‘It Makes Me Sick’: Actress in Muhammed Movie Says She Was Deceived, Had No Idea It Was About Islam

The story of the Muhammed movie which sparked deadly protests in Libya and Egypt gets weirder. The actors who appeared in it had no idea they were starring in anti-Islam propaganda which depicts Muhammed as a child molester and thug. They were deceived by the film's director, believing they were appearing in a film about the life of a generic Egyptian 2,000 years ago.

Cindy Lee Garcia, an actress from Bakersfield, Calif., has a small role in the Muhammed movie as a woman whose young daughter is given to Muhammed to marry. But in a phone interview this afternoon, Garcia told us she had no idea she was participating in an offensive spoof on the life of Muhammed when she answered a casting call through an agency last summer and got the part.

The script she was given was titled simply Desert Warriors.

"It was going to be a film based on how things were 2,000 years ago," Garcia said. "It wasn't based on anything to do with religion, it was just on how things were run in Egypt. There wasn't anything about Muhammed or Muslims or anything."

In the script and during the shooting, nothing indicated the controversial nature of the final product, now called Muslim Innocence. Muhammed wasn't even called Muhammed; he was "Master George," Garcia said. The word "Muhammed" was dubbed over in post-production, as were essentially all other offensive references to Islam and Muhammed.

For example, at 9:03 in the trailer, Garcia berates her husband, who wants to send their daughter to Muhammed: "Is your Muhammed a child molester?" she says in the final product. But the words are dubbed over what she actually said. The line in the script—and the line Garcia gave during filming—was, "is your God a child molester," Garcia told us today.

Garcia was horrified when she saw the end product, and when protesters in Libya killed four U.S. Embassy employees.

"I had nothing to do really with anything," she said today. "Now we have people dead because of a movie I was in. It makes me sick."

According to Garica, her three days on set last July were unremarkable. The film's mysterious pseudonymous writer and director, "Sam Bacile," has claimed to be an Israeli real estate mogul. But Garcia said Bacile told her he was Egyptian on set. Bacile had white hair and spoke Arabic to a number of "dark-skinned" men who hung around the set, she said. (A Bacile associate also told The Atlantic he wasn't Israeli or Jewish.)

"He was just really mellow. He was just sitting there and he wanted certain points to be made."

Once, Garcia said, Bacile wanted a girl that "Master George" (aka Muhammed) was to sleep with to look seven years old, instead of 10, to heighten the outrage. But his Assistant Directors protested, saying that was too young.

After the protests erupted and Bacile appeared in the media, Garcia called him up today to express her outrage at his deception.

"I called Sam and said, 'Why did you do this?' and he said, 'I'm tired of radical Islamists killing each other. Let other actors know it's not their fault.'"

Garcia isn't satisfied simply knowing it wasn't her fault.

"I'm going to sue his butt off."

Update: The entire 80-member cast and crew of the film have released a statement saying they were misled. Via CNN:

The entire cast and crew are extremely upset and feel taken advantage of by the producer. We are 100% not behind this film and were grossly misled about its intent and purpose. We are shocked by the drastic re-writes of the script and lies that were told to all involved. We are deeply saddened by the tragedies that have occurred.

Update II: Here's what appears to be the original casting call, posted in July 2011on craigslist:

NOW CASTING SAG and NON SAG ACTORS for "DESERT WARRIOR." Director Alan Roberts.
Historical desert drama set in Middle East. Indie Feature film shoots 18 days in L.A. in August. Studio and backlot locations.

Male Roles: DR. MATTHEW (Lead): Middle Eastern Pharmacist, 40-50, intelligent, family man; GEORGE (Lead); 40-50, Middle Eastern warrior leader, romantic, charismatic; YOUNG GEORGE (featured) 18-22; PRIEST (featured): 60-70, bearded; ABDO (featured), 60-70, Elder tribe leader; ISRAELI MEN 30-50 (featured); WARRIORS (featured) 18-50, Various Middle Eastern types, bearded.

Female Roles: CONDALISA (featured) 40, attractive, successful, strong willed; HILLARY (featured) 18 but must look younger, petite; innocent; YOUSTINA (featured) 16-18, Daughter of doctor; MIDDLE EASTERN WOMEN (Various Featured Roles) 18-40, attractive, exotic; OLDER WOMAN (featured) 60-70, feisty.

Please place Role desired in SUBJECT: line of email.

Indicate SAG or NON-SAG

Require phone contact for immediate interview in Beverly/LaCienega area.

If you have any more information please email me: Adrian@gawker.com

The Movie So Offensive That Egyptians Just Stormed the U.S. Embassy Over It

Terry Jones, the Florida Koran-burner, is helping to promote a movie vilifying Egypt's Muslims, and the Egyptian media got ahold of some clips.

