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Anti-Islam movie grossly misled cast

Outrage gains momentum throughout the Muslim world against a US-made provocative, blasphemous movie that insults Prophet Mohammad (PBUH).

The $5-million movie, named Innocence of Muslims was financed by more than 100 Zionist Jews.

Press TV has conducted an interview with Pastor Stephen Sizer with the Christ Church in London to elaborate more on the issue.

He is joined by Omar Nashabe with the al-Akhbar newspaper from Beirut and Gordon Duff, the senior editor of Veterans Today from Ohio.

The following is an approximate transcription of the interview.

Press TV: How do you see all of this? Do you feel that perhaps it is an Israeli operation? But how does all of this affect when people are looking at this from the outside as far as your perspective of religion especially Muslims the way that they are being portrayed now by the mainstream media?

Sizer: Well, first of all let me say that the Christian community completely denounces the practice of insulting and slandering adherence of other religions or their founders. And inflammatory statements that are intended to upset and incite violence are repudiated unequivocally within the Christian community. But if we go back and look at the series of events that have happened, we can perhaps make sense of where we are today, and this tragedy of people losing their lives over a 14-minute video that was intended to do this very thing.

The video was a short homemade video made by someone who has a criminal record, Nakula Nakula, who is presently in police detention in the United States, because it looks like he has breached his bail conditions. He was convicted of fraud and he was required to not use the Internet and not use synonyms.

He has done both in the making of this film. He has deceived many people to produce it. It has not been shown in cinemas, on television. It is on Youtube and eccentric extremist religious leader Terry Jones exploited that. It was then picked up by a religious leader in Egypt who showed samples of the video on his program and clearly upset people in Egypt who even never heard of the film. And then the media got hold of it, and we have got this spiral of violence and misunderstanding and hatred, which is repudiated within Islam, Judaism and Christianity.

So we have got to go back and understand. It is not for people in the West to tell the Muslims in the Middle East how they should respond. We must get our own house in order, but we must also put this in proportion of taking our lives because I am upset by something you have said or done is not acceptable. It is a criminal act and to see a mob brawl in some of the Middle East countries is not the way that we can resolve these issues.

Press TV: How do you see it? What is the key right now? As our previous guest [Omar Nashabe] talked about ‘Muslim Unity’ but what about unity between religious people in general? What needs to be done at this point in time?

Sizer: I would hope that we can have a timeout that the radio and TV stations throughout the Middle East would broadcast the statements being made by political and religious leaders in the West, repudiating the film. And let us remember that Terry Jones, his church has 25 members, how are they significant? The entire cast and crew who made the film have repudiated it. They have said that they were grossly misled by its intent and purpose. Their words in the film were overdubbed with new statements. They said they were shocked at the rewriting of the script and the lies they were told about being involved.

Even the people in the film feel abused by this individual Nakula Nakula, who made the film, who is, as I said, a convicted felon and he presumably now will face further convictions in the United States for the way in which he has made this film.

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