Muslims Call for End to Vilification of Islam: A protest close to Google’s offices on Sunday 14th October 2012 called on them to withdraw a short anti-Islamic video and other Islamophobic material from their YouTube channel.
The video, variously titled but mainly known as Innocence of Muslims was first uploaded to YouTube in July 2012 in an English language version but was the dubbed in Arabic in early September that year.
Wikipedia quotes a Vanity Fair review of the video: “Exceptionally amateurish, with disjointed dialogue, jumpy editing, and performances that would have looked melodramatic even in a silent movie, the clip is clearly designed to offend Muslims, portraying Mohammed as a bloodthirsty murderer, Lothario and pedophile with omnidirectional sexual appetites.“
The videos were apparently trailers for a full length film called ‘Desert Warrior’ which had been filmed as being about life in Egypt 2,000 years by US non-profit Media for Christ, but in post-production was altered by directory Nakoula Basseley Nakoula , working under the pseudonym Sam Bacile, to be crudely and explicitly anti-Islamic, much to the disgust of at least some of its actors. It isn’t clear if the full film was ever completed, although an early version was apparently screened once in California to an audience of ten people.
Its director was arrested in late September in Los Angeles under various charges related to the making of the film and his use of the alias “Sam Bacile”, and later sentenced to a year in prison and 4 years of parole.
The videos on YouTube led to protests around the world, including in the Middle East, North Africa, Asia and Europe, some violent with “over 50 deaths, including 23 in Pakistan.” The protest in London was a peaceful one, organised by the Muslim Action Forum who called on YouTube to remove the video and for the the UK Government and other organisations to endorse a ‘Declaration of Global Civility.’
The UK government Commission for Countering Extremism in 2024 commissioned an independent report into Blasphemy Extremism in the UK, which incorrectly states that the The Muslim Action Forum “first emerged in 2015 when it organised a large protest outside of Downing Street to express anger over plans by Charlie Hebdo to republish its 2012 cartoons of Mohammed.”
Had the authors looked at My London Diary they would have known it was organising protests in 2012, and that it was founded following a meeting of “over 100 leading Muslim Scholars, Spiritual leaders and representatives of major Muslim organisations” in Birmingham in September 2012.
In my post on My London Diary I made my own comments about the MAF and their Declaration of Global Civility, in particular noting “What many might feel is missing from the declaration is the lack of any reference or acknowledgement to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which was adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations in 1948 and is the foundation of our ideas of what a civilised society should be.”
I also commented that “global civility should include rather more tolerance for the expression of views which are abhorrent to you, and should certainly preclude the kind of violent responses that this film has aroused in some Muslim countries.” And I commented on the way that women were marginalised in the protest, kept at some distance from the speakers and the men, with no women speakers.
You can read my lengthy account of the protest and seem many more pictures I took at the event on My London Diary: End the Vilification of Islam.
The previous weekend I had photographed another peaceful London protest against these films: Muslims against Anti-Muslim Film.
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