Earlier today two MSNBC commentators called for the prosecution of those involved in making the film that has been blamed for the attacks on US interests in Egypt and Cairo.
This afternoon, the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood-dominated government has formally called for such prosecution.
Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi asked the Egyptian embassy in Washington to take legal action in the United States against makers of a film attacking the Muslim Prophet Mohammad, the official state news agency said on Wednesday.
Morsi had requested the mission take “all legal measures”, the MENA agency said, without giving further details on what that might involve. (Reuters)
The United States should, but will not, tell Morsi to go to hell and cut off all aid to Egypt immediately. While Morsi and others use the film as a pretext for the attacks, evidence is mounting that the attacks in both Libya and Egypt were days, if not weeks, in the making.
The protest was planned by Salafists well before news circulated of an objectionable video ridiculing Islam’s prophet, Mohammed, said Eric Trager, an expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
The protest outside the U.S. Embassy in Cairo was announced Aug. 30 by Jamaa Islamiya, a State Department-designated terrorist group, to protest the ongoing imprisonment of its spiritual leader, Sheikh Omar abdel Rahman. He is serving a life sentence in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.
When the video started circulating, Nader Bakkar, the spokesman for the Egyptian Salafist Noor party, which holds about 25% of the seats in parliament, called on people to go to the embassy. He also called on non-Islamist soccer hooligans, known as Ultras, to join the protest.
On Monday, the brother of al-Qaeda leader Ayman al Zawahiri, Mohamed al Zawahiri, tweeted that people should go to the embassy and “defend the prophet,” Trager said.
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