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Everyday Americans spout off hours upon hours of offensive statements about Islam. So how on Earth did a poorly-produced, wildly obscure 14-minute YouTube clip spark violent uprisings from Yemen to Afghanistan to Algeria to Egypt? The answer is Sheik Khaled Abdullah, an Egyptian TV host who latched onto a trailer of the U.S. film Innocence of Muslims on Sunday, a move that has stoked anti-American sentiment across the Muslim world.

At the outset of the controversy, the U.S. media focused on the blowhard producer of the film Sam Bacile, a pathological liar of sorts, who allegedly tricked his cast and crew into making the grotesquely offensive movie and lied to the mainstream media about his identity and the film's financing. While Bacile's lies have made for an interesting media sideshow, he never would've become a headline if his film hadn't sparked an international incident. So the question remains: Why this shoddy YouTube clip and why now?

The original trailer of Innocence of Muslims was posted to YouTube by Bacile in July, but never gained attention until last week when it was translated into Arabic and linked to by an Egyptian-American Copt Morris Sadek in an Arabic-language blog post. Around that same time, Koran-burning Florida Pastor Terry Jones began promoting the film to practically no effect in the U.S. But it did gain the attention of a Glenn Beck-style TV pundit in Egypt: Sheikh Khalad Abdalla, a host on the Islamist satellite-TV station al-Nas. On Sept. 8, Abdullah lit the match that set this entire international incident in motion and broadcast an offensive clip of the trailer in which a man playing Muhammad calls a donkey "the first Muslim animal." Here's the fateful moment of Abdullah on TV playing the clip: