Thousands of furious protesters stormed US diplomatic missions in Cairo and Benghazi after the screening of an anti-Islam movie that insults Prophet Mohamed, writes Gamal Nkrumah An Israeli filmmaker based in California produced an anti-Muslim movie that incensed the Islamic world. The film was scheduled to be screened in the US marking the 11th anniversary of the 11 September terrorist attack in New York and Washington. The movie, The Innocence of Muslims, cost $5 million and depicts Prophet as a philanderer of child sexual abuse. The film claims that the Prophet Mohamed was a fraud. The film resulted in a wave of violent protests in Egypt and Libya, snowballing in other Muslim nations as Al-Ahram Weekly went to print. The movie also led to the assassination of the US ambassador in Libya, Chris Stevens. Sam Bacile is an anti-Islam Israeli filmmaker based in California. "Islam is a cancer, period," proclaimed Bacile, a real estate developer who claims to be an Israeli Jew, and who directed and produced the two-hour film funded by Jewish donors, Bacile insisted, and not by Coptic Christians. The Israeli filmmaker has been in hiding since the protests erupted in Cairo and Benghazi. The film, which Muslims and Christians both said was provocative and insulting to Islam, culminated in disaster: the US ambassador to Libya and three staff members, including two Marines, were gunned down as militant Islamists fired rockets on the ambassador and his staff. In Cairo, a group of demonstrators including Christians stormed the US Embassy compound in Garden City and tore up the American flag and burnt and hoisted in its place a black banner emblazoned with La Illah illa Allah, Mohamed Rasul Allah ó "There is no God but God, and Mohamed is the Prophet of God". In a White House statement, US President Barack Obama said he had ordered "all necessary resources to support the security of our personnel in Libya and to increase security at our diplomatic posts around the globe." "I called Libyan President [Mohamed] Megaryeif to coordinate additional support to protect Americans in Libya. He expressed his condemnation and condolences and pledged his government's full cooperation," Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said. What Washington didn't contemplate was that as Al-Ahram Weekly went to press, angry protesters had gathered around the US Embassy in the Tunisian capital, repeating the Cairo scenario. However, it was not clear what exactly the American ambassador to Libya was doing in Benghazi, the country's second largest city when the actual US embassy is located in the Libyan capital Tripoli. The Grand Mufti of Egypt Ali Gomaa and Al-Azhar, Egypt's most prestigious Islamic institution of higher learning, condemned the incidents in Cairo and Benghazi. Morris Sadek, an extremist Coptic Christian, and Pastor Terry Jones, a fundamentalist Christian preacher who is notorious for burning the Quran, are widely believed to have been promoting the film.