Right now, protesters in Cairo are gathered at the U.S. embassy compound, where some have scaled the walls and pulled down the American flag, with which they've replaced a black flag bearing the prayer "There is no god but Allah and Mohammed is his messenger." They say they're protesting an American film that insults Prophet Mohammed. About half an hour in, someone took a photo that appears to show some of the protesters, of which Reuters estimates there to be 2,000, setting off celebratory fireworks.

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* Correction: This sentence originally credited Terry Jones with producing the film, as some Egyptian media had suggested. In fact, as the Wall Street Journal now reports, Jones is playing a promotional role, but the film was in fact directed and produced by "an Israeli-American California real-estate developer who called it a political effort to call attention to the hypocrisies of Islam." Separately, members of a Libyan Islamist extremist group called Ansar al-Sharia attacked the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, over the film, firing at the building with a rocket-propelled grenade.

U.S. Suspects Libya Attack Was Planned

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration suspects that the fiery attack in Libya that killed the American ambassador and three other diplomats may have been planned rather than a spontaneous mob getting out of control, American officials said Wednesday.

Officials in Washington studying the events of the past 24 hours have focused on the differences between the protests on the American embassy in Cairo and the attack on the consulate in Benghazi, the Libyan city where Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and the other Americans were killed.

The protesters in Cairo appeared to be a genuinely spontaneous unarmed mob angered by an anti-Islam video said to have been produced in the United States. By contrast, it appeared the attackers in Benghazi were armed with mortars and rocket-propelled grenades. Intelligence reports are inconclusive at this point, officials said, but indications suggest the possibility that an organized group had either been waiting for an opportunity to exploit like the protests over the video or perhaps even generated the protests as a cover for their attack.

President Obama strongly condemned the killings and ordered increased security at American diplomatic posts around the world. American defense officials said 50 Marines were en route to Libya to strengthen security at United States diplomatic facilities, and the State Department ordered all “nonemergency” personnel out of the country and warned Americans not to go there, suggesting that further attacks were possible.

The death of Mr. Stevens on Tuesday, the anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, was the first of an American envoy abroad in more than three decades.

“These four Americans stood up for freedom and human dignity,” Mr. Obama said in a televised statement from the White House Rose Garden, where he stood with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. “Make no mistake: we will work with the Libyan government to bring to justice the killers who attacked our people.”

  Mr. Obama also offered praise for the Libyan government, noting that Libyan security forces fought back against the mob, helped protect American diplomats and took Mr. Stevens’s body to the hospital. “This attack will not break the bonds between the United States and Libya,” he said.

The attack at the compound in Benghazi was far more deadly than administration officials first announced on Tuesday night, when Mrs. Clinton said one American had been killed and one injured.

Another of those killed was Sean Smith, an information management officer who joined the Foreign Service 10 years ago, Mrs. Clinton said in a statement. The State Department did not identify the other two, pending notification of relatives. Mr. Smith, a husband and father of two, previously served in Iraq, Canada and the Netherlands.

The killing of the ranking American official in Libya raised questions about the vulnerability of American officials at a time when the profound changes sweeping the Arab world have hardly dispelled the rage against the United States that still smolders in pockets around the region. The Benghazi attack also put an enormous new strain on Washington’s relations with the new Libyan government that took over after the ouster of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi last year, and they threatened to sour American public opinion about the prospects of the democratic opening of the Arab Spring.

Neither Mr. Obama nor Mrs. Clinton disclosed details of the attack, and it was unclear precisely how Mr. Stevens or the others had died.

Officials in Washington said no warning had been distributed inside the United States government in the days before the assault on the consulate, either on the possibility of an attack to coincide with the 9/11 anniversary or more specifically that a plot might be afoot in Libya. That suggests that American intelligence was not picking up unusual communications or other evidence pointing to a planned attack.

About 24 hours before the consulate attack, however, Al Qaeda posted to militant forums on the Web a video in which its leader, Ayman al-Zawahri, acknowledged the death in an American  drone strike in June of his Libyan deputy, Abu Yahya al-Libi, and called on Libyans to avenge the death.

If it were established that the deaths of the American diplomats resulted not from the spontaneous anger of a crowd about an insult to Islam but from a long-planned Qaeda plot, that might sharply shift perceptions of the events. But officials cautioned that the issue was still under urgent study.

The White House would not comment. “At this stage, it would be premature to ascribe any motive to this reprehensible act,” said Tommy Vietor, a White House spokesman.

Mr. Stevens assumed his ambassador post in May after having served as an envoy to the Libyan rebels who overthrew Colonel Qaddafi. He was widely admired by the Libyan rebels for his support of their struggle, and others who knew Mr. Stevens described him as an extraordinarily talented and insightful diplomat.

