As most of my readers will already know, anti-American protests have erupted in Egypt, Libya and elsewhere, sparked by a low-budget film called “The Innocence of Muslims,” which was produced by Israeli-American real estate developer Sam Bacile to show the “hypocrisies” of Islam. The protests in Libya led to the death of the American ambassador to Libya, Christopher Stevens, as well as three others, including two Marines. The ambassador’s body was paraded around by the rioters, in what has become an all-too-familiar sight from Somalia to Baghdad to Tripoli, before it was recovered and put en route back to the United States.
This appears to be the timeline. Amateur filmmaker Sam Bacile raised $5 million from roughly 100 Jewish donors, produced the film over the course of three months with 60 actors and 45 crew, and the film arrived to the sound of crickets. Bacile hoped that the film would promote the cause of Israel by revealing Islam’s hypocrisies and fraud to the world. Although he was told that he would become the next Theo van Gogh, and understood that the wildly provocative film would likely spark a backlash, he went ahead with it anyway. It premiered earlier this year, however, to a largely empty theater in Hollywood. The full-length trailer was posted on YouTube in July, and no one seems to have noticed.
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