…In Egypt, the situation is difficult but there is no persecution, we would say discrimination. And then we have the wartorn areas like Iraq and for over 60 years in Palestine. These two situations make it very difficult for Christians. In Palestine, the Christians have lost hope and they leave the country if they can. We find the same situation, more or less in Iraq. The Christians are migrating from their area to the north, the Kurdish north of Iraq.
Q: Let us leave the question of war to the side for a moment. How would we grade, if you will, when we are talking about discrimination and when it is an outright persecution?
Father [Samir Khalil] Samir: War is the worst situation and the discrimination in Egypt is the second level. For example, the whole day and during the whole year, you are bombarded with Islamic propaganda starting at five in the morning. They start their preaching using megaphones and this is five times a day…
My advice to any Christians living in Egypt, Iraq and most other Muslim majority states in the Middle East is simple…
Get out! Leave if and while and you can.
Whenever I read stories coming out of Egypt I keep thinking of the Jews in Germany in the early 30’s. Not saying the Muslims are going to try to exterminate the Copts. But the situation is not going to get better and it could get a lot worse. To believe otherwise is simply to live in denial. And denial is a dangerous place to live in the Middle East.
Egypt was nearly 100% Christian at the time of the Arab invasion in the seventh century. They were not so much swamped by Arab immigration as they were worn down by sharia and centuries of discrimination and periods of persecution. It was 500 years before the Copts began speaking Arabic daily. The 8 to 10 million Copts who remain are the observant remnant. The idea that ten million people could just leave their homeland is unworkable. Pray for their survival of this new period of persecution.
Read the whole article, by the way. He describes very clearly the situations in the various Muslim countries, some not so bad, some terrible.
I did read it. The states where the discrimination is relatively low key are almost all police states run by dictators.
If “we” christians all leave, who will bring them the Good News? It was also “dangerous” to be a Christian in 1st Century Asia and Europe, just as Paul, et al.