Max Blumenthal reports: The US Ambassador to Libya, Chris Stevens, and three US diplomats were killed in attacks and rioting provoked by an obscure, low-budget anti-Muslim film called “The Innocence of Muslims.” The producer of the film is a real estate developer supposedly named “Sam Bacile” who claims to be an Israeli Jew. Bacile told the AP the film was made with $5 million raised from “100 Jewish donors.” He said he was motivated to help his native country, Israel, by exposing the evils of Islam.

While Bacile claims to be in hiding, and his identity remains murky, another character who has been publicly listed as a consultant on the film is a known anti-Muslim activist with ties to the extreme Christian right and the militia movement. He is Steve Klein, a Hemet, California based insurance salesman who claims to have led a “hunter-killer team” in Vietnam.”

Klein is a right-wing extremist who emerged from the same axis of Islamophobia that produced Anders Behring Breivik and which takes inspiration from the writings of Robert Spencer, Pamela Geller, and Daniel Pipes. [Continue reading…]

Sarah Abdurrahman writes: One thing that is immediately evident from watching the nearly 14-minute long trailer for the film is how low the production quality is. I mean really, it is unbelievable that this movie could have cost anywhere near the reported $5 million that it took to make it. Because the production value is so atrociously low, the terrible audio and dubbing just seems par for the course. But on further inspection I noticed something: seemingly every reference to the religion of Islam in the trailer is dubbed over in post production.

If you watch closely, you can see that when the actors are reading parts of the script that do not contain Islam-specific language, the audio from the sound stage is used (the audio that was recorded as the actors were simultaneously being filmed). But anytime the actors are referring to something specific to the religion (the Prophet Muhammed, the Quran, etc.) the audio recorded during filming is replaced with a poorly executed post-production dub. And if you look EVEN closer, you can see that the actors’ mouths are saying something other than what the dub is saying.

Gawker reports: Cindy Lee Garcia, an actress from Bakersfield, Calif., has a small role in the Muhammed movie as a woman whose young daughter is given to Muhammed to marry. But in a phone interview this afternoon, Garcia told us she had no idea she was participating in an offensive spoof on the life of Muhammed when she answered a casting call through an agency last summer and got the part.

The script she was given was titled simply Desert Warriors.

“It was going to be a film based on how things were 2,000 years ago,” Garcia said. “It wasn’t based on anything to do with religion, it was just on how things were run in Egypt. There wasn’t anything about Muhammed or Muslims or anything.”

In the script and during the shooting, nothing indicated the controversial nature of the final product. Muhammed wasn’t even called Muhammed; he was “Master George,” Garcia said. The words Muhammed were dubbed over in post-production, as were essentially all other offensive references to Islam and Muhammed.

For example, at 9:03 in the trailer, Garcia berates her husband, who wants to send their daughter to Muhammed: “Is your Muhammed a child molester?” she says in the final product. But the words are dubbed over what she actually said. The line in the script—and the line Garcia gave during filming—was, “is your God a child molester,” Garcia told us today.

Garcia was horrified when she saw the end product, and when protesters in Libya killed four U.S. Embassy employee.

“I had nothing to do really with anything. Now we have people dead because of a movie I was in. It makes me sick.”

According to Garica, her three days on set last July were unremarkable. The film’s mysterious pseudonymous writer and director, “Sam Bacile,” has claimed to be an Israeli real estate mogul. But Garcia said Bacile told her he was Egyptian on set. Bacile had white hair and spoke Arabic to a number of “dark-skinned” men who hung around the set, she said. (A Bacile associate also told The Atlantic he wasn’t Israeli or Jewish.)

CNN reports: A statement released on the behalf of the 80 cast and crew members of “Innocence of Muslims,” a film that reportedly prompted Tuesday protests at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo and the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, indicates that they are not happy with the film and were misled by the producer.

“The entire cast and crew are extremely upset and feel taken advantage of by the producer. We are 100% not behind this film and were grossly misled about its intent and purpose,” the statement says. “We are shocked by the drastic re-writes of the script and lies that were told to all involved. We are deeply saddened by the tragedies that have occurred.”

The connection between an atrociously made anti-Islamic video and the attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi remains open to question. Still, Julian Borger fills in a number of the missing links.

The long fuse that led to the explosion of violence that ultimately killed Stevens was lit last summer in California, where someone calling himself Sam Bacile set about making what is likely to be remembered as one of the most notorious films in recent history. It is far from clear who Bacile is. He described himself in telephone interviews this week with the Wall Street Journal and AP as an Israeli-American property developer, but neither the Israeli authorities nor the California realtors association had heard his name.

