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Obscure Film Mocking Muslim Prophet Sparks Anti-U.S. Protests in Egypt and Libya

September 11, 2012, 7:25 pm
By ROBERT MACKEY and LIAM STACK

Video of Egyptian protesters on the walls of the U.S. Embassy in Cairo ripping the American flag apart.

Angered by reports in the Egyptian media that members of the Coptic Christian diaspora in the United States had produced a crude film mocking the Muslim prophet, protesters climbed the walls of the U.S. Embassy in Cairo on Tuesday and tore down the American flag. Later, a Libyan security official told Reuters that armed militiamen had attacked the U.S. consulate in Benghazi to express their rage at a 14-minute trailer for the English-language film which was posted on YouTube in July.

The trailer attracted little att ention until last week, when a version dubbed into Arabic was posted on the same YouTube channel and then copied and viewed tens of thousands of times.

While it remains unclear who produced the film, an Egyptian-American Copt known for his broadsides against Muslims drew attention to it last week in an e-mail newsletter publicizing the latest publicity stunt of the Florida pastor Terry Jones, reviled in the Muslim world for burning copies of the Koran. Reached by telephone in Florida, a representative of Mr. Jones seemed unaware of the film, but hours later the pastor sent The Lede a statement by e-mail in which he complained of the attack on the embassy in Cairo and announced plans to screen the trailer for the film on Tuesday night, saying that it “reveals in a satirical fashion the life of Muhammad.”

The Coptic activist, Morris Sadek, did not respond to a request for an interview, but he is an ally of Mr. Jones and his blog f eatures photographs of the two men at a tiny, anti-Islam protest outside the White House in June. Later, he told The Associated Press that he planned screenings of the film.

Although Mr. Sadek did not claim in his e-mail promoting Mr. Jones to have produced the movie - which dramatizes the life of Muhammad, incorporating scenes based on slurs about him that are often repeated by Islamophobes - three days after he passed around a link to the film's trailer, a Cairo newspaper reported that the leader of an Egyptian political party had “denounced the production of the film with the participation of vengeful Copts, accompanied by the extremist priest Terry Jones.”

The same day, a scene from the film - in which an actor playing a buffoonish caricature of the prophet Muhammad calls a donkey “the first Muslim animal” - was broadcast on the Egyptian television channel Al-Nas by the host Sheikh Khaled Abdalla.

Video of a scene from a film mocking the Muslim prophet as shown on Egyptian television on Sunday.

Last year, the Egyptian-British journalist and blogger Sarah Carr wrote, “Sheikh Khaled Abdalla is part of a school of particularly shrill religious demagogues who turn every possible event into an attack on Islam.” She added that Sheikh Khaled regularly attacked Egypt's Coptic Christian community.

The Egyptian media reports appear to have drawn much more attention to the obscure film trailer, which was posted on YouTube by someone using the name Sam Bacile who failed to respond to a request for comment on Tuesday.

As Menna Alaa reported for The Egypt Independent, photographs and video posted online showed the protesters at the embassy in Cairo on Tuesday ripping the American flag apart and raising a black, jihadist flag with the words, “There is no god but Allah and Muhammad is his messenger.”

The Cairene blogger who writes as Zeinobia repo rted there were “also pro-Al Qaeda chants unfortunately,” which was particularly striking on the 11th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States.

Mostafa Hussein, a psychiatrist and blogger, pointed to a photograph that showed that the protesters had also scrawled the name Osama bin Laden on a sign outside the embassy.

In response to the protests, diplomats from the besieged compound said in a statement: “The Embassy of the United States in Cairo condemns the continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims â€" as we condemn efforts to offend believers of all religions.” Later, the embassy's official Twitter feed condemned both the provocative film and the attack on the compound.

Zeinobia also reported that confusion about the origins of the film was so general that one group of fundamentalist Muslims was “calling for another huge protest at the embassy of Netherlands demanding its closure because the Dutch government is producing an insult film against Islam.” Dutch diplomats responded with a statement denying these claims, she noted.

The Egyptian blogger who writes as The Big Pharaoh noted that one sign wielded by a protester outside the American embassy in Cairo called for “the expulsion of Coptic Diaspora from Egypt.”