Participating in World Youth Forum panel entitled ‘The Role of World Leaders in Building and Sustaining Peace’, Egyptian President Abdel Fatah Al Sisi stated that Egyptian citizens were free to worship or not, adding that it wasn’t a matter the state could interfere with. The President, elaborating on the vision of ‘peace’, commented on Friday’s terrorist attack, in which seven Coptic Christians were killed after gunmen opened fire at a bus near the Saint Samuel Monastery in Minya. “We in Egypt don’t discriminate, we don’t say this is Muslim and this is Christian; we say we are Egyptians,” he stated, referring to the fact that attacks concerned and bothered all Egyptians. The narrative to portray acts of terrorism as a national plight rather than a specifically Christian concern has been on-growing, with the government often reminding citizens that terrorism has claimed both Muslim and Christian lives. However, most recent terrorist attacks have targeted Coptic Christians such as the 2017 church bombings. The President extensively talked about the right to worship in Egypt as well as the importance of allocating houses of worships to the nation’s various faiths. He particularly spoke…