In July, a clip from Bacile’s film, called Innocence of Muslims, a bizarre and amateurish attack on the prophet Muhammad, appeared on the internet. The subject is religion but the style, production values and acting are reminiscent of gonzo, low-budget porn, a vast industry in southern California, where this movie seems to have been made. Rarely has the porn industry produced anything as intentionally offensive as the Bacile film.

Steve Klein, a militant Christian activist credited as a consultant on the film, told The Atlantic online: “He’s not Israeli … His name is a pseudonym. All these Middle Eastern folks I work with have pseudonyms. I doubt he’s Jewish. I would suspect this is a disinformation campaign.”

The man calling himself Bacile said he had raised a budget of $5m from 100 “Jewish donors”, whom he declined to name, to make the film, which he wrote and directed himself with the aim of demonstrating his belief, as he described it to the Wall Street Journal, that “Islam is a cancer”.

To that end, Bacile got his amateur cast to depict the prophet Muhammad as a feckless philanderer who approved of child abuse. It took three months, 59 actors and about 45 crew. The result was two hours of stumbling dialogue and wooden acting among flimsy sets, and a stream of gratuitous insults aimed at Muslims. It was screened in an almost empty cinema in Hollywood earlier this year. In another age, that would probably have been the end of the story. In the YouTube era, however, it was a bomb primed for detonation.

Bacile posted a 13-minute English-language trailer on YouTube in early July but it was only in the past week that it appears to have caught on of the online sectarian culture wars.

A Florida pastor, Terry Jones, who had triggered protests in the Islamic world for burning the Qur’an and his campaign to stop the construction of a mosque at the site of the 9/11 attacks, promoted the film on his website and announced his intention to broadcast the trailer at his Gainesville church this week.

The film clip was also promoted last week by Morris Sadik, the Egyptian Coptic Christian also based in California, who runs a small, virulently Islamophobic group called the National American Coptic Assembly. It was later denounced by mainstream Copts in Egypt, but it was too late to stop it going viral.

At some point over the summer, a version of the YouTube trailer surfaced with the dialogue dubbed in Egyptian Arabic and the translated clip was picked up by a firebrand Cairo television host, Sheikh Khaled Abdallah, with a record of focusing on perceived threats to Islam. He aired clips from the video on his television show on Saturday, and the same video clips were posted to YouTube on Monday.

As the audience for Innocence of Muslims grew exponentially, militant Islamists called for a mass protest at the US embassy in Cairo. The organisers said they began planning it last week when Sadik began promoting the trailers, but support for the demonstration snowballed after the Sheikh Abdallah programme.

A crowd of some 2,000 is reported to have gathered outside the embassy walls in Cairo on Tuesday. The security services appear to have been caught flat-footed even though the protest had been announced. Most of the diplomats and local staff had left early and a few dozen of the demonstrators were able to scale a wall, take down the stars and stripes and replace it with a black flag. The Egyptian police only managed to evict them in the late evening.

By that time, however, the spark had jumped westwards to the eastern Libyan city of Benghazi. According to al-Jazeera, an extremist militia called Ansar al-Sharia, one of many such armed groups staking out fiefdoms in Libya in the aftermath of Muammar Gaddafi’s fall, heard about the storming of the Cairo embassy and the American film.

Stevens had the misfortune to be making a short visit to Benghazi, and, according to US officials quoted on Wednesday, was probably not the intended target.

In his soon-to-be-released book, The Islamophobia Industry: How the Right Manufactures Fear of Muslims, Nathan Lean writes: As is the case with any industry, advertising is paramount to the success of a product. One need look no further than the Super Bowl to understand the advertising industry’s sheer obsession with reaching a massive number of people; each year, the highest bidders are offered short slots to disseminate catchy clips of their goods, be they Coca-Cola, Nike shoes, or other high-rolling, multi-million-dollar enterprises.

The Islamophobia industry also goes to great lengths to sell its message to the public. The difference, though, is that in many cases the very networks that spread their product are themselves participants in the ruse to whip up public fear of Muslims. This is not a relationship of buyer and seller, where various characters that peddle panic purchase slots on major television networks to plug their merchandise. Rather, it is a relationship of mutual benefit, where ideologies and political proclivities converge to advance the same agenda.

Fox News, the American television station that brands itself as “fair and balanced,” is the epitome of this relationship. It has been, for the better part of the last decade, at the heart of the public scare-mongering about Islam, and has become the home for a slew of right-wing activists who regularly inhabit its airwaves to distort the truth to push stereotypes about Muslims. It was little surprise, then, that a Brookings Institution poll on American values conducted in September 2011 found that approximately two-thirds of Republicans, Americans who identify with the Tea Party movement, and Americans who most trusted Fox agreed that the values of Islam are at odds with the values of the United States. Additionally, nearly six in 10 Republicans who say they trust Fox also say that they believe that American Muslims are trying to establish Islamic law in America. In contrast, the attitudes of Republicans who view other news networks fall in line with the general population.

