Egypt has just joined the war against the Islamic State group. Its air force has attacked the jihadist army in retribution for the beheading of 21 Egyptian Christian Copts held in Libya, whom they described as “Crusaders.”
As usual, jihad polemics were ignorant. Coptic Christianity goes back to the earliest Christian conversions in Egypt, centuries before the Crusades. Its adherents are mostly members of the original population of Egypt. They were Christians long before Egypt’s incorporation into the Islamic Arab caliphates in the seventh century and after.
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