Salman Rushdie Death Fatwa: Iran Adds To Reward For Author's Killing
By NASSER KARIMI 09/16/12 12:35 PM ET
TEHRAN, Iran -- A semi-official religious foundation in Iran has increased a reward it had offered for the killing of British author Salman Rushdie to $3.3 million from $2.8 million, a newspaper reported, days after protests coursed through the Muslim world over alleged insults to the Prophet Muhammad.
Hardline Jomhoori Eslami daily and other newspapers reported on Sunday that the move appeared to be linked to protests over an amateurish anti-Islam film, which crowds in some 20 countries said drove them to defend their faith – in some cases by attacking American embassies.
The report said the 15 Khordad Foundation will pay the higher reward to whoever acts on the 1989 fatwa, or religious edict, issued by Iran's late leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, which called for the death of the author "The Satanic Verses" because the novel was considered blasphemous.
The paper said the decision to boost the original reward, offered in the 1990s, came from foundation head Ayatollah Hassan Saneii.
"As long as the exalted Imam Khomeini's historical fatwa against apostate Rushdie is not carried out, it won't be the last insult. If the fatwa had been carried out, later insults in the form of caricature, articles and films that have continued would have not happened," the paper quoted Saneii as saying.
Iran's hardliners say Khomeini's fatwa is "irrevocable."
In 1998, the Iranian government declared it would not support the fatwa, but at the same time the government said it could not rescind the edict, since under Islamic law, that could be done only by the person who issued it. Khomeini died in June 1989.
Khomeini's fatwa sent Rushdie into hiding under police protection, but that didn't stop him from writing more novels. In 1990, he published an apology and reiterated his respect for Islam.
Also on Sunday, thousands of clerics gathered in seminaries across Iran to protest the anti-Islamic movie, state TV reported.
Ahmad Khatami, an ally of the country's top leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, told a gathering in In the holy city of Qom, 130 kilometers south of the capital Tehran, that the United States and Israel were the "main suspects" in the case.
His remarks prompted "death to Israel and "down with the U.S." chants by demonstrators.
Egypt’s New Leader Spells Out Terms for U.S.-Arab Ties
Tara Todras-Whitehill for The New York Times
President Mohamed Morsi will travel to New York on Sunday for a United Nations meeting.
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK and STEVEN ERLANGER September 22, 2012
CAIRO — On the eve of his first trip to the United States as Egypt’s new Islamist president, Mohamed Morsi said the United States needed to fundamentally change its approach to the Arab world, showing greater respect for its values and helping build a Palestinian state, if it hoped to overcome decades of pent-up anger.
A former leader of the Muslim Brotherhood and Egypt’s first democratically elected president, Mr. Morsi sought in a 90-minute interview with The New York Times to introduce himself to the American public and to revise the terms of relations between his country and the United States after the ouster of Hosni Mubarak, an autocratic but reliable ally.
He said it was up to Washington to repair relations with the Arab world and to revitalize the alliance with Egypt, long a cornerstone of regional stability.
If Washington is asking Egypt to honor its treaty with Israel, he said, Washington should also live up to its own Camp David commitment to Palestinian self-rule. He said the United States must respect the Arab world’s history and culture, even when that conflicts with Western values.
And he dismissed criticism from the White House that he did not move fast enough to condemn protesters who recently climbed over the United States Embassy wall and burned the American flag in anger over a video that mocked the Prophet Muhammad.
“We took our time” in responding to avoid an explosive backlash, he said, but then dealt “decisively” with the small, violent element among the demonstrators.
“We can never condone this kind of violence, but we need to deal with the situation wisely,” he said, noting that the embassy employees were never in danger.
Mr. Morsi, who will travel to New York on Sunday for a meeting of the United Nations General Assembly, arrives at a delicate moment. He faces political pressure at home to prove his independence, but demands from the West for reassurance that Egypt under Islamist rule will remain a stable partner.
Mr. Morsi, 61, whose office was still adorned with nautical paintings that Mr. Mubarak left behind, said the United States should not expect Egypt to live by its rules.
“If you want to judge the performance of the Egyptian people by the standards of German or Chinese or American culture, then there is no room for judgment,” he said. “When the Egyptians decide something, probably it is not appropriate for the U.S. When the Americans decide something, this, of course, is not appropriate for Egypt.”
He suggested that Egypt would not be hostile to the West, but would not be as compliant as Mr. Mubarak either.
“Successive American administrations essentially purchased with American taxpayer money the dislike, if not the hatred, of the peoples of the region,” he said, by backing dictatorial governments over popular opposition and supporting Israel over the Palestinians.
