Who Is Alan Roberts, the Director of 'Innocence of Muslims'? We Think His Real Name Is Robert Brownell
http://www.vice.com/en_au/read/who-is-a ... t-brownell
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by happenstance » Sun Sep 16, 2012 11:23 pm
by justdrew » Mon Sep 17, 2012 12:13 am
by seemslikeadream » Tue Sep 18, 2012 9:17 pm
Egyptian warrants issued for Terry Jones, Coptic filmmaker
By The Associated Press
Published: September 18, 2012
Updated: September 18, 2012 - 4:06 PM
CAIRO --
Egypt's general prosecutor issued arrest warrants today for seven Egyptian Coptic Christians and a Florida-based American pastor and referred them to trial on charges linked to an anti-Islam film that has sparked riots across the Muslim world.
The case is largely symbolic since the seven men and one woman are believed to be outside of Egypt and unlikely to travel to the country to face the charges. Instead, the prosecutor's decision to take legal appears aimed at absorbing at least some of the public anger over the amateur film, which portrays the Prophet Muhammad as a fraud, womanizer and buffoon.
But some Christians and human rights groups expressed concern that trying people on charges of insulting religion, which also occurred to a degree under the secular-leaning regime of Hosni Mubarak, could only increase now that various strains of Islamists are gaining power. The arrest warrants were issued the same day that a Coptic teacher in southern Egypt received a prison sentence for Facebook postings deemed anti-Islamic, charges that predated the amateur film.
The prosecutor's office said in a statement that the eight accused, who include the film's alleged maker, face charges of harming national unity, insulting and publicly attacking Islam and spreading false information. The office said they could face the death penalty, if convicted.
Their case has been transferred to a criminal court, but no date for the trial has been set.
Among those charged is Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, an Egyptian Copt living in southern California and believed to be behind the film. Florida-based Pastor Terry Jones, who has said he was contacted by the filmmaker to promote the video, as well as Morris Sadek, a conservative Coptic Christian in the U.S. who pushed the video on his website, are also among those charged.
The connection of the other five accused in the case to the film was not immediately clear. Most of them live in the United States. They include two who work with Sadek in a radical institute for Coptic Christians in the U.S. that has called for an independent Coptic state; a priest who hosts TV programs from the U.S., a lawyer who lives in Canada and who has previously sued the government for clashes in 2000 that left 21 Christians dead.
They also include a woman who had converted to Christianity from Islam years back and is a staunch critic of the religion.
Jones did not immediately respond to a message asking comment. Sadek's phone was switched off. The others could not be immediately reached for comment.
Ultraconservative Salafi lawyer Mamdouh Ismail praised the prosecutor's decision. While recognizing that the eight will be tried in absentia, Ismail said referring them to a court will help curb public anger.
“Now these are legal measures instead of angry reactions, whose consequences are undetermined,” he said. “This would also set a deterrent for them and anyone else who may fall into this” offense.
The prosecutor's statement, a copy of which was obtained by The Associated Press, said that after studying the film investigators have determined that it contains scenes offensive to Islam and state institutions. It also says they questioned 10 plaintiffs before issuing the charges.
Nakoula, 55, told the AP in an interview last week outside Los Angeles that he was the manager of the company that produced “Innocence of Muslims.” Jones also told AP that he was contacted by Nakoula to promote the movie.
Violence surrounding the film, clips of which appeared on YouTube, has included angry protests outside U.S. embassies worldwide and an attack on the American Consulate in Libya that killed the U.S. ambassador.
Both the Christians and rights groups say charges of insulting religion, vague in what constitutes an insult, are only pressed against offenses to Islam, and never to Christianity.
A Muslim preacher who tore the Bible in protest over the offensive film remains free without any charges. Another Coptic Christian who posted the film on his Facebook page and has posted other videos discussing the merits of atheism is currently under 15 days detention on accusations of insulting religion.
A Coptic teacher was sentenced Tuesday to six years for posting on his Facebook page drawings that were deemed to be insulting the Prophet, as well as comments considered an affront to the country's current president. The charges predate the amateur film, but anger was heightened outside the courtroom in southern Egypt, and many Islamists protested the sentence as too meager.
Medhat Klada, a Coptic Christian living in Switzerland, said the accused are referred to criminal trials without even interrogation.
“This is only to absorb public anger but there is no justice in Egypt,” he said. “These charges are now used with force because of the rise of political Islam and the fierce fight” between the different strands among these groups.
Amr Gharbeia, a program director with the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, argued against the constitutionality of the charges.
