This has nothing to do with Jewish/Zionist conspiracy but all to do with people with backward mentality following a Faith 'Islam' to the extreme!!!

This has nothing to do with Jewish/Zionist conspiracy but all to do with people with backward mentality following a Faith 'Islam' to the extreme and a government who intend to use all measures in its capacity to hold to power!!  . The Church massacre in Egypt was committed by the radical Muslim brothers while the Egyptian government who may have a dark secret role in all this watch in silence and rejoice as the spot light turns away from their corrupted, and murderous government. This is nothing new to the Arab and Muslim world; Algeria corrupted military regime committed atrocities on their own people during the Algeria civil (1983-2009) and blamed them on the radical terrorist groups to gain the upper hand in the international scene and gains valuable sympathy from world leaders.

Algiers, 09/02/01 - A book just published in France by a former Algerian army officer has rocked the Algerian establishment and horrified public opinion with its detailed accounts of atrocities planned and executed by special military units and the intelligence services in their fight against Islamic guerrillas.

"La Sale Guerre" (the dirty war) by Habib Souaïdia is the latest in a string of publications that implicate government forces in the massacres of innocent civilians hitherto officially ascribed to Islamic guerrillas.

What is different about this book is that the author himself took part in atrocities and covert operations, supplying names, dates, and places.

Souaïdia began active service as part of a mobile unit in central Algeria. In March 1993 he was posted to barracks in Lakdharia, 80 kilometres east of Algiers. It was an Islamic guerrilla stronghold in the early 1990s and he was to spend 18 months there - pretty much the rest of his short military career in the field.

His experiences and eye-witness descriptions of those 18 months make up the harrowing core of the book.

It was no time at all before he came face to face with the dirty war at Lakhdaria. On orders from two high-ranking officers, one of whom was a general, he and his men escorted a detachment of commandos and secret service agents (from the notorious DRS, the Intelligence and Security Department. They were on a mission to the village of Ez-Zaatria in Mitidja Plain, a region infested by Islamic guerrillas in the early 1990s.

There they massacred 12 villagers they suspected of Islamist sympathies. The press the next day ran headlines denouncing a terrorist attack on the village of Ez-Zaatria.

"Habtouh lel-oued"

Souaïdia seeks to denounce the methods used in the fight against Islamist terrorists, possibly to absolve himself of the bloodshed in which he was directly involved.

He harks back to a phrase he often heard barked out: "Habtouh lel-oued!" Its literal meaning was "down to river", but it was in fact an order that signified only one thing: "execute the prisoners".

It was an order that was to escalate sickeningly. At a debrief following a military operation in 1993 Souaida received the order "to exterminate anyone who supports the Islamists, not just terrorists".

He began to wonder whether they were ultimately heading for "the extermination of the three million people who voted FIS in the December 1991 ballot". By then he was already killing innocent civilians when out on patrol. He remembers, for example, two villagers he shot on the edge of a forest. They were on their wayhome but took fright and ran.

He also describes how he obeyed orders from his superiors. "If we closed with terrorists, we used to cut off the heads of the ones we shot and bring them back. We'd leave the bodies to scavengersŠ but if there quite a few tangos [terrorists] we wouldn't bother with their heads, we'd just slice off their ears."

Burned alive

It was only after he came to Lakhdaria that Habib Souaïdia took part in his first large-scale military operations and began to ask himself questions. "Confusion set in: who was really doing the killing?" he writes, before going on to assert that "the army was also killing indiscriminately to smear the Islamist terrorists".

Although the army combated the Islamists mercilessly, they so often gained the upper hand that towards the end of 1993 "we received orders to leave our RPG 7 bazookas at base in case they fell into the hands of terrorists".

Back at the barracks, a converted colonial house, he saw DRS agents torturing a man with electric shocks. That was in January 1994 and he supplies the names of the tortures.

The following month he found out that DRS agents had posed as terrorists to abduct and assassinate the legally elected FIS mayor of Lakhdaria. He states that in 27 months of active service he witnessed some 15 assassinations.

