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Hoisting homemade wooden crosses and gruesome photographs of bodies they said were crushed by tanks, hundreds of Coptic Christians rallied in front of the White House Wednesday to protest rising violence against minority Christians in Egypt and demand that the Obama administration put pressure on Cairo to protect their rights.The demonstrators, mostly Egyptian immigrants who came in buses from as far as New York and Chicago, included black-robed Coptic orthodox priests and families who had lost relatives to recent violence in Egypt, including the New Year's Eve bombing of a church and a bloody clash Oct. 9 between protesters and army forces in Cairo that left 27 people dead.
In September, Copts in the United States worried that Islamic intolerance would rise in their homeland and that they would be viewed with suspicion in their adopted land.
Religious tensions in Egypt, where Christians are a small but influential minority
| once. now, only if garbage collectors are influential these days |
Many Christians in the Egyptian-American community, a largely middle-class group scattered across a dozen states, have expressed concern that radical Islamist groups are increasingly dominating the post-revolutionary scene and seek to turn Egypt into a Sunni theocracy. Some placards at the rally Wednesday warned of an "Islamic jihad" against Christians.
The demonstrators also expressed fears that the Egyptian army, a longtime bulwark of Mubarak's power, is becoming a repressive force against Christians. Many held up bloody photos of crushed torsos and limbs, which they said had been deliberately run over by tanks on Oct. 9.
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