In December 2009, Fox News host Laura Ingraham interviewed Daisy Khan, the wife of Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, who was leading the initial push for the Park51 Islamic community center. At that time, there was little controversy over plans for the proposed building to be located near the ground zero site — so little that Ingraham even admitted that she liked what Khan and her husband were doing. “I can’t find many people who really have a problem with it,” she admitted on air. “I know your group takes a moderate approach to Americanizing people, assimilating people, which I applaud. I think that’s fantastic.”

Soon, though, it would not be fantastic. At least not to Laura Ingraham who, in an about-face move, suddenly latched onto the anger and rage being ginned up by Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer. “I say the terrorists have won with the way this has gone down,” she sneered during an interview with ABC News in August 2010. “Six hundred feet from where thousands of our fellow Americans were incinerated in the name of political Islam, and we’re supposed to be — we’re supposed to be considered intolerant if we’re not cheering this?”

Little more than eight months had passed. That summer, though, had been dominated by the rise of a radical bunch of bloggers who had fashioned a controversy where one did not exist. Pamela Geller’s snarling write-up about the “Ground Zero Mosque” in early May 2010 was picked up by Andrea Peyser of the New York Post, a conservative newspaper owned by the man at the top of Fox News, Rupert Murdoch. Peyser’s regurgitation of Geller’s outrage reached hundreds of thousands of people, turning what was once a conspiracy theory of some unknown right-wing Internet prowlers into a major new story.

Fox News’ Sean Hannity had read Peyser’s piece. He was familiar with Pamela Geller too, and on May 13, 2010, just days after the story made national news, he invited Geller on his show to talk about it. “There is a giant mosque being planned to be built in an area right adjacent to ground zero,” he said. Of course, the Park51 community center’s 13 stories were relatively small compared to the towering skyscrapers that hovered over the streets in midtown Manhattan. But the word “giant” had a certain frightening ring that Hannity and Geller sought to sell. “Andrea Peyser wrote about it in the New York Post today,” he said. “Atlas Shrugs’s Pamela Geller, a blogger and columnist, is hosting a ‘No 9/11 Mosque’ rally at Ground Zero on June 6 to protest the construction and she now joins us on our newsmaker line.”

Media Matters reports that from May 13, 2010, until August 12, 2010 — a period of 91 days — Fox News shows hosted at least 47 different guests to discuss the project, 75 percent of whom opposed it. Nexis transcripts of Fox newscasts during that 13-week period were reviewed showing that just nine out of the 47 guests who appeared during that time favored the center. In some cases, guests expressed their personal opposition to the center but rejected the idea that it could be somehow prevented. Juan Williams, a former reporter for National Public Radio, was one of them. Appearing on Hannity’s show, he said, “I happen to agree with you about the idea that they shouldn’t build the mosque,” he told the Fox host. “But that doesn’t mean that we, as Americans, can say to him [Rauf] ‘No, you can’t build here.’ That’s wrong.” Williams stated his opinion plainly. It was something he did regularly — and something that two months later would cost him his job.

* * *

On Oct. 18, 2010, Williams was a guest at Fox News again. This time, instead of appearing on Sean Hannity’s show, he chatted with Bill O’Reilly. The conversation settled on Park51. As an analyst for NPR, it was familiar turf for Williams. He had navigated the prickliness of political issues before, careful not to reveal his personal opinions. But Fox News and Bill O’Reilly clearly had an agenda and after having ignited a small blaze of controversy earlier in the year by saying “Muslims attacked us on 9/11,” it was clear that O’Reilly was looking for someone to back him up.

“Political correctness can lead to some kind of paralysis where you don’t address reality,” Williams said. “I mean, look, Bill, I’m not a bigot. You know the kind of books I’ve written about the civil rights movement in this country. But when I get on the plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous.”

The remark did not seem to faze O’Reilly. In fact, it fit precisely into the narrative he was spinning: Muslims are people to be feared, especially Muslims in airplanes. Over at NPR, however, news of the comments was unsettling. As a political analyst, it was not Williams’ responsibility to offer his opinions on such issues. In fact, he was not being paid to offer his opinions at all. And to blatantly level a broad-brush blow at the Muslim community because he felt suspicious of them was not within the keeping of NPR’s journalistic standards. Williams was terminated from his position soon thereafter. Despite his initial shock over his firing, there was some good news for him. The stereotypical remarks were worth a cool $2 million — the amount of money that Fox News offered Williams for an extended three-year contract with its network. “In one arrogant move the NPR exposed itself for the leftist thought police they really are,” read one user’s comment on the radio network’s website. Maybe that was so — but Fox News had, by offering Williams an expanded role, encouraged and even financed Islamophobia. [Continue reading…]

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.