[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 161 (2015), Part 10]
[House]
[Pages 14329-14330]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]





                    SACRED RIGHT--RELIGIOUS FREEDOM

  (Mr. POE of Texas asked and was given permission to address the House 
for 1 minute and to revise and extend his remarks.)
  Mr. POE of Texas. Mr. Speaker, Coptic Christians--the largest 
religious minority in Egypt and the largest Christian community in the 
Middle East--are constantly persecuted.
  In 2011, Ayman Nabil Labib went to school like he did every day. 
Ayman, like most Coptic Christians in Egypt, had a cross tattooed on 
his wrist as a sign of his Christian faith.
  When he got to school, Ayman's Arabic language teacher asked him to 
cover the tattoo. Instead, Ayman pulled the cross from underneath his 
shirt and left it hanging around his neck.
  The teacher became enraged. He choked Ayman and asked Ayman's

[[Page 14330]]

Muslim classmates: What are you going to do with him? Then his 
classmates beat him to death to silence his faith.
  Ayman was murdered because he was a Christian.
  Religious freedom is a basic, sacred, universal human right. 
Alexander Hamilton said in 1775, ``The sacred rights of mankind . . . 
are written, as with a sun beam in the whole volume of human nature, by 
the hand of the divinity itself; and can never be erased or obscured by 
mortal power.''
  And that is just the way it is.

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