Update:
Nakoula’s imprisonment symbolises America’s capitulation to the Shariah
Robert Spencer wrote on Sept. 17 in PJ Media, before Nakoula was jailed: “Nakoula has a checkered past, reportedly including methamphetamine dealing and bank fraud. But if he is indeed sent back to jail because of this video, no matter what priors he has, no matter how checkered his past, make no mistake: he will be a political prisoner. He will be in prison not for the meth or the fraud or for the technicality of the probation violation, but for insulting Muhammad. His imprisonment will be a symbol of America’s capitulation to the Shariah.”
Where was Lowry while Nakoula was rotting in prison for the past eight months? What took him so long?
Nakoula Basseley Nakoula deserves a place in American history. He is the first person in this country jailed for violating Islamic anti-blasphemy laws.
You won’t find that anywhere in the charges against him, of course. As a practical matter, though, everyone knows that Nakoula wouldn’t be in jail today if he hadn’t produced a video crudely lampooning the prophet Muhammad.  In the weeks after the attack on U.S. facilities in Benghazi that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three others, the Obama administration claimed the terrorist assault had been the outgrowth of a demonstration against the Nakoula video. The administration ran public service announcements in Pakistan featuring President Barack Obama saying the U.S. had nothing to do with it. In a speech at the United Nations around this time, the president declared — no doubt with Nakoula in mind — “The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.”– (RICH LOWRY/POLITICO)
PJ Media:Â STACY MCCAIN ONÂ The Fate of Basseley Nakoula.
“Hillary’s promise of vengeance to the father of a fallen SEAL wasn’t that we’d get the jihadis who killed him but that we’d punish the filmmaker. That’s perverse, but in keeping with the fact that she decided to run ads on Pakistani TV apologizing for the film while Islamist cretins menaced American diplomats across the region.”
– Allahpundit, Oct. 25, 2012
The wrong guy in the wrong place at the wrong time: Nakoula was out on “supervised release” for a federal bank fraud conviction. He was $700,000 behind on restitution payments and operating under an alias when he made “The Innocence of Muslims,” a crappy movie that got turned into a YouTube video clip that in turn became the pretext of riots in Egypt and then — it is now generally acknowledged — was utilized as a flimsy excuse by the State Department in an attempt to distract from its embarrassing failures in the September attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya.
Having become unintentionally famous, the con man Nakoula was arrested and hustled into federal court amid unusually high security two weeks after the Benghazi attacks. We need not wonder why Eric Holder’s Justice Department made this a top priority:
“We will make sure that the person who made that film is arrested and prosecuted.”
– Hillary Clinton, Sept. 14, 2012 . . . .
But this isn’t really about Nakoula at all, is it?
What the case of Nakoula actually demonstrates is the strangely misplaced priorities of the Obama administration: Eight months later, they still haven’t caught any of the terrorists who killed a U.S. ambassador and three other Americans in Benghazi, but they needed only two weeks to apprehend Nakoula.
Indeed. Nakoula wasn’t a hero, but he was a scapegoat. We’re still waiting to see just exactly what sins of others were loaded onto his shoulders — and who, precisely, those others were.
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