Coptic Orthodox Church

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Another tragedy for Coptic Christians: Did the New York Times get the bigger picture?

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Another tragedy for Coptic Christians: Did the New York Times get the bigger picture?

Every now and then, your GetReligionistas receive emails from readers who are infuriated by the headline on a story, as opposed to the contents of the actual story. Why, they ask, do reporters write terrible headlines like that?

This provides another chance to let readers know a basic newsroom fact: Reporters rarely, if ever, write the headlines that go over their stories. They are written by copy editors.

(It’s possible that this fact has changed in the digital age. Maybe, as economic woes shrink news teams, reporters are asked to submit headlines. Young journalists can drop me notes telling me to get a clue.)

All of this is a set-up to discuss a double-decker New York Times headline that recently caused me to do a near spit take while drinking my morning cold-caffeine beverage. See if you can spot the offending phrase:

A Boom, a Fire and a Stampede: Dozens Die at a Coptic Church in Egypt

A blaze that killed at least 41 at a church in greater Cairo caused anguish among a religious minority that has long felt itself oppressed in Egypt

The key words, for this Orthodox believer, were these (with an added dose of italics — “a religious minority that has long felt itself oppressed.”

Whoa. The Copts feel that they are oppressed? This is a matter of emotions or their own opinions of what is happening to them?

In short, are there any experts who study global religious-freedom issues who do not accept, as a reality — demonstrated for centuries — that Coptic believers are persecuted or at least “oppressed” in Egypt? If readers question that statement, I would suggest a quick scan through this U.S. State Department report — “2021 Report on International Religious Freedom: Egypt.”

Now, the good news is that the actual Times report eventually offers quite a bit of information about the plight of Coptic believers. But first, here is the overture that helps set up the implied question in this tragedy: When is a church fire more than a simple church fire?


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Yo, New York Times editors: Why edit faith out of obit for the 'Mother Teresa' of Africa?

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Yo, New York Times editors: Why edit faith out of obit for the 'Mother Teresa' of Africa?

If you know anything about old-school journalism, then you have heard this mantra — “who, what, when, where, why and how.” During my nearly three decades as a journalism and mass media professor, I used to refer to these essential building blocks of hard-news reporting as the “W5H” formula.

Clearly, when you are dealing with the life story of a woman who sacrificed everything in order to help poor, suffering, abandoned children, the “why” factor in that equation is going to be especially important.

This brings us to two very different news reports about the death of one of modern Ethiopia’s most beloved figures, a woman who was frequently described as a living saint. Here is the New York Times headline: “Abebech Gobena, the ‘Mother Teresa’ of Africa, Dies at 85.” And here is the overture:

Abebech Gobena was returning from a pilgrimage to the holy site of Gishen Mariam, about 300 miles north of the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, when she saw the woman and her baby.

It was 1980, and Ms. Gobena was passing through an area recently stricken by drought and an accompanying famine. All along the road were bodies — many dead, some dying, some still able to sit up and ask for food.

“There were so many of these hungry people sprawled all over, you could not even walk,” she said in a 2010 interview with CNN. She handed out what little she had — a loaf of bread, a few liters of water.

The word “holy” in the lede is rather important, since we are talking about Coptic Orthodox monastery of Gishen Mariam.

According to ancient traditions, Gishan Mariam is the location of a piece of the cross on which Jesus was crucified. It was a gift from St. Helena, the mother of Constantine I, and came to Ethiopia as a gift from the Patriarch of Alexandria. A festival called “Meskel,” celebrating the finding of the cross, is a major event in Ethiopian life.

So the story begins with Gobena returning from a pilgrimage to this holy site, which almost certainly tells us something about this woman’s life. This is interesting, since the Times piece does not include any of the following words — “Christian,” “Orthodox,” “Coptic,” “faith” or “saint.”

Would it make a difference, for example, to know that the small amount of water Gobena was carrying, which he gave to those who were suffering, was holy water that she was carrying home from the shrine to be used for rites of blessing and healing?