Mr. Obama called Mr. Stevens “a courageous and exemplary representative of the United States” who had “selflessly served our country and the Libyan people at our mission in Benghazi” and, as ambassador, “supported Libya’s transition to democracy.”

The news of the deaths emerged on Wednesday after violence spilled over the American Consulate in Benghazi and demonstrators stormed the fortified walls of the American Embassy in Cairo. Anti-American protests also were reported in Tunisia, the birthplace of the Arab Spring revolution, and in Gaza. The Taliban called on Afghans to “take revenge” on American targets in Afghanistan.

The president of Libya’s National Assembly, Mohammed Magarief, apologized for the attack, describing it as “cowardly” and offering condolences, The Associated Press reported. Speaking to reporters, he said the culprits would be brought to justice and pledged to maintain close relations with the United States.

Tuesday’s violence was initially attributed to anger over a 14-minute trailer for the American video, called “Innocence of Muslims,” that was released on the Web. The violence provoked by the video, which was publicized in recent days by the Egyptian media, recalled the wave of rage and protest in 2005 that followed the publication of 12 cartoons in a Danish newspaper lampooning the Prophet Muhammad.

An unidentified Libyan official in Benghazi told Reuters that Mr. Stevens and three staff members were killed in Benghazi “when gunmen fired rockets at them.” It was not clear where in the city the attack took place. The Libyan official said the ambassador was being driven from the consulate building to a safer location when gunmen opened fire, Reuters said.

Agence France-Presse quoted the Libyan Interior Ministry as saying that Mr. Stevens and the three staff members were killed when a mob attacked the consulate in Benghazi. Al Jazeera’s English-language Web site said Mr. Stevens died of smoke inhalation after a mob set fire to the building, and a Libyan physician who treated Mr. Stevens at the hospital was quoted by The Associated Press as saying he had tried to revive him for 90 minutes.

In Italy, the Web site of the newspaper Corriere della Sera showed images of what it said was the American Consulate in Benghazi ablaze with men carrying automatic rifles and waving V-for-victory signs, silhouetted against the burning buildings. One photograph showed a man closely resembling Mr. Stevens apparently unconscious, his face seeming to be smudged with smoke and his eyes closed.

Mr. Stevens, conversant in Arabic and French, had worked at the State Department since 1991 after a spell as an international trade lawyer in Washington. He taught English as a Peace Corps volunteers in Morocco from 1983 to 1985, the State Department Web site said.

According to the State Department, five American ambassadors had been killed by terrorists before the attack on the American consulate in Benghazi. The most recent was Adolph Dubs, killed after being kidnapped in Afghanistan in 1979. The others were John Gordon Mein, in Guatemala in 1968; Cleo A. Noel Jr., in Sudan in 1973; Rodger P. Davies, in Cyprus in 1974; and Francis E. Meloy Jr., in Lebanon in 1976.

In the violence in Benghazi on Tuesday, protesters with automatic rifles and rocket-propelled grenades attacked the American Consulate and set it on fire, Libyan officials said. Some news reports said American guards inside the consulate had fired their weapons, and a brigade of Libyan security forces arriving on the scene had battled the attackers in the streets as well.

In Cairo, thousands of unarmed protesters had gathered outside the American embassy during the day. By nightfall, some had climbed over the wall around the embassy compound and destroyed a flag hanging inside. The vandals replaced it with a black flag favored by ultraconservatives and militants and labeled with the most basic Islamic profession of faith: “There is no god but God, and Muhammad is his prophet.” Embassy guards fired guns into the air, but a large contingent of Egyptian riot police officers on hand to protect the embassy evidently did not use their weapons against the crowd, and the protest continued, largely without violence, into the night.

A spokesman for the Muslim Brotherhood, the mainstream Islamist group and the sponsor of Egypt’s first elected president, Mohamed Morsi, urged the United States government on Tuesday to prosecute the “madmen” behind the video, according to the English-language Web site of the state newspaper, Al Ahram.

The spokesman asked for a formal apology from the United States government and warned that events like the video were damaging Washington’s relations with the Muslim world. He also emphasized that any protests should remain peaceful and respect property.

There should be “civilized demonstrations of the Egyptian people’s displeasure with this film,” the Brotherhood spokesman said, according to the newspaper Web site. “Any nonpeaceful activity will be exploited by those who hate Islam to defame the image of Egypt and Muslims.”

Bracing for trouble before the start of the protests here and in Libya, the American Embassy released a statement shortly after noon that appeared to refer to Terry Jones, a Florida pastor who promoted the video: “The United States Embassy in Cairo condemns the continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims — as we condemn efforts to offend believers of all religions.” It later denounced the “unjustified breach of our embassy.”