Two big-picture points suggest themselves about the situation facing Christians in Egypt, which to greater or lesser degrees is shared across most of the Middle East.

First, Christians are not the only one suffering.

Right now Egypt’s most embattled minority group is arguably the Muslim Brotherhood, the conservative Islamic movement whose members are subject to arrest, torture, and extra-judicial execution by security services. Other minorities, such as Egypt’s small Shi’a Muslim population, also experience hardships, as do many women, gays, free-speech activists, and other constituencies.

The day before we left, the country’s top prosecutor, a Muslim, was killed in a car bomb attack, presumably by Islamists upset at the crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood.

Second, Christians in Egypt insist their aim is not special privilege but equality as citizens. They see themselves as fully Egyptian, not the “other”, and their suffering as part and parcel of the broader difficulties facing the entire nation under a regime which, to put it charitably, has a checkered history vis-à-vis human rights.

Read the article “Today, the Holy Family Would Run Away From Egypt” on cruxnow.com.