The Sohag Court of Misdemeanours today sentenced to six years in prison Bishoi Kamel, the Coptic teacher charged with deriding Islam, and insulting the Prophet Mohamed and President Mursi on his Facebook account
The Sohag Court of Misdemeanours today sentenced to six years in prison Bishoi Kamel, the Coptic teacher charged with deriding Islam, and insulting the Prophet Mohamed and President Mursi on his Facebook account.
Kamel was sentenced to three years in prison for deriding religion and disdaining the Prophet Mohamed through scornful pictures and cartoons; cartoons to the Prophet; two years for insulting the President; and one year for insulting the prosecutor.
Sohag security forces cordoned the court and its grounds for fear that the thousands of violent hardline Islamists outside would make good on their threat to rip Kamel apart if they could get their hands on him.
The sentence was bitterly criticised in Coptic circles where the general sentiment is that overly harsh sentences are being handed to Copts, “a natural result of the steady Islamisation of the State,” according to the Coptic activist from Alexandria Kameel Seddiq. Many questioned the fact that ‘disdain of religion’ is almost always taken to mean the disdain of Islam, and that almost no Muslim has been sentenced for disdaining Christianity, an activity that is openly ongoing on all print, audio, and visual media; to say nothing of general climate on the Egyptian street.
Watani International
18 September 2012