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ISIS executes another Coptic Christian: Once again, this appears to be 'conservative' news

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ISIS executes another Coptic Christian: Once again, this appears to be 'conservative' news

Let’s spend a moment examining a basic (you would think) file produced by a Google News search for this name — “Nabil Habashi Salama.”

Who is this man in the news? Simply stated, he is the latest Coptic Orthodox Christian killed by ISIS.

Does his death matter? Alas, this appears to be a political question, one that shapes basic journalism decisions about what stories are worthy of mainstream coverage.

First things first: Here is the overture of a report about his death published at Christianity Today. The headline: “ISIS Executes Christian Businessman Kidnapped in Egypt’s Sinai.”

The Islamic State has claimed another Christian victim. And Egypt’s Coptic Orthodox Church has won another martyr.

“We are telling our kids that their grandfather is now a saint in the highest places of heaven,” stated Peter Salama of his 62-year-old father, Nabil Habashi Salama, executed by the ISIS affiliate in north Sinai.

“We are so joyful for him.”

The Salamas are known as one of the oldest Coptic families in Bir al-Abd on the Mediterranean coast of the Sinai Peninsula. Nabil was a jeweler, owning also mobile phone and clothing shops in the area. Peter said ISIS targeted his father for his share in building the city’s St. Mary Church.

In a newly released 13-minute propaganda video entitled The Makers of Slaughter (or Epic Battles), a militant quotes the Quran to demand the humiliation of Christians and their willing payment of jizya — a tax to ensure their protection.

Now, what is Christianity Today?


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Are conservative news media downplaying the brutal crackdown against Egyptian gays?

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Are conservative news media downplaying the brutal crackdown against Egyptian gays?

Depending upon your point of view — and in their purist iterations — demands for equal rights for gay people are either about justly extending social and legal parity, or a moral struggle to uphold traditional religious doctrine and cultural ideas about sexuality and gender.

Either way, homosexuality is one of the three biggest culture war issues dividing Americans, along with questions about abortion and the legal parameters of religious freedom.

It's also a prime issue internationally. Globalization has fostered the spread of contemporary Western liberal values. That, in turn, has prompted push back in some non-Western nations enmeshed in the global market’s whirlwind of change.

Some of the more recent stories referencing the issue have come out of Egypt, where homosexuality, while not explicitly outlawed, is harshly condemned by the majority Muslim and minority Coptic Christian religious establishments.

Every so often Egypt’s authoritarian government, led by President Abdel Fatah al-Sissi, appears to use the issue as a political cudgel to bolster support among Muslim and Christian traditionalists, who together comprise the vast majority of the nation’s population.

Click here for a recent Washington Post piece summing up the situation.

The story begins thusly:

CAIRO -- A crackdown on gay people in Egypt intensified in recent days as security forces raided cafes in downtown Cairo and courts delivered harsh prison sentences, further driving the nation’s LGBT community underground.


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New era of Coptic martyrs: RNS dives into big questions about a deadly serious subject

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Lots of news stories -- big ones and everyday ones -- are haunted by religious themes (and even factual material) that mainstream reporters skate right past. Here at GetReligion, we call these religion-shaped holes in stories "ghosts."

There are also news stories that, to be blunt, are haunted by questions and issues that can only be described in terms of theology, often requiring a willingness to dig into centuries of history and debates of a complex or even mysterious nature.

I sincerely appreciate attempts to write these theologically driven stories, because I know that they are (a) hard to get right, (b) hard to get approved by editors and (c) hard to write in words that work in a daily newspaper (think accuracy plus readability).

So I really want to cheer for a Religion News Service feature that came out with this headline: "Unrelenting killing of Coptic Christians intensifies debate over martyrdom."

This is a story about a very complex issue: Is there a point at which praising Christian believers who are killed by the Islamic State turns into a bad thing, when crying "martyrdom" begins to blur the lines between terrorism and the kinds of heroic witness honored by the church through the ages?

