Clad in his spectacular Bishop’s regalia, Greek Orthodox Bishop Ezekiel throws a cross in the water at the annual “Thefeonia” at Station Pier. This Greek “Festival of the Waters” is held at Port Melbourne in early January every year, where I’ve represented Federal Labor to the sometimes 5 to 6 thousand members of the Greek Australian community.
Usually I’m there with an array of local State and Federal Greek Australian politicians, but, in my own mind, my presence is emblematic of the natural tolerance and pluralism of modern Australia. All the politicians release doves and make brief speeches.
At the “Thefeonia” this year it seemed appropriate that I briefly expressed the nation’s solidarity with another ancient Christian community, Australia’s Copts, who are approximately 80,000 strong across Australia four of whose churches, in Australia were amongst the sixty four listed worldwide as targets by an Al Qaeda website.
Many of the Greek Orthodox people present expressed their quiet thanks that I had raised this matter. One woman told me that a Coptic family in Melbourne had seven members of their family killed when the Saints Church in East Alexandria, Egypt, was attacked at Midnight Mass on the 31st December, killing 22 innocent men women and children and seriously wounding 98 people.
The attack came after weeks of escalating violence against the Copts in Egypt. The Copt represent 10 per cent of the 80 million people in Egypt, they are the largest Christian community remaining in the Middle East. They are a link to ancient Egypt, as their Coptic language is the last remnant of the language of the hieroglyphs, and their culture and traditions pre-date Islam.
Like a tottering Pharaoh, no amount of Grecian 2000 can hide the fact that an authoritarian like Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak is in his mid 80s. A blatantly rigged parliamentary election, together with the disintegration of internal order, suggests that Hosni Mubarak’s plan to install his son Gamal, laughably known as ‘Gary’, will not happen.
Egypt’s feared security chief, Omar Solmain, may not carry out his Dear Leader’s wishes, preferring himself. The sudden demise of the Tunisian dictator, Ben Ali, coupled together with the breakdown of order in Cairo, and Hosni’s chronological imperative means that the strategically vital regime in Egypt is at risk. So much of Middle East stability is built on the regime in Cairo. Foreign assistance won’t help.
Actually, in the distorted perception of the Middle East, the 3 billion dollars that goes to Israel is foremost in most Western minds (Israel could easily, and should do, without this United States subsidy. Israel’s GDP in 2009 was $195.3 Billion and provided that they can access and buy the top flight military technology, they would benefit both themselves and the United States by seeking this independence).
Problematically, Congress already provides a matching annual grant and lifeline from the United States to Egypt of 2.77 billion dollars per annum. Without this US subsidy, bread prices would skyrocket and the Mubarak regime would collapse.
Surprisingly, despite the dramatic attacks on the Coptic Christians in Egypt, and its immediate effects in Australia with the Jihadist listing of local churches, none of our Jerusalem-based reporters ventured to Alexandria or Egypt. This news lapse wasn’t just an Australian phenomena. Jeffrey Goldberg writing in the Atlantic Monthly, noted what he thought was ”the lackadaisical coverage of the most important story coming out of the Middle East now.”
In the attack on Egypt’s big Christian minority, Goldberg was right to see the wider murderous anti-Christian campaign in Egypt and Iraq, indeed throughout the Middle East. In Iraq a couple of months prior to the Islamist attack in Alexandria, Al Qaeda boasted of its slaughter in a Baghdad church where Jihadists murdered 58 men, women and children and a number of priests.
Christians are under siege from Islamist in the Palestinian territories, but have bought themselves a temporary truce in Lebanon where the disgraced and disgraceful Christian warlord General Aoun is in alliance with Iran’s-Lebanese franchise -Hezbollah. Only in Israel has the number of Christians increased from 34,000 in 1948 to 151,700 ( according to the Israeli Centre Bureau of Statistics Report of 2010).
Mubarak’s maladroit reaction to Pope Benedict’s plea that Governments do more to protect religious minorities was to withdraw the Egyptian Ambassador to the Vatican. Pope Benedict insisted “Words are not enough in confronting religious intolerance, there must be a concrete and constant effort by the world’s nations”. US President Obama and French President Sarkozy also specifically denounced the anti-Christian violence. There were questions about whether Australia had spoken out loudly enough.
However, it was pathetic to see the excuses of Mubarak’s regime.
Waheed Ra’fat, one of the managing editors of the Al-Watani Al-Yom publication, which belongs to President Hosni Mubarak’s ruling National Party, wrote this week:
Mossad is the accused because it stands to benefit most from distracting Egypt’s attention from what is going to happen in South Sudan on January 9. The Mossad has a strategy of instigating fitna [civil war, disagreement and division within Islam].
Coptic Christians in Australia also pointed out that Al-Ashram, another Egyptian newspaper that serves as an organ for Mubarak’s regime, went so far as to state “that Mossad had succeeded in infiltrating Al-Qaeda and was using Muslim terrorists to launch deadly attacks”.
This reaction contrasts sharply with moderate Muslims in Egypt who stood united with the Copts at Coptic Christmas Eve mass services.
Things are obviously a little wacko in Egypt, where recently the Governor of Sinai said Egyptian officials believed that a fatal shark attack in one of their resorts could have been a “plot” by the Mossad. Oh, I forgot - the Islamists believe that even the birds of the air are part of a “Zionist plot”. Saudi officials recently arrested a vulture who was part of a Haifa University bird tracking experiment.
Peter Day in the Australian Spectator noted Egypt’s fate is on the line.
Hani Shukrallah, an independent journalist and former editor-in-chief of Al-Ahram, writes in the paper that an Egypt free of its ancient Christian Coptic minority is for the first time not beyond his imagining. He hopes to be dead before that: ‘This will be an Egypt which I do not recognise and to which I have no desire to belong’.
Yet sadly we face something wider even then the fate of Egypt - for this is another aspect of Al Qaeda Jihadist war- the systematic attempt to drive Christianity out of the Middle East. This systematic attack on Middle East Christians is but a part of the Salafist war waged by them. It is fought by their many satellites and franchises from the Algerian Salafist front of the Combat and Call, to Jemah Islamiya in Malaysia and Indonesia.
But it is Al Qaeda’s virtual warriors, their autonomous avatars in the West who they program via the internet which occupies 90 per cent of the time of western security agencies, such as MI5.
It is these home-grown Jihadists that we have to fear the most. Fortunately for Australia our security agencies have so far foiled all attempts of terror attacks on mainland Australia. Even if all Jewish and Coptic sites in Australia have to remain highly guarded, it may be necessary so Australia continues to avoid mass causality attacks.
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