Brothers On The Streets

As certain of my public school tutees are wont to say of themselves and their erstwhile classmates, especially in the priciest parts of London. Well, of course.

Daniel Larison writes:

"Like the protesters who have flooded the streets of Egypt in the past week, the country’s large minority of Coptic Christians worry about joblessness and lack of freedoms. But most want President Hosni Mubarak to stay in power.

Fear of what may follow the removal of Mr. Mubarak, a secular strongman who has ruled the country for the past 30 years, is making reluctant supporters out of the country’s Christians, an estimated 10% of Egypt’s 80 million population. Mr. Mubarak has been aggressive in pursuing perceived Islamist extremist groups, a policy that has endeared him to Coptic Christians, not to mention the U.S.

Many Copts worry that Mr. Mubarak’s exit would leave them dangerously exposed—either by chaos, or to a government that may be more tolerant of Islamist extremists." ~The Wall Street Journal

These are very reasonable fears. Since the secular authoritarian government in Iraq fell after the invasion, the Christian minorities in Iraq have been exposed to frequent atrocities and intimidation. While there were some encouraging signs of Muslim solidarity with the Copts after the Alexandria church bombing, there is reason to worry that Copts and other Christians would face the same threats if the current regime fell. Even if a new government were not tolerant of attacks on minorities, it might be too weak to offer effective protection. Protections for ethnic and religious minorities are essential for preventing new democratic governments from devolving into majoritarian tyrannies, especially when those minorities may be identified (fairly or unfairly) with the old regime. Democratists have had a bad habit of ignoring the dangers to minorities that promoting democracy in the region has worsened, and Near Eastern Christians have been among those most harmed by this project. We may hope that the Coptic Church and the other Christians living and working in Egypt do not share that fate.

As one of the comments puts it:

God forbid that one day there will be no more Christians where Christianity first began. Unfortunately American evangelicals seem more concerned with Jews in Israel than Christians in the Middle East. Many American Roman Catholics have fallen into the same line of thinking maybe because they don’t realize that there are many Catholics in Palestine, Lebanon and even Iraq. God bless the Muslims who protect the Christians in the Middle East and may God grant them victory over the Islamists who would eradicate Christianity from its birthplace.

Quite so.

But Richard Bulliet calls on the United States to stop fearing the Muslim Brotherhood, which, as Brendan O'Neill explains, is very largely a British creation. It retains excellent Foreign Office links to this day; in Egypt as in many other places, we have long and rightly played both sides of the street.

One quarter of the Parliament to be elected on a constituency basis, one quarter on a proportional basis, forty-five per cent (an equal number of men and women) to be nominated by the General Guide of the Muslim Brotherhood, and five per cent (an equal number of men and women) to be nominated by the Coptic Patriarch. No legislation could be introduced unless sponsored by at least one MP from each of those four categories, nor could it be enacted without the approval of all four of the General Guide, the Patriarch, and the first and second-placed candidates in a direct Presidential election, termed the President and the Vice-President but enjoying exactly equal powers. Why not?

What would be the reaction to that from the preposterous Toby Young, who clearly had no idea that Mohammad Amin al-Husayni, veteran of the Allied side in the First World War, had been created Grand Mufti of Palestine (he, like anyone else, had previously only been Mufti of Jerusalem) by the ardently Zionist Sir Herbert Samuel, but had later been radicalised along with his people by the repression only made possible by the freeing up of British forces when Czechoslovakia was handed over to Hitler, and had thus been driven into Hitler's embrace, from which he organised the Bosniaks into the SS Division that was to be recalled in the uniforms and other features of their sons and grandsons in the 1990s? Nor had he worked out that the dissemination of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in and from Egypt could hardly be blamed on an illegal opposition party. Nor that that book is readily available, in pretty much any language you like, in London.

Or what would be the reaction from Douglas Alexander, who may or may not literally be Gordon Brown's godson (I have heard conflicting reports on that one), but who is clearly as hardline a Likudnik as any Blairite, and thus incapable of working with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office?

In the first case, obviously, who cares? But not in the second.