General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsA bunch of information about this whole mess
The headline here is pretty Representative of the OP. Having done some digging, here's some stray observations.
(tip: Google translate will translate Arabic, but not any faster than it would take to teach yourself the language. But at least I've looked at the websites of all the players in the story while learning what I could from English language sources.)
Well, a hundred web pages later it seems that there is something extreme Christians and extreme Muslims agree on... gay people are allied with whichever sects they are against. Religious outrage peddlers are just a drag. All of them.
We've got embittered members of the Coptic Christian minority in Egypt coming to America and making a crummy movie downing Mohamed because they hate Islam. Where they come from they are a religious minority under the Muslim majority going back almost a millennium, so their 'tude is as understandable as anyone else's... but they are shit-stirrers and full of sectarian hostility. Their downing of Mohamed includes suggesting he was bisexual, of course.
We've got embittered American fundamentalist Christian Terry Jones, who most likely thinks everyone he doesn't like is gay, endorsing "the movie" simply because he hates Islam.
We've got Egyptian Salafi TV Host Sheik Khaled Abdallah bringing "the movie" to wide Arabic audiences for the first time as part of his ongoing crusade against Egyptian Coptics. To him the significance of the movie wasn't that America is against Mohamed but that the Egyptian Coptic community, his major and continual target, is against Mohamed.
After his Coptic hobby-horse come Shiite's and gays and jews and atheists... the usual. In this clip he manages to attribute a major Egyptian soccer riot to Isreali, Iranian, gay and atheist infiltrators. Because Iran is all about spreading the gay agenda. It appears that he wants his country back. http://www.memritv.org/clip/en/3305.htm )
So the whole thing with the movie is Egyptian "inside baseball" sectarian hate ping-pong.
A couple of sources of miscellaneous information. (The NYT blog is before much was known about the Coptic film-maker so has some America-side details wrong, but is probably the first American journalism to talk about the real origination of the protests, from the airing of "the movie" on Sheik Khaled Abdallah's show on Egyptian-based Arabic religious network Al Nas on 9/8/12.)
http://www.theatlanticwire.com/global/2012/09/egyptian-outrage-peddler-who-sent-anti-islam-youtube-clip-viral/56826/
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/11/obscure-film-mocking-muslim-prophet-sparks-anti-u-s-protests-in-egypt-and-libya/
Oh, and I forgot al-Qaida. They hate everybody, of course, including gay people. The first Cairo Embassy protest featured a distinct pro al-Qaida flavor. AQ #1 Al Zawahiri's brother was in attendance. The folks scaling the building didn't just take down the flag. One of them scrawled "Ben Laden" on the embassy sign.
And the protest in Benghazi seems to have been organized by al-Qaida franchise Ansar al-Sharia as cover for their commando raid on the consulate. (I have read that Libyan Ansar al-Sharia is distinct from the Yemeni Ansar al-Sharia. So they can fight each other over the name when they run out of other things to fight about.)
An absolute cluster-fuck of radical religious nuts, all thinking locally and acting globally.
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In looking for examples of Al Nas programing other than the Sheik Khaled Abdallah show you run into zillions of videos of Abu Alala Muhammad ibn Hussein ibn Yacoub... I guess he's the Bill O'Reilly of Al Nas. I don't know that he's a player in the current embassy protests, but since I was on his Wiki page at one point I'll include this example of civil religious discourse.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_Hussein_Yacoub