Some interesting and convincing points are made.
Dan Murphy
The Christian Science Monitor
9/12/2012
As I finished this post, I came across an interview with an actress who appears in some of the footage given to Gawker. It goes a long way to clearing up some of the mystery, though not entirely.
Cindy Lee Garcia tells the website that she was hired last summer for a small part in a movie she was told would be called “Desert Warriors,” about life in Egypt 2,000 years ago (Islam is about 1,400 years old).
She told Gawker “It wasn’t based on anything to do with religion, it was just on how things were run in Egypt. There wasn’t anything about Muhammed or Muslims or anything and that, according to Gawker, “In the script and during the shooting, nothing indicated the controversial nature of the final product. Muhammed wasn’t even called Muhammed; he was “Master George,” Garcia said. The words Muhammed were dubbed over in post-production, as were essentially all other offensive references to Islam and Muhammed. Garcia said that there was a man who identified as “Bacile” on set, but that he was Egyptian and frequently spoke Arabic.
The online 14-minute clip of a purportedly anti-Islamic movie that sparked protests at the US embassy in Cairo and and the US consulate in Benghazi, Libya is now looking like it could have been ginned up by someone sitting a basement with cheap dubbing software.
Full credit goes to Sarah Abdurrahman at On the Media and Rosie Grey at Buzzfed who appear to be the first to highlight (there may be others, but they’re the ones who caught my eye) the fact that almost every instance of language referring to Islam or Muhammad in the film has been dubbed in. That is, mouths are mouthing but the words you’re hearing don’t match.
There have already been a bunch of lies associated with the alleged film…
The article continues at The Christian Science Monitor.
Update: James Lileks at The Bleat:
…Chairman of the JCS calls babble-head raver and asks him to dial back the anti-Muslim stuff.American citizen, thus informed, is expected to reassess his personal trajectory.
You know what? You do have a dog in this fight. And it’s the mangy, ugly, snarly dog that craps on your carpet and it your sister. I can’t stand these “preachers” who’ve made a career out defining the acceptable parameters of Christianity down to a sliver so thin it makes dental floss look like transatlantic telegraph cable. I believe God has set aside a special room for the Westboro Baptist Church people, where it’s always 104 degrees, which is what they deserve: a really lame hell. I believe there’s actually a place where a Catholic, a Mormon, and a Muslim could sit around in the break room and talk about Star Trek, and that place is called – what’s the word? It’ll come to me. Damn.
Right: America. Anyway:
Various folk have called for a ban on the movie that supposedly caused the riots. There’s the usual professor advising that the idiot who made it should be jailed, which is a revealing opinion from a professor of religious studies. An opinion journalist suggests the government should prosecute people who had nothing to do with a video for expressing a positive opinion about it. Possible as an accessory to the murder carried out by foreign nationals on American soil. A rather elastic definition of culpability, to say nothing of the law.
I don’t want to go into theoretical examples of the academic response to a suppression of an anti-Christian video; it’s tiresome to even posit the obvious outrage. It’s no great insight to note there’s a carve-out for certain groups who must be exempt from ridicule, and another group whose ridicule is an expected component of enlightened thought. It goes without saying that when you suggest mounting a play about that religious figure mounting a child, you get censured, and when you propose a play about another religious leader accepting a man’s proposition, you get backers…
Read the whole thing.
At Instapundit, Shut up, they explained
JOHN PODHORETZ: Shut Up, They Explained: Romney’s Day. “Romney can be criticized for attacking it. Romney can be criticized for what he said, for his wording, for his ideas. He can be faulted for his timing—although such criticism is really only about style and political smarts, not substance. But the onslaught yesterday wasn’t about that. What Mark Halperin calls ‘the gang of 500′—-the world of conventional opinion-—was saying one thing and one thing only to Mitt Romney, and that was: You are not to speak.”
They defend Obama like crazed Muslims defend the Koran. No criticism can be seen as legitimate, because they have invested everything…
…MORE STILL: Reader Arthur Barie writes:
Glenn, you know what you’re not seeing in all these stories criticizing Romney’s statement?
Romney’s statement.
Can’t let a clear defense of the 1st Amendment, and of American interests leak out into the public eye.
It’s all about the narrative.
More links and video at Instapundit.
Why Defending Free Speech Is More Important than Criticizing Bigotry. Romney was right and his critics are dead wrong. A timeline at PJ Media.
Obama caves to Romney, embraces free speech for critics of Islam
President Barack Obama used Air Force One to conduct a policy loop-de-loop Wednesday, asserting in a CBS interview that he supports Americans’ right to criticize Islam, following almost 18 hours of determined condemnation from Team Romney and damaging news from Egypt and Libya.
“We believe in the First Amendment,” Obama told CBS’s Steve Kroft during an interview arranged days earlier.
“It is one of the hallmarks of our Constitution that I’m sworn to uphold, and so we are always going to uphold the rights for individuals to speak their mind,” he said, according to a transcript narrated by White House spokesman Jay Carney.
The transcript was released several hours after Obama had a Rose garden statement to condemn criticism of Islam…
Another day, another walk-back.
