The man who exercised his free speech and produced a YouTube film in 2012 about Islam only to be blamed by a reckless Secretary of State for deadly attacks against four US service members in Benghazi is now living in poverty and fear.
According to an exclusive report by Fox News, “Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, the Coptic Christian whose short video ‘The Innocence of Muslims’ was initially faulted for sparking the Sept. 11, 2012 terror attack at U.S. diplomatic compounds in Libya, is now living in a homeless shelter run by First Southern Baptist Church in Buena Park, Calif. He has served time in prison, been shamed publicly by the White House and threatened with death.”
Hours after reports of the Benghazi attacks emerged, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was one of the first White House officials to blame Nakoula’s fringe YouTube video for motivating the attackers.
Here’s the statement she released via an official channel of the US State Department at 10 PM EST on September 11, 2012:
Some have sought to justify this vicious behavior as a response to inflammatory material posted on the Internet. The United States deplores any intentional effort to denigrate the religious beliefs of others. Our commitment to religious tolerance goes back to the very beginning of our nation. But let me be clear: There is never any justification for violent acts of this kind.
Despite unequivocal evidence provided by US intelligence mapping out the premeditated motives of the Islamist Benghazi attackers, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton chose to repeat this canard blaming the video at a memorial service for the Benghazi victims.
Here’s a video of her remarks:
Joined by Susan Rice (who would later resign as US ambassador to the UN only to reemerge from the fire of lies as Obama’s National Security Adviser), Clinton’s initial misrepresentation of what occurred in Beghazi would go on to ruin Nakoula’s life.
Each falsehood deployed by the Obama administration’s Soviet-style propaganda messaging campaign to obfuscate its failure to keep US embassy personnel safe would add more ammunition to the salvo of threats standing in the way of the Coptic Christian filmmaker’s ability to lead a normal life. Since then, Nakoula’s has been turned upside down. “For the past three years, Nakoula has been living at the homeless shelter on church grounds,” reports Fox News.
“I don’t believe in democracy anymore,” Nakoula told Fox. “I don’t think there is such a thing as freedom of speech.”
In late 2012, Nakoula was sent to jail for allegedly violating the term of his probation after being charged with bank and credit fraud. Prosecutors claimed that the very act of posting the video to YouTube was a violation of his probation terms.
After a brief stint in jail, Nakoula still remained a man with a target on his back. The Coptic Christian filmaker’s characterization of the Prophet Mohammad in his video elicited an onslaught of serious death threats and fanatically angry messages.
And yet, Nakoula has no regrets.
“If I could go back, I would do it again,” he told Fox as he sat in a jail cell three years ago. “Everybody gets hurt in this culture. We need the world free of this culture. We have to fight it.”