CAIRO: Less than 24 hours after Egyptian protesters scaled the outer wall at the United States Embassy in Cairo, the country's top political force the Muslim Brotherhood has called on the nation to participate in countrywide demonstrations on Friday. The film, written and directed by Israeli-American Sam Bacile, who continued his attacks against Islam on Wednesday by calling the religion “a cancer,” also sparked a violent attack on the US Consulate in Benghazi, Libya that killed the US Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens and three other staff workers. The Brotherhood called “for peaceful protests on Friday outside all the main mosques in all of Egypt's provinces to denounce offenses to religion and to the Prophet,” the Brotherhood's Secretary-General Mahmoud Hussein said in a statement published on Wednesday. He also urged all “national forces to join the protests.” In Egypt on Tuesday evening, protesters climbed the US Embassy's wall and took down the American flag, replacing it with an Islamic flag that read: “There is no God but God and Mohamed is His Messenger." While the Egyptian protesters remained nonviolent, in Libya's Benghazi, violent attacks took place against the American consulate in the city. Coptic Christian youth, led by the Maspero Youth Union, announced they would hold a vigil in front of the US Embassy in Cairo later on Wednesday evening to protest against the film that “insults Muslims." “The film, clips of which are available on the social website YouTube, depicts Muhammad as a fraud, showing him having sex and calling for massacres," The Associated Press reported. The protesters had demanded the expulsion of the American Ambassador to Egypt, the Sheikh of al-Azhar and the Grand Mufti for their “inadequate response" to the film and the crisis. “Islam does not censor opinions, but refuses the freedom to violate the beliefs of faith," said a statement from Egypt's Ministry of Endowments in response to the crisis. “We are obviously working with Egyptian security to try to restore order at the embassy and to work with them to try to get the situation under control," US State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said from Washington. Embassy staff, as ahead of any protest close or near to the embassy, were evacuated before the demonstration began.
