Thank you very much for inviting us, for allowing us to present this presentation.
I am Nabih Abdelmalek. I am a Canadian of Egyptian Christian origin, known as the Copts, and I'm here to represent the Copts in Canada.
It's worth mentioning that the majority of the Christian immigrants are highly professional and have invested their lives in this land. It is not surprising that the highly educated immigrants choose Canada. By the way, I am a retired NRC scientist.
The purpose of this presentation is to attract your attention to the way Christian Copts of Egypt are persecuted and discriminated against. While the free world in Europe and North America is trying to create highly regarded avenues of discussion between different religions, races, nations, and ideologies to achieve well-respected rights for each human, we see the violation of human rights in Egypt as a growing trend under which Copts are suffering daily.
I brought with me 20 copies of three references. Reference number one says it's worth mentioning that the European Parliament ruled on January 18, 2008, that Egypt now is a country that commits numerous violations against the Copts in Egypt.
Persecution takes two forms, official and unofficial. I'm going to talk about the official one, then the unofficial one.
The official one. The Copt community represents 15% to 20% of the Egyptian population. That's the largest minority in the Middle East. That means there are between 10 million and 15 million in Egypt. This number is greater than some countries in the world, yet Copts' rights are denied. The Egyptian government trivializes this percentage and informs the international community that the percentage is less than 5%.
The second item in the Egyptian Constitution, reference B, states that Islam is the religion of the state. Arabic is its official language and the principal source of religious legislation is Islamic. This item in the Constitution did not exist before it was introduced by President Sadat some 40 years ago. Considering Islamic law as the only source of law and rules for day-to-day life is a violation of Christian ideologies and well-established secular systems around the world.
The Egyptian National Assembly consists of 444 members and includes only four or five Christians appointed by the president himself. It is embarrassing that zero members are there. The election process is greatly manipulated to exclude Christian candidates. Both military and police academies accept 1% Christian students enrolled in these academies, meaning that all officers in the security force, almost 99.99%, as well as in the army, are Muslims. There is no sympathy for the Christians at all.
Christian graduates from universities are not given equal opportunity in the job market and are openly told that, as such, higher positions in companies will not be assigned to Christians. A Christian must not be allowed to be a supervisor over a Muslim. This is sharia law, I'm sorry to say. Accordingly, Christians cannot get into managerial positions.
While the west is allowing minorities as well as the majority to obtain permits to build religious institutions, including mosques, temples, and churches, permits to build churches in Egypt are issued from the president. Imagine the Governor General spending her day saying, “Yes, we will build a church”, or “No, we won't build a church”.
Churches need 10 conditions to be built. Moreover, preparing and maintaining churches, again, is subject to approval from the president himself. Recently, kindly, in 1999, the government agreed to allow permits to repair churches. Any permit during the implementation goes through hurdles and takes years to complete.
If the head of a Christian family converts to Islam, all his minor children are automatically considered Muslims under sharia law. If such a person converts back to Christianity, his ID must show that he is an ex-Muslim, which subjects him to attacks. Interestingly enough, his children remain Muslims. They cannot convert. They remain Muslims.
Muslim converts to Christianity are subject to extermination--killing--by the fanatical groups. Thousands of them fill the Egyptian prisons, as was stated in front of the subcommittee yesterday and reported in the Ottawa Citizen today.
In the history books used in schools, the Ministry of Education has intentionally omitted the 700 years of Coptic history from the time Christianity entered Egypt to the Islamic invasion.
These are very quick and rapid points concerning official discrimination. I'm going to make just three points about unofficial discrimination.
On a regular basis, the Copts in Egypt are subjected to attacks from the media--TV and newspapers--ridiculing Christ and the Christian faith. Recently, a good number of books by prominent Muslim scholars have been published, again ridiculing the Christian faith.
At the end of Friday prayers, imams of the mosques say a prayer asking Allah to destroy the infidels--that's me--the Christians and the Jews, making widows of their wives and orphans of their children. The Egyptian government turns a blind eye and a deaf ear to all that. That's the unofficial discrimination.
Minor girls are regularly kidnapped, forced to convert to Islam, and given in marriage to Muslim men and/or raped. This was also reported in the Ottawa Citizen this morning. Families of these girls are badly treated when they complain to the security police and ask to have their girls back. They're told to shut up or else.
Recently, the monastery of Abu Fana was attacked by some desert people, 60 of them, with machine guns. They caused lots of destruction to the monastery. They kidnapped three imams for 12 hours and asked them to convert to Islam by saying, “There is no god but Allah, and Mohammed is the prophet”. When they refused, they were badly beaten and injured. They were released after 12 hours, following negotiations. The government hospital refused to admit them. They had to be treated privately by Christian doctors. That's in reference C. The list goes on and on.
Thank you very much.