FrontPage Magazine editor Jamie Glazov interviews Raymond Ibrahim.
FrontPage Interview's guest today is Raymond Ibrahim, an Islam expert and author of The Al Qaeda Reader. A Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center and Associate Fellow at the Middle East Forum, he writes frequently on all things Islamic, including Muslim persecution of Christians.
On Wednesday, December 7, Raymond testified before the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission in the House of Representatives, in a hearing presented by Reps. Frank Wolfand James McDermott, titled "Under Threat: The Worsening Plight of Egypt's Coptic Christians."
FP: Welcome Raymond. Good tointerview you again.
Ibrahim: Thank you, Jamie; happy to be back.
FP: The suffering of the Christian Copts of Egypt is getting worse, so it's a great thing you were asked to testify at that hearing—and it's a positive thing that they even had a hearing. For starters, while we know of your professional credentials concerning Islam, can you tell us a bit about your Coptic ancestry?
Ibrahim: Sure. Though I was born and raised in the U.S., my parents were both Copts who emigrated from Egypt in the late 1960s. According to them, after Egypt's 1952 revolution, they knew it was time to get going—knew that things would get progressively worse for Christians. And so they have. I believe they understood this, not because they were especially prescient, but rather because what is understood immediately and instinctively on the ground (in Egypt), often take decades to become intelligible thousands of miles away (in the West).
In fact, it's interesting for me to recall, in retrospect, how the things I and others constantly write about in order to get the West to understand Islam, Copts know instinctively—simply because they experience in reality what we know in theory. This disconnect is why a group like the Muslim Brotherhood, the mere mention of which for decades would make Coptic hair stand on end, is now touted as a "largely secular" group by the current U.S administration, which has been complacent, if not complicit, in the Brotherhood's rise to power. Read the rest on:
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