Coptic Christians in Egypt were targeted in a series of attacks throughout the country last week, according to Reuters. More than a dozen shops were burned in addition to one church front. In a note of irony, Reuters reporter Aziz El-Kaissouni claims, “Christians account for up to 10 percent of the population of Egypt and relations between them and the Muslim majority are usually harmonious.” But the fact is that Christians in Egypt are considered sub-citizens in their own country and live in a state of constant fear from violence inspired by the Muslim Brotherhood and other extremist Islamic groups, and an official government policy of indifference towards acts of religious-inspired (Muslim) terror.

Elsewhere in the Middle East this weekend, a Roman Catholic friar, Fr. Adriano Franchini, was stabbed in Izmir, Turkey, AsiaNews reports. Christians in Turkey are on edge ever since the brutal slaying of Fr. Andrea Santoro while he was conducting services in his church in Trabzon last year. The Armenian Evangelical Christian editor of a Turkish newspaper, Hrant Dink, was assassinated on the streets of Istanbul a few months later, followed by the torture and murder of three Protestant bible publishers in Malatya last April. Details have emerged in the ongoing trial of the accused suspects in the Malatya massacre that implicate local Turkish officials in the slayings.