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Latest update: 07/01/2011
- Christians - Christmas - Egypt - France - Middle East - Nicolas Sarkozy
Christians targeted by 'religious cleansing' in the Middle East, Sarkozy says
Following a New Year's Day bombing that killed 21 people in the Egyptian city of Alexandria, French President Nicolas Sarkozy on Friday said that Christian minorities in the Middle East are becoming victims of "religious cleansing".
By News Wires (text)
AFP - French President Nicolas Sarkozy said Friday that Christian minorities in the Middle East are victims of "religious cleansing", following deadly attacks on churches in the region.
A series of attacks against Christians "looks more and more... like a particularly wicked programme of cleansing in the Middle East, religious cleansing," Sarkozy said in an annual New Year's address to religious leaders.
A deadly attack on a Coptic church in the Egyptian city of Alexandria on January 1 killed 21 people.
An Al-Qaeda-linked website had published threats against that church and other Coptic communities in various countries.
Forty-four worshippers and two priests died in an attack on a Syriac Catholic church in Baghdad in October, the worst of a series of attacks against Christians in Iraq.
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Comments (1)
That's not Mr. Prtesident
President Sarkosy's latest comment on the recent atrocity aginst the Two Saints Church in Alexandria, Egypt is indeed obviously generalized, indiscriminate and flagrarantly bizarre.It is obviously generalized and indiscriminate because it puts both the extremely different settings in Egypt and Iraq into one basket, which led him to a wrong conclusion. It is bizarre becuse it lacked the insight into the political and socio-economic condiitions os a major Middle East country that had maintained long-standing relations with France. What happened in Alexandria is a heainous crime that has been widely and strongly denounced by the the vast majority, if not all, of Muslims in Egypt apart from their Christian fellow-citizens.
By any objective standards, this can never counted as any signs of religious cleansing. I would like to know how much His Excellency was upset by the obnoxious carnages against Muslim Bosnians in Europe during 1990s, in the framework of systematic acts of ethnical and basically religious cleansing there.
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