The horrific bombings carried out by the Islamic State against churches in Tanta and Alexandria, Egypt on Palm Sunday, April 9, 2017, killed at least 45 and injured 100 more. These attacks underscore the nature of the growing Jihadist threat to religious minorities in the Middle East. Among the online Jihadists in the region celebrating the death toll, one ISIS supporter on Telegram described "Copts, Zionists, Magians [a pejorative word referring to Zoroastrians but referring to Shia Muslims in this case], and atheists" as a "Satanic brotherhood" and "accursed [people] who have no religion."
Photo from Mar Girgis Church, Tanta (Ibrahim Izzat)
For almost 20 years, MEMRI has translated, documented, and analyzed this brand of poison that has been brazenly disseminated through the media by Islamists and Jihadists in a variety of languages, but especially in Arabic. While Christians have been frequent targets of this propagandizing, so have Jews and heterodox, secular, liberal and free-thinking Muslims of various sorts. And while this material has been around seemingly forever, it has become much more readily available with the rise of social media.
ISIS is only the latest Jihadist entity to target Egyptian Christians through the decades and indeed, all these groups relied on an extensive, enduring, and informal social network popularizing hate speech against religious minorities and other marginalized groups.
The amount of MEMRI material on anti-Coptic Christian incitement and violence is voluminous, but here, in brief, are some important recent primers on this scourge, which rather than showing signs of abating, seems to be growing as the Islamic State industrializes hate and bigotry by wedding its incendiary propaganda to bloody acts of mass murder:
MEMRI JTTM report Article in ISIS Weekly Al-Naba' Threatens to Intensify Attacks Against Copts in Egypt, March 9, 2017
MEMRI JTTM report ISIS Egypt is Openly Betting on Bigotry as a Winning Strategy, February 22, 2017.
MEMRI JTTM report Jihadis Express Satisfaction at Coptic Church Attack in Cairo, Threaten Egyptian Christians with Expulsion and Slaughter, December 12, 2016.
MEMRI Daily Brief No. 79, Coptophobia, February 19, 2016.
MEMRI Daily Brief No. 53, The ISIS Caliphate and the Churches, August 27, 2015.
MEMRI Daily Brief No. 46, ISIS's View of Christians Echoes That of Official Saudi Fatwas, June 1, 2015.
