Every three minutes a Christian is being tortured in the Muslim world, and in 2009 more than 165,000 Christians will have been killed because of their faith, most of them in Muslim countries, according to a human rights organization that is visiting Israel starting Sunday.
"Hamas digs up the bodies of Christians from Christian burial sites in the Gaza Strip claiming that they pollute the earth," said Reverend Majed El Shafie, President of One Free World International (OFWI), who will head a delegation of human rights activists, members of parliament from Canada and religious personalities.
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El Shafie, 32, was born in Cairo to a distinguished Muslim family of lawyers and judges. Through a Christian friend he was exposed at an early age to hatred toward the Christian minority in Egypt.
He decided to convert to Christianity, wrote a book about it and as a result became an outcast and a victim of oppression.
In 1998 he was arrested, imprisoned, tortured and condemned to death.
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So how did the now-Reverend El Shafie escape?
El Shafie managed to escape, fled to the Sinai, where a Beduin family hid him for two months, and crossed the Israeli border on a jet-ski.
As customary, the much maligned Bedouins helped him to escape to the Israeli border. That's the same Bedouins whom Egypt keeps accusing of terrorism whenever accusing well-known terrorist organisations doesn't fit into Egypt's self image of having well-protected borders and the same Bedouins that host parties of Israeli tourists and protested British fascist Galloway's support for Hamas.
Members of the delegation will meet with Knesset Speaker Reuven Rivlin, Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Danny Ayalon and Mayor ofJerusalem Nir Barkat in the hope of enlisting Israel to champion their cause.
And I hope that Israel will do what she can to help them.
El Shafie will need all the help he can get and I hope that Israel will open paths to him that are otherwise closed.