Before I mention my one question about this fine story, let's look at some crucial summary material near the top:

The 2,000-year-old Coptic Church of Egypt has a long tradition of hallowing those who died affirming their faith in the face of violence. But the group that calls itself the Islamic State has launched waves of attacks on the Coptic community in recent years -- claiming at least 70 lives and wounding scores of others -- an unrelenting assault that has opened a debate in the community about martyrdom.
The issue has been most recently punctuated by the deadly knifing of a Coptic priest in a poor Cairo neighborhood Thursday (Oct. 12). A suspect was arrested but his motive is still unknown.
Recently, another Coptic priest -- the well-known Rev. Boules George from the well-heeled Cairo suburb of Heliopolis -- took to the television airwaves to “thank” the Islamic State terrorists who launched the Palm Sunday church bombings that claimed 45 lives, saying they provided “a rocket” that delivered victims straight to heaven.

Here is the crucial question: Is being blown up by a bomb, or killed in random violence, truly an act of "witness" to the Christian faith delivered to the apostles?


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Twisting Ramadan: Some big newsrooms failed to note timing of attack on Copts in Egypt (updated)

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What can we say? How long must we sing this song?

Once again there has been another attack in Egypt that has left scores of Coptic Christians dead and wounded. Currently, the death toll is at 26 or 28, depending on the source of the information.

Once again there are the same basic themes to cover. The ancient Copts -- the vast majority are part of Coptic Orthodoxy -- make up about 10 percent of the population of Egypt. They are the largest body of Christian believers left in the Middle East, part of a religious tradition that emerged in the time of the first disciples of Jesus.

Once again, Egyptian officials have renewed their vows to help protect the Copts. Once again, reporters tried to find a way to list all of the recent terrorist attacks on the Copts -- a list so long that it threatens to dominate basic news reports.

So what now? Why now? Here is the top of the Reuters report -- circulated by Religion News Service, as well -- which caught my attention because of its early focus on what may, tragically, be a crucial fact.

In this case, the "when" and the "why" factors in that old journalism formula -- "who," "what," "when," "where," "why" and "how" -- may be one in the same. Read carefully.

CAIRO (Reuters) -- Gunmen attacked a group of Coptic Christians traveling to a monastery in southern Egypt on Friday, killing 28 people and wounding 25 others, and many children were among the victims, Health Ministry officials said.
Eyewitnesses said masked men opened fire after stopping the Christians, who were traveling in a bus and other vehicles. Local television channels showed a bus apparently raked by gunfire and smeared with blood. Clothes and shoes could be seen lying in and around the bus.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack, which came on the eve of the holy month of Ramadan. It followed a series of church bombings claimed by Islamic State.


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Powerful, important read: Wall Street Journal on the 'epochal shift' of Christians from the Middle East

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I'm no expert on Christians in the Middle East, but this strikes me as a powerful, important read.

It's an in-depth report from the Wall Street Journal on the "epochal shift" of Christians from the Middle East.

TANTA, Egypt — Like the Jews before them, Christians are fleeing the Middle East, emptying what was once one of the world’s most-diverse regions of its ancient religions.
They’re being driven away not only by Islamic State, but by governments the U.S. counts as allies in the fight against extremism.
When suicide bomb attacks ripped through two separate Palm Sunday services in Egypt last month, parishioners responded with rage at Islamic State, which claimed the blasts, and at Egyptian state security.
Government forces assigned to the Mar Girgis church in Tanta, north of Cairo, neglected to fix a faulty metal detector at the entrance after church guards found a bomb on the grounds just a week before. The double bombing killed at least 45 people, and came despite promises from the Egyptian government to protect its Christian minority.

