Al-Ahram, Cairo’s topmost daily paper, which is State-owned, carried on its second page last Monday a column under the title “Copts 2010” by Abdel-Nasser Salama. In highly offensive, aggressive rhetoric which blatantly instigated reader opinion against Copts, the Church, and Pope Shenouda III; the column cited ‘information’ which it claimed for historical fact and which ‘proved’ Copts have been for decades acting in a treacherous manner against their homeland. It takes no effort to detect that the unsubstantiated so-called ‘information’ is entirely groundless; its only base is in the writer’s imagination.
I do not understand or condone the printing of such an article by al-Ahram’s editorial executives. I should know, because we at Watani constantly face situations in which we have to take decisions on the printing of offensive, undocumented material. We usually handle such situations with the professional responsibility that would keep Watani away from instigating sectarian tension.