He saw a father and his 15-year old son tortured then burned alive in front of the whole barracks because they were suspected of informing the Islamists. "It was absolute insanity. On one side, terrorists posed as members of the security forces and on the side troops dressed up as Islamic guerrillas to carry out atrocities that would be blamed on the terrorists."

By the end of 1994 the army was sustaining casualties by the dozen throughout the mountainous regions to the east of Lakhdaria.

It responded by setting on fire huge swathes of forestland around Lakhdaria and in Kabylia because "it was impossible to spot anything from helicopterŠ Trees hundreds of years old went up in smoke. It was an ecological disaster that must also have killed local people."

Civilians bombed

In March 1995 the army "deployed impressive weaponry as it sealed off the mountain guerrilla bases around the town Aïn-Defla, 120 kilometres south-west of AlgiersŠ For a whole week planes and MI 18 and BM 21 helicopters, known as Stalin's Organ Pipes, bombed the mountains."

Villages, hamlets and remote dwellings were all hit, claiming a thousand lives, hundreds of whom were civilians. "The press naturally did not breathe a word about the civilian casualties. It considered all the dead were terrorists."

The army, too, considered everyone a terrorist, including shepherds whom it regularly killed. "These people [shepherds] inform terrorists about army movements," writes Habib Souaïdia, quoting Colonel Hamana, killed in action in 1995.

Souaïdia's military career was cut short when in 1995 he was convicted - falsely, he claims - of theft and sentenced to four years in prison

On release he immediately sought to flee Algeria despite close the close surveillance kept on him. He eventually made it to Paris and in an interview to Le Monde in June 2000, he stated he was prepared to speak out.

In "La Sale Guerre" he does just that. And although much of the book is taken up with assessment in hindsight of the bloody turmoil, he names killers, torturers and officers behind reprisal raids in which civilians were butchered. It is a measure of his determination.

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"La Sale Guerre" (the dirty war) by Habib Souaïdia
First draft co-authored by Mohamed Sifaoui
Afterword by Ferdinando Imposimato
Published by La Découverte, Paris, 2001

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About Habib Souaïdia

Habib Souaïdia was born in 1969 in Tébessa in eastern Algeria. In 1985 he joined the Military Cadet School where he passed his baccalaureate. At the age of 20 he entered the Military Academy of Cherchell and graduated as officer in July 1992. He then enrolled to train as a paratrooper at a specialised academy in Biskra. He was to complete only five months of his course. At the age of 24 he was posted to Algiers to begin active service in the army's counter-insurgency struggle. In 1993 he was moved to Lakhdaria and continued to serve in the fight against Islamic terrorists until he was convicted of theft and sentenced to four years behind bars at the military prison of Blida. Released in June 1999, he fled Algeria in April 2000 for France where he was granted political asylum.

Mohamed Sifaoui
Algerian journalist, granted asylum in France in 1999.

Ferdinando Imposito
Celebrated Italian anti-Mafia magistrate. Since 1986 he has specialised in corruption and human rights violations. Supports the setting up of the International Criminal Court.

Renaud Sarda

Prejudices against Egypt's Copts stoke tensions

AP – Egyptian Muslim woman show solidarity logos of Islam
 and Christianity during a march Wednesday Jan. …

CAIRO – Ahmed Ibrahim says his best buddies are Christian, something he says raises the ire of some of his fellow Egyptian Muslim friends, who often counsel him against being so close to non-Muslims.

"They cite Quranic verses that say Christians are enemies of Muslims but never mention many other verses that speak positively of Christians," lamented the 29-year-old physician. "My wife tells me that my Christian friends are good to me only because they want to improve their image or gain popularity."

"Well, so what? They are still good to me."

In the wake of a shocking New Year's suicide bombing of an Egyptian church, the government is heavily touting national unity. But on the ground, personal prejudices between members of Egypt's two faiths have always run deep and wide, often fueled inadvertently or not by government policies.

Christians, believed to make up about 10 percent of Egypt's estimated 80 million people, say the attitudes create an atmosphere where violence against their community is overlooked, tolerated or explained away. Saturday's bombing, which killed 21 and wounded nearly 100 at a midnight Mass, was the deadliest attack on them in years, but there are regular lower-level instances of violence, which authorities often attribute to personal disputes or mentally ill individuals, not religious hatreds.

