The recent widespread rage exhibited by Islamists over the movie "Innocence of Muslims" brings to mind the Islamic firestorm that greeted the Danish newspaper "
Jyllands-Posten's" publication of Muslim-oriented political cartoons in 2005.
One is left to wonder at the knee-jerk response such things invariably elicit from the notoriously thin-skinned Islamists.
Pavlov would have had a field day with all this, no doubt. Be that as it may, the focus of this article is on the movie "Innocence of Muslims."
The film is...less than well made. Possibly
Ed Wood, the late director of such infamously bad "B" movies as "Glen or Glenda" and "Plan 9 From Outer Space," was channeled for consultation.
Guy Adams reports that many of those who endured the film's sparsely attended premier were left wondering if they had just watched an especially bad "failed spoof."
I admit that I have not watched the film (watching the trailer was hard enough), and I have instead relied on reports by trusted confidants with greater patience, more forgiving tastes, and stronger stomachs than I possess. They are all in agreement that the film is really,
really awful. That is, the acting is wooden, the "plot" obscure, the makeup atrocious, the dialogue stilted, the audio atrocious, and the overall effect produced one of slack-jawed amazement that people actually spent time and money on this thing.
Philip Hodges writes, "It's got to be the
worst "anti-Muslim" film ever. It is so bad... it's as if whoever put this together was trying desperately to make
Christians look bad, not Muslims." In any event, the back-story to the movie is infinitely more interesting than the film itself. It is a Byzantine tale of ineptitude and skullduggery.
According to Britain's newspaper "
The Guardian," "The Associated Press's initial report on [the movie's] trailer... identified a mysterious character, 'Sam Bacile,' as its producer. Bacile told the Associated Press [AP] that he was a Jewish Israeli real estate developer living in California. He said that he raised $5m for the production of the film from '100 Jewish donors,' an unusual claim echoing 'Protocols of the Elders of Zion'-style fantasies."
"The Guardian," it should be noted, is well known for its decidedly leftist slant (think "The New York Times"), and I would take with a grain of salt their claim that the movie was "produced and promoted by a strange collection of rightwing Christian evangelicals and exiled Egyptian Copts...[and the movie's trailer was] created with the intention of both destabilizing post-Mubarak Egypt and roiling the US presidential election."
The part about the film being produced and promoted by "exiled Egyptian Copts" may well be true, but as for the rest, I would advise not jumping to any conclusions just yet.
"Sam Bacile", the film's purported producer, has been extraordinarily difficult to track down. It turns out that "Sam Bacile," who claimed to be a Jewish (Israeli) real estate agent, is not Jewish, not Israeli, not a real estate agent, and not Sam Bacile. As I say, a difficult man to track down.
According to
Fox News, when the AP attempted to contact "Sam Bacile" using a phone number that they had acquired, they were unable to locate the elusive Mr. Bacile, but
were able to trace the phone to a Mr. Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, who admitted to managing the film's production company. I will mention in passing that Mr. Nakoula was convicted in 2010 of bank fraud and spent almost two years in a federal prison--but we won't go there as this tale is already convoluted enough as it is.
One of Nakoula Basseley Nakoula's alias's (he has several) is, interestingly enough, Bacily--which has the ring of Bacile, don't you think? Let us don our deerstalker caps, fire up our Meerschaums, and ponder things for a moment shall we?
Well then, it appears that most of us agree that the elusive Mr. Bacile is indeed Mr. Nakoula (or Mr. Bacily, as the case may be). You'll be glad to know that US law enforcement officials agree, and believe that "'Sam Bacile' was an alias Nakoula used to advance his various scams." So who is Nakoula Basseley Nakoula?
Purportedly he is an Egyptian
Coptic Christian (Copt, for short)--albeit a bad example of one. It is possible that the heavy-handed propaganda of "Innocence of Muslims" came about through a series of ludicrously misguided efforts to help the Copts, and bungled attempts at damage control regarding the film.
The film, believe it or not, started out as a sort of historical documentary about life in the ancient Middle East. How that turned into a vicious slam on Islam and Muhammed is no doubt worthy of a film in itself. The
film's actors are as perplexed as anyone (I exclude the actors from any share in the film's awfulness). As far as
they knew, the film's main character was a guy named George, not Muhammad. Originally the film was billed as a "historical...desert adventure film."
Through the miracle of over-dubbing, and some monumental editing, the producers of the film managed to turn what was a third rate "desert adventure" into a fourth rate piece of trash. Somewhere along the way, "George" became "Mohammad," and the "desert adventure" flew out the window, to be replaced with a storyline of virulent anti-Muslim propaganda. The actors, who had no idea that they would end up in a "religious movie," were left scratching their heads and saying "WTF?"
It is possible that when Nakoula Basseley Nakoula saw his "desert adventure" rapidly sinking into the obscurity that it so richly deserved, his "damage control" mode switched on, and he racked his brain for some way, any way, to recoup his financial investment, and the idea for "Innocence of Muslims" was born.
But even with extensive over-dubbing, heavy editing, and script changes, the film continued its plummet into the depths. What to do? "I know -- release it in Arabic!" Oh boy--bad idea.
It is at this point that I start to question the narrative. I can appreciate that as a Coptic Christian Mr. Nakoula may have held some animosity toward Muslims, perhaps a whole lot of animosity -- and his efforts to salvage something from his "desert adventure" film is understandable. But he would have to be uncommonly dim,
extremely dim, not to appreciate the explosive impact that his anti-Muslim movie would have on the Arab world.
Is he really that clueless, or is there more than meets the eye at work here? I tend to agree with Philip Hodges's opinion that "There has to be more to this than what the media has told us." Was translating and/or promoting the Arabic version of "Innocence of Muslims" done by individuals who knew full well the effect it would have? Was it used as a convenient way to "stir the pot" on cue?
Regardless of whether releasing the Arabic version of "Innocence of Muslims" was the result of a "comedy of errors," or nefarious manipulation, the results have been egregiously tragic--and I suspect that we are far from seeing the last of those results.
