The Wall Street Journal reports: Demonstrators attacked a U.S. consulate in Libya, killing one American, and breached the walls of the U.S. Embassy in Cairo, mounting angry protests over a film by a U.S. producer that portrays the Prophet Muhammad as a womanizer, pedophile and fraud.
The movie, “Innocence of Muslims,” was directed and produced by an Israeli-American real-estate developer who characterized it as a political effort to call attention to the hypocrisies of Islam. It has been promoted by Terry Jones, the Florida pastor whose burning of Qurans previously sparked deadly riots around the world.
In Benghazi, Libya, several dozen gunmen from an Islamist group, Ansar al Sharia, attacked the consulate with rocket-propelled grenades to protest the film, a deputy interior minister for the Benghazi region told the Al-Jazeera network. A government brigade evacuated the consulate, after which militants set it on fire, said the minister, Wanees Sharef.
One State Department officer was killed in the attack in Benghazi, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Tuesday night.
Mrs. Clinton said the State Department was working with Libyans to secure the compound and protect Americans in Libya.
To the east, in Cairo, a crowd of some 2,000 people gathered at the Embassy to protest the video. Some of them climbed the embassy walls late Tuesday, pulling down and burning an American flag.
Hours after nightfall, dozens of young men remained standing on top of the embassy walls, shouting into megaphones. One of the youths climbed up the flagpole to hoist a black banner emblazoned with the Muslim profession of faith in white letters—”There is no God but God and Muhammad is His Messenger”—a standard used by hardline Islamist groups throughout the world.
At the Cairo Embassy, Egyptian police had removed demonstrators from the grounds, the State Department said. The Egyptian foreign ministry said that the government bears full responsibility for the protection of foreign embassies on Egyptian soil.
The flashpoint appeared to be the film about the Prophet Muhammad, portions of which in recent days have been circulating on the Internet. Contravening the Islamic prohibition of portraying the prophet, clips from the film show him not only as flesh and blood—but as a homosexual son of undetermined patrimony, who rises to advocate child slavery and extramarital sex, for himself, in the name of religion.
The film’s 52-year-old writer, director and producer, Sam Bacile, said that he wanted to showcase his view of Islam as a hateful religion. “Islam is a cancer,” he said in a telephone interview from his home. “The movie is a political movie. It’s not a religious movie.”
Mr. Bacile said he raised $5 million from about 100 Jewish donors, who he declined to identify. Working with about 60 actors and 45 crew members, he said he made the two-hour movie in three months last year in California.
The film has been promoted by Dr. Jones, who said Tuesday that he planned to show a 13-minute trailer that night at his church in Gainesville, Fla.
“Islam is a cancer”………“The movie is a political movie. It’s not a religious movie”
These seem to be contradictory statements?
“”There is no God but God and Muhammad is His Messenger”—a standard used by hardline Islamist groups throughout the world.”
Actually that’s the standard for any Muslim. It is the fundamental tenant. It is the main line in prayers: Le ilah il Allah wa Muhammed rasul Allah.
The anti-Islam movement — the new McCarthyism — has made the tactical choice of trying to claim that it is not attacking Islam as a religion. Most Americans support freedom of religion and religious tolerance, so it’s not a good idea to parade anti-religious bigotry. So, the way the Islamophobes deal with this is to claim that Islam is not a religion — that it is a political movement comparable with global communism, the new Red under the bed.
Since this can reasonably be called a Zionist-led movement, it’s noteworthy that they are popularizing metaphors such as “Islam is a cancer” — a notion that has transparent genocidal implications. Are they really fantasizing about nuclear-armed Israel applying radiation therapy to the Islamic world? An operation in which the ‘doctor’ would end up killing the ‘patient’ and himself. Many of the Zionists like to sound the alarm about “suicidal mullahs” — even though there’s no evidence that such individuals exist — but given their recklessness and hysteria we should probably more concerned about the actions of suicidal Zionists.