“This is not a call for prosecuting those who insult Christians or Shiites, but if we are going to use this charge only in one direction (against insulting Islam), then we should just call it off,” he said.
by 8bitagent » Tue Sep 18, 2012 9:26 pm
by Iamwhomiam » Tue Sep 18, 2012 11:59 pm
by justdrew » Wed Sep 19, 2012 12:06 am
Iamwhomiam wrote:Sorry. I cannot for one moment believe Nakoula Basseley Nakoula is actually a Copt.
Anyone who knew the true purpose of this film would also have known the plight of the Coptic community once it was seen or heard about by local Muslims.
by Nordic » Wed Sep 19, 2012 2:57 am
Crazy: Some in CIA wanted to create fake Saddam Hussein sex video, report asserts
Tuesday, May 25, 2010 9:47 EDT
A little-noticed blog post by a veteran intelligence reporter averred Tuesday that the CIA’s Iraq Operations Group weighed a plan prior to the 2003 Iraq invasion that sought to discredit Saddam Hussein by portraying him as gay.
According to Jeff Stein, a longtime intelligence reporter who first revealed that FBI officials had eavesdropped on a sitting Democratic congresswoman, the CIA’s Iraq Operations Group considered creating a video that would the then-Iraqi leader having intercourse with a teenage boy.
"It would look like it was taken by a hidden camera," a former CIA official purportedly told Stein. "Very grainy, like it was a secret videotaping of a sex session."
The CIA would have then "flood[ed] Iraq with the videos" the official added.
by LolaB » Wed Sep 19, 2012 10:22 am
by seemslikeadream » Wed Sep 19, 2012 1:06 pm
The ‘Pro-Israel’ Network Behind the Innocence Video
by Justin Raimondo, September 19, 2012
If someone had planned to upend US foreign policy — to utterly destroy the very basis [.pdf] of all our diplomats (and military personnel) have been working to achieve in the Middle East and throughout the Muslim world — they couldn’t have done a better job of it than whoever put together Innocence of Muslims.
As violent protests spread, the consequences continue to roll in: the suspension of joint US-Afghan military operations, the suspension of US aid talks with Egypt, the rapid decline of US prestige in the region, and the growing influence of the radical Islamist movement US support for the “Arab Spring” was designed to counter. The Obama administration’s effort to split the Islamist upsurge and lend its support to “moderates” has been stopped cold.
Was the release of the video a random event, one of those unpredictables that can arise at any moment to foil the best-laid plans? Perhaps. Yet one is hard-pressed to explain what the makers of Innocence sought to accomplish, if not precisely what has occurred. According to various explanations floated in the media — primarily by anti-Muslim agitator Steve Klein — the idea was to promote the video to Muslims. In one account, Klein says he hoped the video would “smoke out” Muslim radicals in the US, who he is convinced have organized secret “cells” that will strike on command. On the other hand, we are told the film’s authors and promoters hoped to “convert” Muslims.
Neither explanation is very convincing. The video itself is so crude, so inept, and so deliberately insulting it is hard to believe anyone thought it could convert anyone to anything. And as for the prospect of “smoking out” secret Islamist cells — if there were such cells, one would hardly expect them to reveal themselves because of a YouTube video.
In order to understand the real motives and goals of the makers of Innocence, it is necessary to take a good look at the people who have, so far, been identified as the film’s authors and promoters.
The central figure in all this is reported to be one Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, a 56-year-old Egyptian immigrant: although Nakoula presented himself in an interview with the Associated Press as “Sam Bacile,” a 56-year-old “Israeli-American” real estate developer, he is a Coptic Christian, a member of a persecuted minority in Egypt — and a convicted felon. Media reports portray him as the central figure in the making of Innocence: he denies this, and describes his job as arranging “logistics” for the film. Nakoula’s role seems to have been that of a facilitator — gofer — rather than “creative director,” and in any case he hardly seems the type to have originated the idea for the movie. Having been released from jail — where he was serving a sentence for bank fraud — barely a month before filming started, Nakoula was hardly in a position to undertake such a project. Chances are he was recruited by someone else, the real originator and driving force behind Innocence— but who is that someone?
