Egyptian lawmakers rile Congress with US gun violence jab
In a letter to Congress protesting a US travel advisory, an Egyptian parliamentary delegation downplayed the threats to Coptic Christians in the country, comparing the statistics on violence against them to shootings in US cities.
An Egyptian delegation’s angry assertion that the death of “less than 100” Christian Copts is “non comparable” to US gun violence is backfiring on Capitol Hill.
In a letter dated July 26, 18 Egyptian lawmakers furious at a recent State Department travel warning insist that “perception is always worse than the truth in this part of the world.” The letter was leaked by a congressional source dismayed by the apparent downplaying of the terrorist threat against religious minorities.
“All it does is irritate Americans enormously,” a former senior State Department official told Al-Monitor. “It’s dumb and all it’s going to do is irritate people and it’ll make [the authors] look sort of stupid in Congress.”
Coptic Solidarity, a watchdog group advocating for the rights of Egyptian Christians, denounced the gun violence comparison as a false equivalency.
