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Egypt's Ministry of Endowments just announced a new record: in the last six months, yet another 964 mosques were opened, costing Egypt more than 21 billion pounds since 2014.
Today there more than 150,000 mosques in Egypt. The total number of prayer halls is easily tenfold that number—meaning almost 1.5 million.
The total number of churches and monasteries for all Christian denominations in Egypt, including those “licensed” since the issuance of the 2016 Law for Building and Restoring Churches, is currently estimated to be about 5800.
There is one mosque or prayer hall for every 40 or so Muslims, but only one church or monastery for every 2,400 Christians.
That’s a 1:60 ratio of blatant discrimination.
Moreover, 22 billion Egyptian pounds are annually paid to Al Azhar, which has a parallel educational system, or madrasa, from KG to university, with over 2.8 million pupils and students.)
Conversely, not only does Egypt make it immensely hard for Christians to open or maintain churches, but the government does not contribute a single penny to their survival. Churches are even required to pay their utility bills, which no mosque in Egypt does, as the government happily picks up their bill.
- Raymond Ibrahim
The history of the welfare state is the history of the state's savage war of aggrandizement and seizure of authority against civil society. Whether in Germany, in the United Kingdom, in Australia, in Canada, in Scandinavia, or in the United States, the coercive state systematically destroyed the "voluntary sector" of civil society and those intermediary institutions that protected the individual from the direct contact and control by the state [much as the Church did for nearly all of the previous two millennia]. Within the short space of two or three decades the protective sphere covered by workingmen's social and other fraternal duties had been stripped to nothing more than drinking associations, with all other matters taken over by the state apparatus. Henceforth, the workingman and much of the middle class reported directly to the bureaucracy of the state's intrusive regime. Everything they did was in some way or another regulated, regimented and overseen by the state. The dire effects ...
“The secret of politics? Make a good treaty with Russia.”
-- Otto von Bismarck.
Zelenskyy can insult the President to his face in the Oval Office, and all Trump does is keep inviting him back. Relying on false intel about Russian casualties, the Russian economy, and the Russian polity, Trump keeps trying self-defeating, self-sabotaging escalatory tactics with Russia, playing Russian roulette but mistaking it for American poker.
Trump threatens 500% sanctions on Russian-oil purchasing nations today, threatens long-range missiles into Moscow that Russia could think are nuclear-armed, and sends arms to Ukraine laundered through NATO. All this does is enrage the Russian populace and get us closer to triggering a world war between two nuclear powers. As a Russian once advised me: “we’d rather eat dirt than surrender.” Russian history proves it, whether in dealing with the Mongols, Napoleon or the Nazis. Just revisit the history of how the people of St. Petersburg held out during what they called The Great War.
At the same time, Russia holds escalatory dominance...