Public records show a filming permit was taken out by “Media for Christ,” an outfit run by one Joseph Nasrallah Abdelmasih. His group sponsors Christian programming in Arabic, including “The Way,” a production that has featured such prominent Islamophobes as Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer. The Geller-Spencer collaboration goes back to the protests against the New York City “Ground Zero” mosque in which the duo achieved national notoriety: Nasrallah was one of the speakers at their rally. The idea for just such a movie as Innocence showed up on Geller’s blog in February, in a post entitled “A Movie About Muhammad: An Idea Whose Time Has Come.” Ali Sina, an ex-Muslim and board member of Geller and Spencer’s “Stop the Islamization of Nations,” exhorted Geller’s readers to support his movie project:
“The movie shows Muhammad’s raids, plunders, massacres, rapes, assassinations and other crimes. A small subtitle in the lower right corner of each scene will give reference to the source of the story. This movie is entirely factual. Wherever possible, I copied the Quran, the Sira and the Hadith verbatim. It is a riveting story. Truth about Muhammad is more shocking than fiction.
“The world does not know Islam. What is known is a watered down and euphemized version of it that has no bases [sic] in reality. The truth is that Muhammad was a cult leader, much like Jim Jones, Shoko Asahara and Charles Manson. Unlike them he succeeded because there was no central power in the seventh century Arabia to stop him.
“The other good news is that I have been promised a substantial angel financing. I have been daydreaming about this movie for ten years. It was this promise that prompted me into action. I put everything aside for five months, read everything I could about my protagonist, selected the most salient episodes and wrote the script.
“The seed is now sown. Now it’s time to nurture it. What I need is an experienced executive producer, someone who shares my values, to make it happen with professionalism and missionary zeal.
“I am not thinking of a high budget movie, but given the subject matter, it can become one of the most seen motion pictures ever. (Recall Danish cartoons?)”
This may or may not be the same movie as Innocence, but what’s important here is that the idea of such a provocation — “recall Danish cartoons?” — was percolating in these circles when the movie was in production.
Nasrallah has now issued a non-denial denial, in which he claims he was duped — along with the actors — by Nakoula who “did not make the movie we thought he was making.” However, he admits Nakoula called him and that Media for Christ lent him their facilities: and, one has to ask, what movie did Nasrallah think his buddy Nakoula was making?
Nasrallah’s recent involvement with the Geller-Spencer crowd coincided with a very profitable time for his organization: Media in Christ’s income has recently skyrocketed, according to public records, with receipts totaling under $200,000 in 2009 and prior, rising to $633,516 in 2010 and $1,016,366 in 2011. Where did all that money come from — was it Mr. Sina’s “substantial angel”? Nakoula claims he funded his movie project with money from “over 100 Jewish donors.”
When Nakoula spoke to the Associated Press, he described himself as an “Israeli-American” real estate developer operating out of California: this was soon debunked, however, when inquiring reporters outed him as an Egyptian of the Coptic faith. They also discovered he’s a convicted felon — not only for a check-kiting scheme, but also for drug-dealing (methamphetamine). He’s an unlikely hero for the right-wing Christians who have made a martyr out of him, although to ostensible “libertarians” like Matt Welch, who thinks Nakoula & Co. are on the same level as Salman Rushdie, the meth conviction is doubtless a plus.
The idea that these vermin, who deliberately set out to make a “movie” that would inflame the Muslim world, are “free speech” heroes is worse than nonsense: it is valorizing villains. We don’t yet know where the money, or the impetus to make the film, came from, but what we do know is this: the driving force behind Innocence was a desire to create an international incident that would bring discredit on the United States, and empower radical Islamists who hate America and everything it stands for. And the promoters of this garbage pose as “patriots”!
Free speech has nothing to do with this issue: the President requested of YouTube that they reconsider the video’s place on YouTube in light of their terms of service. YouTube refused, and that’s the end of it. Unfortunately, however, that’s not the end of this imbroglio, the consequences of which we’ll be living with for a long time to come.
There is an ugly sore festering under the skin of the West, and its first manifestation — or should I say symptom? — surfaced when Andre Breivik committed his ghastly crime, slaughtering the attendees at a Norwegian Labor Party youth camp. He, too, wanted to “stop the Islamization of nations,” and his online manifesto cited Geller, Spencer, and the writings of the movement their hateful rantings have energized. The English Defense League — a sorry collection of skinheads, neo-Nazis, and soccer hooligans — which Geller endorses, has mounted a campaign of violent intimidation aimed at British Muslims, inspiring imitators in several European countries. These groups feed off the more radical elements of the Zionist movement: Geller and her supporters claim to be “defending Israel,” and the EDL regularly flies the Israeli flag at their hate rallies.
