New York Times Interviews Nakoula Nakoula, the Man Blamed for the Benghazi Attack

Get a load of the Times’ lead:

Fuming for two months in a jail cell here, Nakoula Basseley Nakoula has had plenty of time to reconsider the wisdom of making “Innocence of Muslims,” his crude YouTube movie trailer depicting the Prophet Muhammad as a bloodthirsty, philandering thug.

Let’s see. The man was publicly identified by the federal government, and then rousted at midnight in front the media for questioning. He has been in jail for two months, after no less than the President of the United States blamed him for the murder of a US ambassador and three other Americans. The president went on to say that the future would not belong to those who “slander” Muhammad. Nakoula is in jail on technicalities — parole violations, using an alias and using a computer. Should he regret criticizing Muhammad, as the Times suggests? Did Muhammad lead war parties? Yes, he did. Did he have multiple wives? Why yes, he did. Since when do facts form the basis for slander, and since when does the President of These United States get to dictate to whom the future may or may not belong?

The Times continues:

Does Mr. Nakoula now regret the footage? After all, it fueled deadly protests across the Islamic world and led the unlikely filmmaker to his own arrest for violating his supervised release on a fraud conviction.

So it’s his fault that some people went nuts? The Times should consider its logic, because it has just justified acts and threats of terror.

Not at all. In his first public comments since his incarceration soon after the video gained international attention in September, Mr. Nakoula told The New York Times that he would go to great lengths to convey what he called “the actual truth” about Muhammad. “I thought, before I wrote this script,” he said, “that I should burn myself in a public square to let the American people and the people of the world know this message that I believe in.”

In explaining his reasons for the film, Mr. Nakoula, 55, a Coptic Christian born in Egypt, cited the 2009 massacre at Fort Hood, Tex., as a prime example of the violence committed “under the sign of Allah.” His anger seemed so intense over the years that even from a federal prison in 2010, he followed the protests against the building of an Islamic center and mosque near ground zero in New York as he continued to work on his movie script.

The Fort Hood massacre is still classified as “workplace violence,” both so the Obama government can get away with saying that there have been no terrorist attacks on US soil on his watch, and so it can deprive the survivors of their due benefits if it was called an act of terrorism. Which is what it was.

Coptic Christians have been subjected to Islamist violence in Egypt for centuries, as have Christians across the Muslim world. Perhaps that is what makes Mr. Nakoula so angry. Maybe the Times could look into all that, once it takes the black villain hat off of the political prisoner’s head.

h/t Ann Althouse