Story highlights On Sunday, two churches were bombed in Tanta and Alexandria, Egypt

Timothy Kaldas: Many Egyptians will fail to recognize the driving force behind the violence -- a culture of religious discrimination

Timothy E. Kaldas is an analyst and writer based in Cairo. He is a nonresident fellow at the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy and professor of politics at Nile University. The views expressed in this commentary are his own.

(CNN) After the bombing of two churches on Palm Sunday in Tanta and Alexandria, the Egyptian people have entered a state of mourning. Once again their Christian fellow citizens have been targeted and killed for their faith, and once again photos circulate across social media with the faces and stories of innocent Egyptians murdered as they gathered to worship.

As is always the case, the Egyptian state has immediately issued calls for national unity. The spokesman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs asserted from his Twitter account that the attacks were "obnoxious" and had "failed" to shake Egyptians' sense of unity.

Timothy Kaldas

Egyptians will mourn this event and they will mean it, but many of them will also fail to recognize the fundamental challenge of religious discrimination that rests as the foundation of Sunday's violence. The widespread perception of Christian Egyptians as lesser citizens with lesser rights creates fertile ground for those who seek to incite violence against them.

Moreover, the plight of Copts is regularly dismissed by local officials as exaggerated or otherwise nonexistent. This failure to even acknowledge the discrimination Copts face makes correcting the problem virtually impossible.

In much the same way that American politicians avoid serious debates after a mass shooting with the words "thoughts and prayers," Egyptian politicians and media personalities do so with the words wahda wataniya, "national unity." Today, and in this coming week, Egyptians will insist that they are a united people. Muslim Egyptians will speak glowingly of their Christian brothers and sisters and recount stories of close Christian friends.

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