He initially sought to meet with President Obama at the White House during his visit this week, but he received a cool reception, aides to both presidents said. Mindful of the complicated election-year politics of a visit with Egypt’s Islamist leader, Mr. Morsi dropped his request.
His silence in the immediate aftermath of the embassy protest elicited a tense telephone call from Mr. Obama, who also told a television interviewer that at that moment he did not consider Egypt an ally, if not an enemy either. When asked if he considered the United States an ally, Mr. Morsi answered in English, “That depends on your definition of ally,” smiling at his deliberate echo of Mr. Obama. But he said he envisioned the two nations as “real friends.”
Mr. Morsi spoke in an ornate palace that Mr. Mubarak inaugurated three decades ago, a world away from the Nile Delta farm where the new president grew up, or the prison cells where he had been confined by Mr. Mubarak for his role in the Brotherhood. Three months after his swearing-in, the most noticeable change to the presidential office was a plaque on his desk bearing the Koranic admonition, “Be conscious of a day on which you will return to God.”
A stocky figure with a trim beard and wire-rim glasses, he earned a doctorate in materials science at the University of Southern California in the early 1980s. He spoke with an easy confidence in his new authority, reveling in an approval rating he said was at 70 percent. When he grew animated, he slipped from Arabic into crisp English.
Little known at home or abroad until just a few months ago, he was the Brotherhood’s second choice as a presidential nominee after the first choice was disqualified. On the night of the election, the generals who had ruled since Mr. Mubarak’s ouster issued a decree keeping most presidential powers for themselves.
But last month Mr. Morsi confounded all expectations by prying full executive authority back from the generals. In the interview, when an interpreter suggested that the generals had “decided” to exit politics, Mr. Morsi quickly corrected him.
“The president of the Arab Republic of Egypt is the commander of the armed forces, full stop. Egypt now is a real civil state. It is not theocratic, it is not military. It is democratic, free, constitutional, lawful and modern.”
He added, “We are behaving according to the Egyptian people’s choice and will, nothing else — is it clear?”
He praised Mr. Obama for moving “decisively and quickly” to support the Arab Spring revolutions, and he said he believed that Americans supported “the right of the people of the region to enjoy the same freedoms that Americans have.”
Arabs and Americans have “a shared objective, each to live free in their own land, according to their customs and values, in a fair and democratic fashion,” he said, adding that he hoped for “a harmonious, peaceful coexistence.”
But he also argued that Americans “have a special responsibility” for the Palestinians because the United States had signed the 1978 Camp David accord. The agreement called for the withdrawal of Israeli troops from the West Bank and Gaza to make way for full Palestinian self-rule.
“As long as peace and justice are not fulfilled for the Palestinians, then the treaty remains unfulfilled,” he said.
He made no apologies for his roots in the Brotherhood, the insular religious revival group that was Mr. Mubarak’s main opposition and now dominates Egyptian politics.
“I grew up with the Muslim Brotherhood,” he said. “I learned my principles in the Muslim Brotherhood. I learned how to love my country with the Muslim Brotherhood. I learned politics with the Brotherhood. I was a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood.”
He left the group when he took office but remains a member of its political party. But he said he sees “absolutely no conflict” between his loyalty to the Brotherhood and his vows to govern on behalf of all, including members of the Christian minority or those with more secular views.
“I prove my independence by taking the correct acts for my country,” he said. “If I see something good from the Muslim Brotherhood, I will take it. If I see something better in the Wafd” — Egypt’s oldest liberal party — “I will take it.”
He repeatedly vowed to uphold equal citizenship rights of all Egyptians, regardless of religion, sex or class. But he stood by the religious arguments he once made as a Brotherhood leader that neither a woman nor a Christian would be a suitable president.
“We are talking about values, beliefs, cultures, history, reality,” he said. He said the Islamic position on presidential eligibility was a matter for Muslim scholars to decide, not him. But regardless of his own views or the Brotherhood’s, he said, civil law was another matter.
“I will not prevent a woman from being nominated as a candidate for the presidential campaign,” he said. “This is not in the Constitution. This is not in the law. But if you want to ask me if I will vote for her or not, that is something else, that is different.”
He was also eager to reminisce about his taste of American culture as a graduate student at the University of Southern California. “Go, Trojans!” he said, and he remembered learning about the world from Barbara Walters in the morning and Walter Cronkite at night. “And that’s the way it is!” Mr. Morsi said with a smile.
