Pope Francis will be going to Egypt at Eastertide, but for the Christians of that country it will still be one long Good Friday. The Copts – as most of the country’s Christians are known – are still reeling from the mass murder of nearly 50 of their number by suicide bombers during Palm Sunday liturgies. They know that more is to come: they have been designated by the so-called Islamic State terrorists as “our favourite prey”.
The term is a revealing one. Those who misguidedly present terrorists as victims of social exclusion or poverty ignore the murderers’ own vision of themselves as a superior species who carnivorously kill the vulnerable. This was not an attack by the poor against the rich or an underclass against its rulers, but rather the opposite. There are some very wealthy Copts but the majority are poor and defenceless.
