Don't let Egypt do to Copts what it did to the Jews

When fundamentalism takes root in a country, the trouble always starts with the Jews - but it never ends with them. Now Egypt's Copts have been the target of intensifying attacks and persecutions just as Jews were. The Wall St Journal is one of the few news media to sit up and take notice. Yesterday it published this letter from JIMENA co-founder Joseph Abdel Wahed: (With thanks: Independent Observer)

Where is the outrage at the abuse of the Copts?

Moheb Zaki's op-ed Egypt's persecuted Christians (May 18) reminds me of what our Coptic Christian neighbors told us as Egypt's Jews were being ethnically cleansed beginning as early as 1945: "After Saturday comes Sunday." What this saying meant was that once the Muslims get rid of the Jews, the Christians' turn is next.

The good news is that Egypt's radical Muslims will not be able to expel seven to eight million Christians as easily as they did Egypt's 80,000 Jews, including my family. Hopefully, the world community, the United Nations, human rights organizations and the world's churches will lobby Egypt's leaders. That is more than they did for the one million Jews who were kicked out of nine Arab countries and Iran, leaving behind most of their property, starting in the late 1940s and 1950s, after the foundation of the state of Israel. In 1967, at the start of the Six-Day War, the few remaining adult male Jews in Egypt were rounded up and imprisoned.

That is why I object strongly to our president's speech in Cairo when he made the unbelievable statement that "Islam and America share the same principles of justice and tolerance." Nonsense. Our values include religious and political freedom, respect for women, the rule of law and democratic ideals. Not so in Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Iran, Somalia and in other places dominated by radical Islam such as Gaza.

Joseph Abdel Wahed
Moraga, Calif.

Warped Mirror takes up the theme