Defense of the Jewish state is a major theme of the Islamophobe network: they use it as a shield to deflect criticism. A key leader of this network is former New Leftist and Black Panther groupie David Horowitz: his “David Horowitz Freedom Center” (formerly the Center for the Study of Popular Culture), sponsors Spencer’s “Jihad Watch.” Horowitz’s “Frontpage” site — ablaze with stories decrying the “betrayal” of Israel by the American government and the perfidy of all things Islamic — recently speculated Innocence was created by the very Salafists now leading the protests. Since the video sprang from the same bigoted milieu of which Frontpage is the online Jerusalem, this “theory” isn’t merely ironic — it’s a moral obscenity.
It isn’t hard to imagine where the money to create this deadly provocation came from. Of the many millions in neocon money sloshing around this country, it’s hardly inconceivable a hundred thousand or so would find its way into the hands of a twice-convicted felon and all around dubious character like Nakoula, who is, I suspect, just a con man rather than an ultra-Zionist ideologue like the promoters of his “work.”
Although, to be sure, the difference is altogether negligible.
by 8bitagent » Wed Sep 19, 2012 3:11 pm
by The Consul » Wed Sep 19, 2012 3:53 pm
by StarmanSkye » Wed Sep 19, 2012 6:38 pm
by justdrew » Wed Sep 19, 2012 7:05 pm
by JackRiddler » Thu Sep 20, 2012 12:19 pm
http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/09/18/ ... ight/print
September 18, 2012
Ignorance on Parade
Islamophobia, Left and Right
by JEFF SPARROW
‘Koran discovered with coffee cup stain on the front cover, US marines deployed to all Starbucks franchises.’
The quip, retweeted by celebrity atheist Richard Dawkins, exemplifies the belligerent incomprehension with which so many, including self-proclaimed liberals, have responded to protests against the film The Innocence of Muslims.
Rioting over a YouTube clip that offends the Muslim sky fairy? How tremendously foolish! How childish; how superstitious; how very, very silly!
Well, we’ve certainly seen ignorance paraded over the last few days but it’s as much by smug progressives as anyone else.
Consider a historical analogy.
In 1857, Bengali soldiers (known as ‘sepoys’) shot their British officers and marched upon Delhi. The Great Indian Rebellion became very violent, very quickly. The rebels massacred prisoners, including women and children; the British put down the revolt with a slaughter of unprecedented proportions.
Now, that rebellion began when the troops learned that their cartridges, designed to be torn open with their teeth, would be greased with beef and pork fat, an offence to the religious sensibilities of Hindus and Muslims alike. Had Twitter been an invention of the Victorian era, London sophisticates would, no doubt, have LOLed to each other (#sepoyrage!) about the credulity of dusky savages so worked up about a little beef tallow. Certainly, that was how the mouthpieces of the East India Company spun events: in impeccably Dawkinesque terms, they blamed ‘Hindoo prejudice’ for the descent of otherwise perfectly contented natives into rapine and slaughter.
But no serious historian today takes such apologetics seriously. Only the most determined ignoramus would discuss 1857 in isolation from the broader context of British occupation. In form, the struggle might have been religious; in content, it embodied a long-simmering opposition to colonial rule.
That’s why those who pretend the protests against The Innocence of Muslims came from nowhere merely reveal their own foolishness.
‘Today, many Americans are asking — indeed, I asked myself — how could this happen?’ said Hillary Clinton after the riots in Libya. ‘How could this happen in a country we helped liberate, in a city we helped save from destruction? This question reflects just how complicated and, at times, how confounding the world can be.’
The echoes of George Bush’s infamous query ‘Why do they hate us when we’re so good?’ suggests nothing whatsoever has been learnt from the last decade and the hundreds of thousands of deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere.
For this is, of course, the same Hillary Clinton who, as recently as 2009, proclaimed Mubarak, Egypt’s torturer-in-chief, and his wife, ‘friends of my family’, acknowledging a relationship that exemplified the pally connections between the US elite and every dictator and despot in the region. Mubarak might have been crossed off the Clinton Christmaas list but President Obama forges ever closer relations with the tyrants of Saudi Arabia, delivering the biggest ever arms deal in US history to fortify a reactionary and criminal government against its populace.
No, Hillary Clinton might not recall such matters. But the people of the Muslimworld are considerably better informed – and that’s the context for their anger.
But what about the movie itself? Why should such a shoddy piece of amateur filmmaking become such a flashpoint?
Again, shift to a more familiar referent and the outrage becomes at once markedly less strange. The Protocols of Zion were, of course, also a bodged-up job, a childish forgery thrown together by racist cranks from the Tsarist secret service. But no-one’s surprised when Jews (and their anti-racist allies) mobilise against some fresh incarnation of that notorious document, since we all, quite correctly, recognise any new publication of the Protocols as a conscious and deliberate attempt to promote hatred.
