Following the drive-by shootings in Nag Hammadi on Tuesday night, Coptic Christians marked their Christmas Day by going on the rampage yesterday. Here is the New York Times' account.

Once again, though, it is the Emirates-based paper, The National, which has the most perceptive reporting in English. Pointing out that "the past two years have seen a noticeable increase in hate crimes against Egypt’s Coptic Christian minority", it quotes Mounir Megahed, director of the non-governmental organisation, Egyptians Against Religious Discrimination:

“I think that Egyptian society in general, and particularly in these places in Upper Egypt, is becoming more intolerant ... The state is soft in tackling the issue. They do not put people who commit these crimes to trial.”

These – government inaction against the perpetrators of violence and allowing a culture of intolerance to fester – are the two key points.

The authorities are reluctant to prosecute, presumably for fear of stirring up more trouble. This is coupled with an atmosphere of complacency and denial among officialdom.

“It’s something that happens between people, especially in communities with a low standard of culture or education like Upper Egypt," Salem Abdel Gelil, deputy minister for preaching at Egypt’s ministry of awqaf, tells The National.

Meanwhile Fawzi Zifzaf, the former head of the committee on religious dialogue at al-Azhar University, says: “Any clashes between Muslims and Christians [are] not a general clash at a high level. They are individual incidents. Revenge in Upper Egypt is a tradition. It’s a bad tradition, but it’s there.”

Both men also blame the media for "a tendency to exaggerate the motives, casting feuding families as crusading religious zealots".

Posted by Brian Whitaker, 8 January 2010.