Many in the Coptic community — the vast majority of Egypt's Christians — fear new attacks when the faithful gather at churches the next two nights for Masses ahead of Orthodox Christmas on Friday. Egyptian authorities deployed extra security forces, backed by explosives experts, around many churches.

In a sign of some Muslims seeking to bridge the divide, Egyptian activists have called on Muslims to form human shields in front of the churches during Christmas Eve services. On Wednesday, Muslims gathered at the Islamic Al-Azhar University in a rally of solidarity with Copts.

The government has also hauled the spiritual leaders of the two communities before the media for handshakes and symbolic calls for unity. That traditional response rings hollow for many Copts, who say the state only reinforces a second-class status for their community with policies like restrictions on building churches or the informal ban on Christians assuming certain senior government jobs.

Even the Coptic Church's leader, Pope Shenouda III, a stalwart government supporter, seemed to express impatience with the ubiquitous claims of "national unity," saying in a TV interview after the attack that "it should mean unity in action, thought and feelings. Only then can it be truly national unity."

The bloody scenes of bodies in the street from Saturday's attack, which stunned Muslims and Christians alike, did bring soul-searching in some quarters.

Mustafa Fathy, who grew up in Cairo's poor Boulaq el-Dakrour neighborhood, recounted in a Facebook posting the anti-Christian stereotypes he was taught as a child: Christians don't smell good, they engage in sexual acts in churches, where they also hide weapons to use against Muslims when their numbers grow.

"I apologize to every Christian I grew up with in a society that taught me in my young years a great deal of wrong things about Christians, their faith and lifestyle," Fathy wrote. "I apologize to the Christians who lived on my street but I never played with because my family told me not to."

Common stereotypes among Egypt's Muslims about their Christian countrymen vary greatly from the innocuous, ridiculous and superstitious to the malicious and harmful.

Some may have their genesis in the baffling mystery Muslim schoolchildren are posed with at the age of five or six when their Christian classmates are pulled out of class to take their "Christian religion lesson" elsewhere, out of their sight and earshot.

With a room full of exclusively Muslim children, critics say, teachers with militant ideologies enjoy a free rein to indoctrinate the pupils.

That illustrates an irony of government policy: When it does try to deal with each side equally — for example, by giving each faith's children lessons in their own religion — it reinforces their separation.

"Neither side has a clear and correct idea of what the other is really about," said Nabil Abdel-Fattah, a senior researcher at the state-sponsored Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies. "What they mostly have is misperceptions that reflect widespread ignorance."

Christian analyst Sameh Fawzi says the government focuses on fighting violent Islamic extremists and has introduced changes in school textbooks on human rights and religious moderation.

But it "fails to introduce direct and courageous policies that reinforce the notion of citizenship and encourage a culture of tolerance," he said.

The deepening Muslim conservativism among Egyptians has exacerbated prejudices, with some Muslims contending Egypt is by definition an Islamic nation where Christians should recognize their minority status. The corollary of that attitude is that any complaint by Christians is inflated into an attempt to take over the country.

Rumors run about Christians secretly meeting in churches to plot lure Muslims with cash to convert or to push Muslim rivals out of business. Some view Christian women as morally loose, bent on corrupting Muslim men. Hard-line clerics have accused Christians of hoarding weapons for a violent overthrow of Muslims. One of the most damaging ideas propagated is that Christians conspire with the West against their own country.

Current tough economic times also play a role. One common stereotype runs that Christians are all rich and greedy and that the government gives privileges to Christian businessmen for fear of criticism from the U.S. and the West. One of Egypt's richest men is Christian, but as a whole the community mirrors the economic situation of the country, with a large number of lower middle class and poor.

Discussions of the issue are often tinged with nostalgia for an earlier time when "we all got along," like a nationwide 1919 uprising against British rule where Christian and Muslim religious leaders marched side-by-side in protests.

Stereotypes and prejudices "retreat or totally disappear during times of a national renaissance, when the nation is rallied around a cause or a project," said rights activist and researcher Samir Morcos.

"We don't have this now."