But he also displayed some ambivalence. He effused about his admiration for American work habits, punctuality and time management. But when an interpreter said that Mr. Morsi had “learned a lot” in the United States, he quickly interjected a qualifier in English: “Scientifically!”
He was troubled by the gangs and street of violence of Los Angeles, he said, and dismayed by the West’s looser sexual mores, mentioning couples living together out of wedlock and what he called “naked restaurants,” like Hooters.
“I don’t admire that,” he said. “But that is the society. They are living their way.”
If we ever got rid of Bibi..I mean he LOST an election .. it sounds there would be REAL HELP for the Palestinians! ..Sounds as if he will HELP us to live up to our words... ;) ...
Indonesian protesters stomping on a poster of Nakoula Basseley Nakoula in September. Adek Berry/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, who created the film "Innocence of Muslims," being taken into custody in California in September. Bret Hartman/Reuters
Mr. Nakoula's home in California. Reed Saxon/Associated Press
A sign for the offices of Media for Christ near Los Angeles. Monica Almeida/The New York Times
Lily Dionne, an actress who worked on Mr. Nakoula's film. Monica Almeida/The New York Times
By SERGE F. KOVALESKI and BROOKS BARNES Published: November 25, 2012
LOS ANGELES — Fuming for two months in a jail cell here, Nakoula Basseley Nakoula [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/14/us/origins-of-provocative-video-are-shrouded.html ] has had plenty of time to reconsider the wisdom of making “Innocence of Muslims,” his crude YouTube movie trailer [embedded in the post to which this is a reply] depicting the Prophet Muhammad as a bloodthirsty, philandering thug.
Does Mr. Nakoula now regret the footage? After all, it fueled deadly protests across the Islamic world and led the unlikely filmmaker to his own arrest for violating his supervised release on a fraud conviction.
Not at all. In his first public comments since his incarceration soon after the video gained international attention in September, Mr. Nakoula told The New York Times that he would go to great lengths to convey what he called “the actual truth” about Muhammad. “I thought, before I wrote this script,” he said, “that I should burn myself in a public square to let the American people and the people of the world know this message that I believe in.”
In explaining his reasons for the film, Mr. Nakoula, 55, a Coptic Christian born in Egypt, cited the 2009 massacre [ http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/06/us/06forthood.html ] at Fort Hood, Tex., as a prime example of the violence committed “under the sign of Allah.” His anger seemed so intense over the years that even from a federal prison in 2010, he followed the protests against the building of an Islamic center and mosque near ground zero in New York as he continued to work on his movie script.
Until now, only the barest details were known about the making of the film that inspired international outrage. Initial reports made it seem as if the film had been thrown together in about a year.
But a longer, more intricate and somewhat surreal story emerges from interviews with Mr. Nakoula, church and law enforcement officials and more than a dozen people who worked on the movie — those who knew its real subject and those who were tricked into believing it was to be a sword-and-sandal epic called “Desert Warriors.” Together, they paint a picture of a financially desperate man with a penchant for fiction who was looking to give meaning and means to a life in shambles.
There is a dispute about how important the video was in provoking the terrorist assault on the American diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, that killed the United States ambassador and three other Americans. Militants interviewed at the scene said they were unaware of the video until a protest in Cairo called it to their attention. But the video without question led to protests across the globe, beginning in Cairo and spreading rapidly in September to Yemen, Morocco, Iran, Tunisia, Sudan, Iraq, Pakistan, Lebanon, Indonesia and Malaysia.
The making of the film is a bizarre tale of fake personas and wholesale deception. And as with almost everything touched over the years by Mr. Nakoula — a former gas station manager, bong salesman, methamphetamine ingredient supplier and convicted con man — it is almost impossible to separate fact from fabrication.
A few years ago, Mr. Nakoula told some of the crew members he had gathered, supposedly to make “Desert Warriors,” that the project would have to be put off. He had cancer. Treatment was needed, far away, and they would not be able to reach him. His family shared a similar story with church officials.
Mr. Nakoula, it turns out, was not going away for cancer treatment, although the time did overlap with the prison sentence for bank fraud, which the crew knew nothing about. (Mr. Nakoula pleaded guilty this month to violating his supervised release in that case and received a one-year sentence.)
He claims that he only wrote the film — five versions of the script — and served as a “cultural consultant.” One of Mr. Nakoula’s sons, Abanob Basseley Nakoula, 21, said in an interview that his father had written the script in Arabic and then translated it into English. The son said he helped him with grammar.
