Doubts grow about source of anti-Muslim film behind attacks

Did an anti-Muslim film spark a spasm of violence against American interests in the Middle East? Or was it two films?

Was the film’s maker an “Israeli Jew”?

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A look at how events unfolded in the Middle East and the United States.

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Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spoke about the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya and the death of the U.S. Ambassador to Libya, Chris Stevens.

Was there even a film in the first place, or simply a 14-minute YouTube post claiming to be a trailer for a two-hour movie?

The news media couldn’t agree on such matters Wednesday as the story of the attacks and its causes rolled out across print, TV and Web sites. Most seemed to attribute the cause of the attacks — one of which left the U.S. ambassador to Libya, J. Christopher Stevens, and three other State Department diplomats dead — to a film.

Beyond that, the details got murky. Fast.

The Associated Press and The Washington Post, for example, said the crudely made YouTube video that slurs the prophet Muhammad is for a movie called “The Innocence of Muslims.” But the Huffington Post and the New York Post, among others, said the movie was entitled “Muhammad’s Trial.”

One film? Two? Perhaps even a third: The New York Times said an Egyptian blogger reported that confusion over the film was so widespread in Cairo that a group of fundamentalist Muslims had called for a protest at the Dutch Embassy because the Dutch government was allegedly producing a film slandering Islam — a claim swiftly denied by Dutch diplomats.

But it may not have been a film at all that triggered the violence — or a film may have been responsible in one case, but not the other. There was the not-incidental date of the attacks — Sept. 11 — and the prospect that the attacks were planned to coincide with the anniversary of al-Qaeda’s strike on New York and the Pentagon 11 years ago. Obama administration officials suspected that the Libyan embassy violence was part of a plot that used the protests as a cover.

Contradictory and erroneous reporting in the wake of breaking news, particularly the sort involving mob violence, is nothing new in the media. But the reporting Wednesday on the embassy attacks sometimes resembled a carnival of confusion, with stories striking out in all directions. The episode suggests the difficulties of ascertaining facts about events occuring in two places thousands of miles away — and the fog of war is no clearer in these days of instant communication.

There was, for instance, the mystery of Sam Bacile, the supposed writer, director and producer of a film that depicts Muhammad as a philanderer and child abuser. The Wall Street Journal iden­tified Bacile as a 52-year-old “Israeli-American real-estate developer” who raised $5 million from “about 100 Jewish donors, whom he declined to identify.” In a telephone interview with the paper, a man claiming to be Bacile said he made the film in California last year. It quoted him as saying, “Islam is a cancer.”

AP, in a widely published story, said Bacile was 56 and “an Israeli Jew.” The wire said he was in hiding as a result of the controversy over the film and spoke “from an undisclosed location.”

Reuters identified Bacile as “an Israeli-American property developer” whose name “could have Egyptian origins.”