Slaughter of Coptic Christians

Egyptian Christians march in protest in Cairo, Egypt, Jan 2nd, the day after the attack

Church Bombing in Egypt Kills 21 -Borzou Daragahi & Amro Hassan

A devastating New Year's Day terrorist bombing at a Coptic church in Egypt that killed 21 people was the latest in a wave of violence against Christian communities in the Muslim world, some of which date back to antiquity.

Most Middle Eastern countries outside the Arabian Peninsula have sizable Christian communities, including the Maronites in Lebanon, Armenians in Iran, and the Orthodox in Syria. But their numbers have shrunk over the last century, experts say. Christians now account for less than 5% of the Middle East's population, down from 20%.
(Los Angeles Times)
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The Plight of the Copts -Editorial

Copts make up about 10% of Egypt’s 80 million populace. In September, Al-Jazeera TV broadcast a two-hour program called "Without Limits" that accused the Coptic Church of hiding Israeli weapons and ammunition in monasteries and churches, purportedly in preparation for a war "against the Muslims" that would lead to the creation of an autonomous Coptic state.

The only evidence mustered to support these claims was an incident in mid-August in which the son of a priest in Port Said was falsely accused of smuggling weapons from Israel. The contraband turned out to be Chinese-made fireworks.

In state schools, textbooks represent Egypt as an exclusively Muslim state and include anti-Christian texts. In the summer of 2008, the Egyptian doctors syndicate, which has increasingly been taken over by Muslim Brotherhood activists, banned all organ transplants between Muslims and Copts.
(Jerusalem Post)
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UPDATE:

The Plight of the Middle East's Christians -Jeffrey Goldberg

I've been struck by the lackadaisical coverage of the terrible attack on New Year's Day on a Coptic church in Egypt, in which 21 Christians were killed and 79 people were injured. The Salafist war on Christians in the Middle East is intensifying rapidly, with profound consequences not only for Christians in the lands of their faith's earliest history, but for the rights of all ethnic and religious minorities in the greater Middle East.

One way to think about the Muslim Arab Middle East is as a place historically intolerant of the rights of non-Arab Muslim minorities: The blacks of Sudan, who are trying to break free of Khartoum's hold; the Kurds in Iraq and Syria; Christians in Lebanon, Egypt and Iraq; and the Jews of Israel, among others. In Saudi Arabia, it is illegal even to build a church.
(Atlantic Monthly)
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