But Mr. Nakoula, who described himself to some cast members as the writer and producer, explained to a confidant that his plan was to fool actors into thinking they were making a movie built around an ancient tribal villain named George, dubbing in the name “Muhammad” later whenever anybody said “George.”
As early as 2008, he had cobbled together a 20-page treatment for a film he wanted to call “The First Terrorist.”
In Mr. Nakoula’s responses to questions from The Times, conveyed through his lawyer, Steve Seiden, he had no second thoughts about the way he had handled the cast. “They had signed contracts before they went in front of any camera, and these contracts in no way prevented changes to the script or movie,” he said.
Abanob Nakoula said: “The actors were misled. My dad thought the film would create a stir, and as a precaution for their safety, there are no acting or production credits at the end of the trailer or the full-length movie.”
A Slippery Identity
The amateurish project might have disappeared quietly, the way many forgettable messes do in Hollywood’s underbelly. Yet three years after completing his script treatment, Mr. Nakoula was on a makeshift movie set inside the suburban Los Angeles headquarters of a nonprofit organization called Media for Christ, whose founder has been critical of Islam. There Mr. Nakoula was surrounded by actors wearing false beards, and there was a goat slipping on a tile floor. Alongside him was his director for hire: Alan Roberts, known for soft-core pornography movies like “The Happy Hooker Goes Hollywood.”
Mr. Nakoula noted that the head of Media for Christ, Joseph Nassralla Abdelmasih, was “a friend for five years.” Mr. Abdelmasih attended the 2010 protests against the Islamic center near ground zero. Other contacts in the world of anti-Islam activism would also play pivotal roles. Helping to publicize the film were Morris Sadek and Elaia Basily — activist Copts living in Northern Virginia — and Terry Jones, the Florida preacher whose own Koran burnings had stirred violence abroad.
That Mr. Nakoula is a hard man to pin down is no accident. He told the cast and crew that his name was Sam Bassil, which he sometimes spelled differently. Federal prosecutors convicted him in 2010 under the name Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, but he recently admitted to the court that he had changed his name in 2002 to Mark Basseley Youssef.
What he did not mention at the time, however, was that in 2009, according to court records, he changed his name yet again, this time to Ebrahem Fawzy Youssef. (His lawyer said Mr. Nakoula was unaware until recently that the latest change had been finalized.)
Facts presented by Mr. Nakoula as rock solid tend to weaken upon inspection. For instance, he told federal probation officials that he first came to Los Angeles in 1984 for the Olympics as part of the Egyptian soccer team. But a Web site listing official players on that team does not include Mr. Nakoula. Nor was there evidence that he was on the squad’s staff.
He claimed during production that the budget for the film was $5 million, raised mainly from Jewish donors. Actually, it cost no more than $80,000, apparently raised through his second ex-wife’s Egyptian family and donations from other Copts, according to a person who discussed the financing with him.
Even though the shoot lasted only 15 days, there was enough footage for a feature-length movie, which exists, running roughly one hour and 40 minutes. Mr. Basily, the Virginia activist who has donated to Media for Christ, said he watched the entire film on DVD early this year and found it historically accurate.
All that has been seen on the Web is the 14-minute YouTube trailer, which by the time it hit the Internet in July was titled “Innocence of Muslims.”
Mr. Nakoula was able to finish the project even though people who ran into him over the years found him puzzling. When he rented offices in suburban Los Angeles, other tenants noticed that he came around only at night for the most part and stored stacks of Marlboro cartons there, among other things. When he took a stall at a flea market to sell drug paraphernalia and tobacco merchandise, other stall holders noted that his wares never seemed to move and that he spent most of his time on the phone, shouting in Arabic.
And Coptic Church officials said they considered Mr. Nakoula an unlikely candidate for the kind of religious zeal behind “Innocence of Muslims” because he had attended services so infrequently. But Mr. Nakoula said fervor and witnessing persecution are what drove him to create the film.
In his written responses to questions, Mr. Nakoula reeled off “atrocities” by Muslims that went back many years and formed his views, focusing on shootings, a bombing and the torture of his fellow Copts. After the Fort Hood massacre, in which an Army psychiatrist with ties to Muslim extremism has been charged, “I became even more upset and enraged,” he said.
Abanob Nakoula said: “My dad is not an evil man. He has had a hard life. He did something — the movie, something he felt strongly about — that was not frowned upon by the Constitution. He would always say, ‘Don’t fight Muslims; fight their ideology.’ ”
From Prison to Studio
Nakoula Basseley Nakoula grew up in Egypt but came to the United States and wed Ingrid N. Rodriguez in 1986 in Nevada, according to state marriage records. They divorced in 1990, the records show. Soon afterward, while living in California, he married an Egyptian woman, Olivia Ibrahim, with whom he has three children. Although the couple divorced, the family members all lived together on a cul-de-sac in Cerritos until going into hiding after the video spread.
