Muslims near Luxor gun-down 7 innocent Coptic Christmas church-goers; Muslim pogrom destroyed 80% of local Coptic businesses & pharmacies

(Jihad Watch)  Three men in a car sprayed automatic gunfire into a crowd of churchgoers in southern Egyptian as they left a midnight Mass for Coptic Christmas, killing at least seven people in a drive-by shooting, the church bishop and security officials said.
The attack took place in the town of Nag Hamadi in Qena province, about 40 miles from the famous ancient ruins of Luxor. A local security official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media, confirmed that seven were dead and three seriously wounded.

Bishop Kirollos of the Nag Hamadi Diocese told The Associated Press six male churchgoers and one security guard were killed. He said he had left St. John's church just minutes before the attack.

"It is all religious now. This is a religious war about how they (Muslims) can finish off the Christians in Egypt," he said. 

Hugh Fitzgerald comments

The Copts are the unswerving, the descendants of the original Egyptians who did not, when the Arabs came, give up and accept Islam. Enduring the humiliation, degradation, and permanent physical insecurity of the dhimmi status, many Copts not unsurprisingly fell away, gave up, accepted Islam, took Arab names and thought of themselves no longer as Copts but as Arabs. They forgot their own past. But that was not enough for some Muslims, and there were episodes of mass forced conversions intermittently over the past thousand years.

In November, an unidentified man raped a Muslim 12-year old Qena province girl.  She told police that she was only certain that her attacker wore a black jacket, nothing beyond. To preserve the girl's honor (in the face of Muslim law disregarding a woman's testimony against a Muslim men) it is alleged, a libel was concocted with a Coptic Christian perpetrator.

Reports estimate that 10 pharmacies and 55 shops and businesses in Farshoot and several nearby villages were vandalized, torched or damaged during the few days of Muslim, anti-Copt riots which began on Nov. 21. In Farshoot alone, about 80 percent of Coptic businesses were destroyed, which translates to about over $1 million in damages.

Muslims rationalized the massacre as revenge against Coptics for the rumoured rapist's ethnicity.