a Spanish cathedral.