BEIRUT: Maronite Cardinal Beshara Rai called Saturday for the release of two Syrian bishops who were abducted earlier this week.  “I urge …

President Michel Suleiman ordered on Monday stronger measures to preserve security and stability in northern Lebanon a day after three men were …

CAIRO, EGYPT (Catholic Online) - The images are compelling. They clearly show Egyptian police officers participating in the attack on the Coptic cathedral in Cairo. This is thuggish behavior and unbecoming of a civilized police force.  The images show Egyptian police officers standing by as protesters fire guns, wield machetes, and throw stones at Christians. The Muslims were attacking a Coptic funeral who were mourning the death of another who was killed in a previous clash with Muslims.  Another image shows officers standing by as a protester burns a Holy Bible. What would happen if the roles were reversed?

The government's response has been embarrassingly lukewarm at best. Four Copts were arrested. Christians in Egypt are facing increasingly hostile discrimination and the government is not only failing in its obligation to protect them, it seems to be helping militant Muslims attack them.
Unfortunately, this is typical behavior for militant Muslims and those than enable them. These Muslims are not content with diversity and instead insist on destroying any institution that is not their own. Ever since a new, supposedly democratic government was formed in Egypt, the Muslims have taken advantage of every opportunity to discriminate against and suppress Coptic Christians.  The participation of the police in the religious violence does much to implicate the government in crimes against Christians. It is also quite revealing that four Christian mourners were arrested while the Muslim attackers who initiated the violence were aided by police.

EARLIER this year Iran’s authorities arrested a score of men who, in separate incidents, claimed to be the Mahdi, a sacred figure of Shia Islam, who was “hidden” by God just over a millennium ago and will return some time to conquer evil on earth.

A website based in Qom, Iran’s holiest city, deemed the men “deviants”, “fortune-tellers” and “petty criminals”, who were exploiting credulous Iranians for alms during the Persian new-year holiday, which fell in mid-March.

Many of the fake messiahs were picked up by security men in the courtyard to the mosque in Jamkaran, a village near Qom, whose reputation as the place of the awaited Mahdi’s advent has been popularised nationwide by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. When he took office in 2005 he gave the mosque $10m.

Iran’s economic doldrums may have helped to cause this surge in people claiming to be mankind’s saviour—and in women saying they were the Mahdi’s wife. “In an open atmosphere where people could criticise the government they would not believe these people,” says an ex-seminarian in Tehran, the capital, noting that most Iranians still get all of their news from state television and state-owned or -sanctioned newspapers.

Last year a seminary expert, Mehdi Ghafari, said that more than 3,000 fake Mahdis were in prison. Mahdi-complexes are common, says a Tehran psychiatrist. “Every month we get someone coming in, convinced he is the Mahdi,” she says. “Once a man was saying such outrageous things and talking about himself in the third person that I couldn’t help laughing. He got angry and told me I had ‘bad hijab’ and was disrespecting the ‘Imam of Time’,” as the Mahdi is known.