By Theodore Shoebat
Hillary Clinton has recently declared that the fate of Mubarek is “up to the Egyptian people, their judicial system and their government.” But, she has also made clear that the US will “monitor” all the powers that be in Egypt’s new government, in order to make sure that human rights are followed. The fate of the church in Egypt is now up to the new revolutionary government, and with Clinton’s love of civility, I am sure that the Obama administration will see to it that injustices toward human rights will be kept accordingly. If only this were true.
An Egyptian court has just upheld a three-year prison sentence for a Christian teenager named Gamal Abdou Massoud for allegedly mocking their beloved prophet Muhammad. Has Clinton prevented such an injustice from taking place?
If this is how the revolutionary government is going to treat the most helpless of its subjects, then it is not difficult to prognosticate that immense bloodshed of Christians will be made in the near future.
The violence in Egypt toward the church, which foreshadows a coming holocaust, reminds one of the recent film For Greater Glory, which illustrates the war between the revolutionary government of 1920s Mexico, and a Catholic group who called themselves the Cristeros (followers of Christ).
Like Egypt today, Mexico was under its new revolutionary government, one which wished to destroy the church. The revolutionaries had replaced Mexico’s constitution with the New Mexican Constitution, or the Mexican 1917 Constitution. Article 3 of the 1917 constitution called for secular education in schools; Article 5 out- lawed monastic orders; Article 24 forbade public worship outside the confines of churches; and Article 27 placed restrictions on the right of religious organizations to hold property.
Most unbearable to Catholics was Article 130, which deprived clergy members of basic rights and made them in effect second-class citizens. Priests and nuns were denied the right to wear clerical attire, to vote, to criticize government officials or to comment on public affairs in religious periodicals.
The Catholic Church did not want to retaliate violently against the government, so from 1919 to 1926, they obeyed the laws. However, in 1926, the president of Mexico, Plutarco Elias Calles, introduced legislation which fined priests $250 for wearing religious vestments and imprisoned them for five years for criticizing the government, just as Egypt’s new government are now putting people in jail for critiquing Islam.
Mexican president Calles took advantage of the opportunity to execute a priest publicly in an attempt to discourage other priests from participating in politics. He ordered Pro be shot at the police station and invited reporters to the execution. Padre Pro carried a small crucifix and his rosary and held his arms out forming a cross as he was shot. Pope John Paul II beatified him on September 25, 1988.
Another martyr, San Pedro de Jesus Maldonado Lucero served as the people’s spiritual mentor in Chihuahua, Mexico also suffered a tortuous fate. Soldiers in Santa Isabel, Chihuahua, arrested him and beat him to death for defying government bans on hidden religious celebrations. Maldonado’s murderers used rifle butts to bash in his head and dislodge an eye from its socket. Patrick Cross writes that by 1929, some 25,000 priests in approximately 12,000 parishes could no longer minister to the spiritual needs of Mexican Catholics, who were over 10 million strong.
The Catholics eventually grew tired of living under such laws and retaliated, calling themselves the “Cristeros” or “followers of Christ.” The Cristeros were willing to become martyrs for their freedom of religion. (1)
The new revolutionary constitution of Egypt, which was configured by Islamists who were members of either the Muslim Brotherhood or the Salafists, is reminiscent to the 1917 Constitution of Mexico, in that it upholds laws which are inherently anti-Christian. Article 2 of Egypt’s new constitution states emphatically that “Islam is the religion of the state, and the Arabic language is its official language. The principles of Islamic law are the chief source of legislation.”
Islamic law, or Sharia, upholds that “The punishment of anyone who fight against Allah and His apostle and do mischief in the land is to be killed or crucified or to have their hands and feet from opposite ends or be banished from the land.” (Quran: The table spread) Those who are to be punished, in the eyes of Islamic sheikh-tyrants, are Christians like Gamal Abdou Massoud, who will now be thrown into prison for supposedly attacking Islam.
Mubarek is now under the mercy of Muslim rebels, a situation which is to the acceptance of Hilary Clinton, and I doubt that she will react differently at the sight of the Egyptian church being under the complete control of the bloody hands of an Islamic mob.
Theodore Shoebat is the author of the book For God or For Tyranny
(1) For my info on the Cristeros, see Walid and Theodore Shoebat, For God or For Tyranny, ch. 4, pp. 62, 67.