Mr. Nakoula declared bankruptcy in 2000. By then he was a felon: a police sting caught him trading crates of a methamphetamine ingredient for $45,000 in cash. He was sentenced to one year in prison but did community service instead. A little over a decade later, Mr. Nakoula, while at work on his movie, was arrested for bank fraud. He was behind bars for almost 21 months before getting out in the summer of last year.
“He said it might have been a blessing to go to prison because he had time to work on the script,” his son said.
Mr. Nakoula’s supervised release barred him from using aliases. But he resumed work on his movie under the name Sam Baccil, said Jimmy Israel, who assisted with preproduction. Mr. Israel, who still thought Mr. Nakoula had been away battling cancer, placed casting notices on Backstage.com [ http://backstage.com/ ]. One advertised 11 roles that included “George: male, 20-40, a strong leader, romantic, tyrant, a killer with no remorse, accent.” Mr. Israel said Mr. Nakoula told him that “Muhammad would be named George to mislead the actors.”
Mr. Nakoula found his director through a circuitous route. During the time of his bank fraud scheme, he rented five offices in a building owned by a man named Shlomo Bina, who, as it happened, had once aspired to a movie career, too, crossing paths with Mr. Roberts, the director. Chatting one day, Mr. Bina pointed him toward Mr. Roberts, whose real name is Robert Alan Brownell, records show. Attempts to reach Mr. Roberts through lawyers were unsuccessful.
A few Coptic immigrants in the United States have built media outlets with the help of programming that is anything but favorable toward Islam. One of them is Mr. Abdelmasih of Media for Christ. Not only did he provide Mr. Nakoula with 10 days of free studio space, but he also helped get the promotion going for the YouTube trailer by contacting Mr. Sadek in Virginia.
Mr. Sadek wrote in an e-mail that “my friend,” Mr. Abdelmasih, “told me that Mr. Nakoula had created a movie about the Copts’ persecution in Egypt.” Mr. Sadek then publicized the YouTube trailer on his Web site and to his contacts. Mr. Basily, the activist, also spread word about the trailer using social media. Mr. Sadek also put Mr. Nakoula in touch with another important promotional partner: Mr. Jones, the Florida pastor.
Mr. Abdelmasih said Mr. Nakoula called one day to ask to use his facility. “He said to me the movie was about persecution of Christians by the government, combined with radical Muslims,” Mr. Abdelmasih recalled in an interview.
‘Not Tech-Savvy’
Media for Christ provided no cameras or any other production help, Mr. Abdelmasih said. He also insisted that Media for Christ’s “work is not against Muslims,” and he said he was “shocked” by the final product. But his studio has been used to produce “Wake Up America,” a program hosted by Steve Klein, an insurance salesman in Hemet, Calif., and a staunch anti-Islam activist. Mr. Klein served as a consultant for Mr. Nakoula after they first met at Media for Christ.
When Dan Sutter, cast as George’s grandfather, arrived at Media for Christ’s offices in early August last year, Mr. Nakoula was there, greeting people as Sam. Mel Gibson’s “Passion of the Christ” played on a television in a break room.
Eight months or so after shooting ended, Mr. Nakoula contacted a few of the actors to return to Media for Christ for looping, a standard part of moviemaking in which inaudible dialogue is rerecorded. Lily Dionne, an extra with no lines who was called to dub for another actress, said that a fellow actor had also been asked back and that Mr. Nakoula told him to say “Muhammad” into a microphone. He did.
On July 2, the trailer was posted on YouTube by someone using the name Sam Bacile. Mr. Nakoula’s son said he was the one who did it.
“My dad is not tech-savvy at all, and does not know how to work social media,” Abanob Nakoula said. “So he asked me to take the initiative to spread the word, and I did my best.”
He explained that using the name Sam Bacile, he created a Facebook account before production started and then the YouTube account.
Abanob Nakoula added, “My dad wanted to show the trailer on TV as a commercial, and I told him that was not going to happen because it costs a lot of money and the networks would not show a 14-minute trailer, especially if they knew the content.”
Ana Facio-Krajcer and Noah Gilbert contributed reporting from Los Angeles, and Mai Ayyad from Cairo. Jack Begg contributed research.
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