[](/sites/default/files/uploads/2013/06/ch.jpg)Originally published by Gatestone Institute.

Attacks on Christian children, both boys and girls, are on the rise in Egypt.

Last week, a six-year-old Coptic Christian boy named Cyril Yusuf Sa‘ad was abducted and held for ransom. After his family paid off the Muslim kidnapper, Ahmed Abdel Moneim Abdel-Salam, he still killed the child and threw his body in the sewer of his house. In the words of the Arabic report, the boy’s “family is in tatters after paying 30,000 pounds to the abductor, who still killed the innocent child and threw his body into the toilet of his home, where the body, swollen and moldy, was exhumed.”

[](/sites/default/files/uploads/2013/06/agapegirgis0.jpg)Agape, 14, kidnapped, dressed in hijab, and beaten to convert to Islam.

A few weeks earlier, fourteen-year-old Sarah Abdelmalek was also abducted on her way to school. Later it was reported that “Sarah was smuggled across the borders to Libya [where Coptic Christians are being brutalized] with the help of the Interior Ministry.” The new Coptic pope said the kidnapping and forced conversion of Sarah is a “disgrace for the whole of Egypt,” adding “Can any family accept the kidnapping of their daughter and her forced conversion?”

And yet, in the last few years, some 550 cases of abduction, entrapment, rape, and forced conversion of Christian women have been documented in Egypt. Their rate has only increased after the “Arab Spring” and the empowerment of the Muslim Brotherhood—which has seen a concomitant rise is sexual harassment of all Egyptian women. Ironically, when President Morsi was in Germany last February, he was asked to address the issue of victimized Coptic girls, only to respond by saying the idea that they were being abducted and abused was merely a rumor.

But according to Coptic Solidarity President Adel Guindy: “Any objective and fair review of the cases of forced conversion of Coptic girls, which started four decades ago but dramatically escalated after January 2011 [when the “Arab Spring” reached Egypt], will show a clear pattern of events that point to well organized ‘hidden hands’ behind the process. Amazingly, the collusion of Egypt’s security as well as judiciary authorities—in defiance of the existing laws concerning minors—shows the extent of the scheme. It is part of a ‘war of attrition’ against the Copts in their own homeland.”

Thus, as with any number of recent indicators—including an unprecedented assault on their holiest site and the codification of legal measures to oppress them—the jihad on the children of Egypt’s Christian minority is yet another indicator that a rapidly Islamizing Egypt is hostile to its oldest and most indigenous inhabitants, the Copts, and, as happened to the Jews before them, an example in such societies of what awaits groups considered “other.”

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