The Innocence of Muslims should be understood in the same fashion. This is a film produced at a time in which, across Europe and the United States, the far right has developed an Islamophobic doctrine that replicates, almost exactly, the key tropes of traditional anti-Semitism.
Jews will not integrate. Jews are more fertile than Christians and are outbreeding them. Europe is becoming a province, a colony, of a Judaic entity. Europe will either be Judaicised or there will be a civil war. Most likely, Jews will resort to terrorism as part of their takeover. They are already spoiling for violence.
All of that sounds like the rantings of an old-school fascist. But replace ‘Jew’ with ‘Muslim’, and you’re left with a workaday opinion piece from any mainstream conservative paper.
The structural homology here is not accidental. Mattias Gardell notes how:
The tradition of Islamophobia is, like anti-Semitism, rooted in the medieval Christian hostility to the ‘enemies of God’, with these perceptions disseminated, expanded upon, restructured, rearticulated and reactivated in various social and political contexts, from the Turk scare in early modernity, via the colonial expansion, to the War on Terror.
Many stories told about Jews in medieval and early modern Europe were also spun around what were then termed Moors, Saracens or Red Jews: Muslims were devil-worshipping, sexually deviant, man-eating monsters; Muslims ritually defamed the cross and consumed the blood of ceremonially slaughtered Christian children in blasphemous communions. Church art portrayed Mohammed as the Antichrist, and Muslims as horned devils, Christ-killers, dogs or a hybrid race of dog-men. Lars Vilks – the Swedish artist who depicted Mohammed as a dog – may claim originality, but the dog motif goes back hundreds of years and is as old as the Judensau (the medieval depiction of Jews in obscene contact with a sow).
Elsewhere, the journalist Colm Ó Broin has produced a neat demonstration of the relationship between the old hate and the new hate, with a close comparison of the writings of the notorious Islamophobe Robert Spencer on Muslims alongside the propaganda of Julius Streicher, the editor of, Der Stuermer. Streicher, you’ll recall, went to the gallows at Nuremberg – but Spencer holds forth regularly on FOX News.
The labour leader August Bebel famously dubbed anti-Semitism the ‘socialism of fools’, since some supposed radicals subscribed to crackpot theories about Jewish finance. In a similar fashion, Islamophobia today often gets served up as an addlepated secularism by vulgar atheists, indifferent to how often their conversationsabout Muslim theology slide neatly intoanguish about Muslim birthrates (an obvious giveaway of the racialised imagination and its biological concerns).
Should Muslims be worried about rising Islamophobia? Of course they should! As the recent report by the Institute of Race Relations, Pedlars of Hate, makes clear, anti-Islam bigotry is becoming a key element of the revival of the far Right – a Right that doesn’t merely slander Muslims but also takes action against them.
The Innocence of Muslims was, quite obviously, intended as a provocation, and many Muslims have argued that the minority of shrilljihadis who raised their sectarian and violent slogans at protests around the wold fell entirely into the intended trap.
Then, again, this too is familiar. Twentieth century race-baiters knew all about goadingtheir victims into a certain response, and then using that response to justify a fresh pogrom. Not unexpectedly, German far-right extremists (who have some historical experience with this strategy) are now planning fresh screenings of the film.
Those who call themselves progressive might note that a certain Karl Marx followed the Great Indian Rebellion closely. While he acknowledged and decried the excesses of the rebels, he declared these were ‘only the reflex, in a concentrated form, of England’s own conduct in India.’
In other words, Marx, one of history’s more famous atheists, stood firmly with the ‘ignorant’ sepoys against their ‘enlightened’ opponents.
‘John Bull,’ he wrote, ‘is to be steeped in cries for revenge up to his very ears, to make him forget that his Government is responsible for the mischief hatched and the colossal dimensions it has been allowed toassume.’
Add ‘Uncle Sam’ to that sentence, and you have a remarkably apt assessment of what’s taking place today.
Jeff Sparrow is the editor of Overland magazine and the author of “Money Shot: A Journey into Porn and Censorship.“
by 8bitagent » Thu Sep 20, 2012 4:01 pm
The quip, retweeted by celebrity atheist Richard Dawkins, exemplifies the belligerent incomprehension with which so many, including self-proclaimed liberals, have responded to protests against the film The Innocence of Muslims.
Rioting over a YouTube clip that offends the Muslim sky fairy? How tremendously foolish! How childish; how superstitious; how very, very silly!
Well, we’ve certainly seen ignorance paraded over the last few days but it’s as much by smug progressives as anyone else.
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