(NEW YORK) MintPress — It was, unfortunately, another 9/11 to remember. This time, the attacks on American soil were not against Americans, and the attacks against Americans did not take place on American soil, but they were once again the result of religious extremism that continues to threaten peaceful American-Islamic relations both inside the United States and overseas.

The attacks on the American Embassy in Cairo and its consulate in Benghazi, which killed Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other State Department employees, were thought to be triggered by an obscure independent film, “Innocence of Muslims,” which was made in the U.S. and mocks the Prophet Mohammed and other historical figures.

The Wall Street Journal initially reported that the two-hour film was produced and directed by an Israeli-American, Sam Bacile, a California real-estate developer who called Islam “a cancer” in an interview with the newspaper.

The film’s consultant, Steve Klein, later told journalist Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic that Bacile is neither Israeli nor Jewish and the name is actually a pseudonym for about 15 Coptic and Evangelical Christians from Syria, Turkey, Pakistan and Egypt. Goldberg could not independently verify Klein’s claims.

The man who says he is Bacile also told the Journal that he raised $5 million from about 100 Jewish donors and shot the movie in California in the summer of 2011. He said it was shown in its entirety just once earlier this year at a theater in Hollywood.

A 14-minute trailer featuring an amateurish cast, some with beards glued to their faces, was posted on YouTube in July.

“In an era of digital online media, anybody can put out anything they want, which can be good and bad,” Ibrahim Hooper, Communications Director for the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), tells MintPress News. “We have a First Amendment, and we are a strong believer in that, but it also means people are free to be idiots and bigots if they want.”

“This production is just so amateurish, so trashy and so intentionally inflammatory that it’s not worth paying attention to it.” he adds.

A brief glance at the trailer is all that’s needed to grasp his point. The opening line: “Our prophet had 61 wives — 11 at the same time. He even had a girlfriend!”

Unfortunately, though, what should have been nothing more than a ridiculous satirical video has had an explosive impact.

Video goes viral

The trailer gained little attention until last week, when a version dubbed into Arabic was posted on the same YouTube channel and then copied and viewed tens of thousands of times.

Then, a Coptic activist and lawyer living in the U.S., Morris Sadek, whose Egyptian citizenship had been revoked for promoting calls for an attack on Egypt, drew attention to the trailer in an Arabic-language blog post. He also passed around a link to the trailer in an e-mail newsletter.

That day, a two-minute excerpt dubbed in Arabic was broadcast on the Egyptian TV channel Al-Nas by host Sheikh Khaled Abdalla. It showed the actor playing a caricature of Muhammad calling a donkey “the first Muslim animal.”

Last year, according to the New York Times, the Egyptian-British journalist and blogger Sarah Carr wrote, “Sheikh Khaled Abdalla is part of a school of particularly shrill religious demagogues who turn every possible event into an attack on Islam.”

The film was also promoted by fundamentalist pastor Terry Jones, whose plans to burn Qurans on Sept. 11, 2011 led to deadly riots around the world.

Jones said on Sept. 11, 2012 that he planned to show the trailer that night at his church, the Dove World Outreach Center, in Gainesville, Fla. “It is an American production, not designed to attack Muslims but to show the destructive ideology of Islam,” he said in a statement.

Not surprisingly, Morris Sadek and Jones are close allies, and there is a picture on Sadek’s blog post of the two men shaking hands at a tiny, anti-Islam protest outside the White House in June.

Diplomats under fire

Photographs and video posted online showed the protesters at the embassy in Cairo on Tuesday ripping the American flag apart and raising a black jihadist flag with the words, “There is no god but Allah and Muhammad is his messenger.”

Local bloggers wrote that there were also pro al-Qaida chants and that the protesters had scrawled the name Osama bin Laden on a sign outside the embassy.

American scholar and Mid East historian Juan Cole claimed on his blog “Informed Comment” that they represented a small group of extremists.

“Although some of the Egyptian demonstrators may have thought that the films … were being widely shown in American theaters and on television,” he wrote, “I think the jihadis’ leadership cynically manufactured this ‘crisis’ in order to grab headlines and force the post-revolutionary governments to take a stand.

“If you stood with the Americans, they’d be guilty of blasphemy themselves. If they stood with the jihadis, they’d have surrendered some legitimacy to the latter,” he continued.

Revenge attack

Although it was originally believed that the assault on the consulate in Benghazi was likewise a reaction to the film, the London-based think tank Quilliam, which focuses on counter-extremism, particularly Islamism, maintains that it was not.

“We at Quilliam believe that the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi.was a well planned terrorist attack that would have occurred regardless of the demonstration, to serve another purpose,” it said in a press release

“According to information obtained by Quilliam — from foreign sources and from within Benghazi — we have reason to believe that the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi came to avenge the death of Abu Yaya al-Libi, al-Qaeda’s second in command killed a few months ago.”

It continued, “The reasons for this are as follows: 24 hours before this attack, none other than the leader of al-Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri, released a video on Jihadist forums to mark the anniversary of 9/11. In this video, Zawahiri acknowledged the death of his second in command Abu Yahya and urged Libyans to avenge his killing.

In addition, “According to our sources, the attack was the work of roughly 20 militants, prepared for a military assault – it is rare that an RPG7 is present at a peaceful protest.”

Finally, “According to our sources, the attack against the Consulate had two waves. The first attack led to U.S. officials being evacuated from the consulate by Libyan security forces, only for the second wave to be launched against U.S. officials after they were kept in a secure location.”

Noman Benotman, president of Quilliam, said, “These are acts committed by uncontrollable jihadist groups. We hope Libya will seize this opportunity to revive its policy of Disarmament, Demobilisation and Reintegration (DDR) in order to facilitate an end to the spread of such attacks, with the help of the International Community.”

Meanwhile, about 50 protesters burned American flags outside the U.S. Embassy in Tunisia’s capital, Tunis, to protest “Innocence of Muslims.”

The man who claims to be Bacile has gone into hiding, but he continues to defend the film. Speaking by phone Tuesday from an undisclosed location, he told the Associated Press that he intended his film to be a provocative political statement condemning the religion.

“Our attitude is to build understanding, but occasionally something breaks through and goes viral,” says Hooper of CAIR. “We counsel people in the Muslim world to ignore it, despite the obvious intent to incite.”