This story is packed with hard data and gripping detail such as this:

In northern Iraq, blue and white charter buses crisscross neighborhoods of recently liberated Mosul, returning Muslim families displaced by Islamic State. They drive through Christian areas without stopping. For the first time in nearly two millennia, Iraq’s second-largest city, once a melting pot of ancient religions, lacks a Christian population to speak of.
The Al-Aswad family, a clan of masons who built the city’s houses, churches and mosques and trace their lineage back to the 19th century, vow never to return. They’ve opted to live in the rat-infested refugee camps of Erbil in northern Iraq, where they await updates on their asylum application to Australia.
A Christian charity has given them a small apartment until June, at which point they will have to return to the refugee camps to live in a converted cargo shipping container.
“We call it the cemetery,” said Raghd Al-Aswad, describing how the cargo containers are covered with dark blue tarps to protect against the rain. “It looks like dead bodies stacked side by side with a giant hospital sheet on top of them.”


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Stopping short of Pascha: The New York Times did cover the quiet courage of the Copts

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I guess the big news this Easter is that there isn't any really big news at Easter. Yet.

Obviously, there was big news during Holy Week -- as in the lockdown in Egypt and in other Christian communities across the Middle East in the trembling aftermath of the hellish Palm Sunday bombings. That led to this somber New York Times feature that ran with the headline, "After Church Bombings, Egyptian Christians Are Resigned but Resolute."

It's a fine feature, one that -- as it must -- focuses on the political framework that surrounds the latest wave of persecution of Coptic Christians. After all, this is a tense land in which a near totalitarian Egyptian government that helps lock Christians in their place is also the only force strong enough to weakly protect them from the Islamic State and other truly radicalized forms of Islam.

Orthodox Christians who read this piece may not make it to the end, growing tired of the politics and violence. Where is the ultimate message of Pascha? Where are the voices of those who still believe, who continue to keep the faith despite all the suffering? Aren't they part of the story?

They are. And that theme emerges at the end of the piece -- so wait for it.

The veneration of Christian martyrs is felt most keenly at the monastery of St. Mina, an hour’s drive from Alexandria. There, barren desert has been transformed into a lush compound of gardens and monastic cells around a soaring cathedral. The seven Christians killed in last Sunday’s bombing were taken there for entombment in a martyr’s church under construction for the 2011 bombing’s 23 victims.
“The new martyrs will be buried beside the old ones,” Bishop Kyrillos Ava Mina, leader of the monastery, said as he walked around the site, weaving through a maze of wooden beams. “It is a gift for them to be buried here.” ... 
Many Coptic clerics are careful of engaging in public debate. Asked what was driving the Islamic State attacks, the monastery’s spokesman, Father Elijah Ava Mina, chuckled dryly. “I don’t know,” he said. “Ask them.”


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Do journalists know the details? Egypt's ancient Coptic community is used to being attacked

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Any list of the embattled Christian communities in the Middle East would start with the Coptic Orthodox Church in Egypt and the Eastern Orthodox Patriarchate that is now based in Damascus.

It's valid to use the term "Orthodox" when describing those ancient churches, because that is part of their names. However, it is also important for reporters and editors to know that there are other small, but important, Christian communities in both Egypt and Syria, as well as in other lands in the region.

For example, when talking about Christians in Egypt, journalists often refer to all of them simply as "Copts." This is accurate, because the term "Coptic" can also be used to describe the entire ethnic group. So while the Coptic Orthodox are the largest flock, there are also Catholic Copts and various kinds of Protestant Copts.

So believers in all kinds of churches prayed with a great urgency on Palm Sunday when they heard about the latest deadly bombings targeting Christians in Egypt. Once again, the Islamic State is claiming responsibility. Obviously, this is going to be an unusually tense Holy Week and Pascha (the Orthodox term for Easter) in Egypt, Syria and across the Middle East.

The mainstream coverage of the latest attacks was extensive. However, in a few cases these stories were also somewhat confusing, in part because reporters and editors did not seem to realize that it was not enough to simply tell readers that "Copts" were targeted. To be blunt: Why not use the full names of the people and churches that were attacked? Why not be specific? Why minimize or completely avoid the use of the word "Orthodox"?

You can see exactly what I am talking about in the main Los Angeles Times story -- "Egypt plunged into state of emergency as Palm Sunday church bombings kill at least 44" -- which does not use the term "Orthodox" a single time. Here is the rather political overture:


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