On May 12, Egypt announced that it will support South Africa’s case in the International Court of Justice (ICJ), where Israel is accused of “genocide” for defending its citizens against Hamas’s murderers and rapists who invaded Israeli communities on October 7, 2023. The announcement came in response to the ongoing Israeli military operation against Hamas terrorists and bases, especially in the city of Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip.
It is one of the worst massacres of protesters in modern history — and also one of the best documented. So why is nobody using the plentiful evidence available to bring Egyptian security forces to justice?
There’s plenty of evidence of what happened that day at Rabaa in Cairo: Eyewitness accounts, pictures, videos, even a documentary, “Memories of a Massacre,” that was released this month.
But despite all the evidence, those who were there say there has been no real justice to atone for the massacre that happened in Cairo’s Rabaa al-Adawiya square a decade ago.
On August 14, 2013, Egyptian security services took up positions around the square where an estimated 85,000 people were protesting the political situation in the country.
President Abdel Fatah El-Sisi of Egypt, one of America’s closest allies in the Middle East and a major recipient of U.S. aid, recently ordered subordinates to produce up to 40,000 rockets to be covertly shipped to Russia, according to a leaked U.S. intelligence document.
A portion of a top secret document, dated Feb. 17, summarizes purported conversations between Sisi and senior Egyptian military officials and also references plans to supply Russia with artillery rounds and gunpowder. In the document, Sisi instructs the officials to keep the production and shipment of the rockets secret “to avoid problems with the West.”
Islamic “justice” — which usually finds Muslims in the right, and non-Muslims in the wrong — or rather, tribal justice, has, once again, prevailed in Egypt.
Not only have the Muslim men who stripped naked and publicly abused an elderly Christian grandmother been acquitted in a court of law; now she is the one facing serious legal charges to compensate her tormentors.
As the nearly seven-year-old case of Soad Thabet, now 76, comes to its disgraceful close, it is important to recall the facts.
Is the banned Muslim Brotherhood organization trying to return to power in Egypt?
Many Egyptians believe that the Muslim Brotherhood was behind calls to Egyptians to hold nationwide protests during the UN Climate Change Conference (COP27), which is now in progress at the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Sharm al-Sheikh. The Islamists, they say, justified their call by arguing that the planned demonstrations were designed to protest human rights violations and bad economic conditions in Egypt.
Yet another Coptic Christian church has been set aflame; and yet more Christians have been killed in Egypt.
On Sunday, August 14, 2022, the Church of Abu Seifein—named after Saint Mercurius of Caesarea, revered by the Copts—caught fire as it was packed with over two hundred worshippers celebrating morning mass. At least 41 Christians—18 of whom were children—were either burned alive, killed by asphyxiation, or during the subsequent stampede. Along with the officiating priest, 5-year-old triplets, their mother, grandmother, and an aunt were among those killed.
What caused this church fire?
On Wednesday, authorities introduced measures they hope will incentivise Egyptian growers to sell more wheat: raising prices, setting quotas, and threatening farmers with prison if they do not deliver.
Three men who stripped and dragged an elderly Christian woman through an Egyptian village over rumours that her son was having an affair with a Muslim woman have been acquitted by a court.
Soad Thabet, now 74, was the victim of the sectarian attack in 2016 which saw her paraded naked by a mob of vigilantes in Al-Karm.
The attack was accompanied by the torching of Coptic Christian homes and villagers angrily calling for the religious minority to be expelled.
