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Egypt's prime minister said some of the thousands involved in days of protests near the U.S. Embassy got paid to participate, state news reported Saturday, the same day riot police managed to force demonstrators from the area.

Prime Minister Hesham Kandil said "a number" of those involved in the tense, sometimes violent protests, which began Tuesday, later confessed to getting paid to participate, according to the state-run Middle East News Agency. He noted, too, that some of the demonstrators were acting on their own and weren't paid to vent their anger against the United States over an inflammatory anti-Islam film that was privately produced in that country.

Kandil did not say whether the government knew or suspected who paid the demonstrators, according to the MENA report. http://www.cnn.com/2012/09/15/world/meast/egypt-us-embassy-protests/in
dex.html?hpt=hp_t2]
Wonder if that might be the case in other countries, and if so, WHO paid them?
Also, in the beginning there was this:

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Jewish groups are upset that the initial reporting about the anti-Islam movie known as "Innocence of Muslims" depicted the film as being financed by a group of Jewish donors.

We are greatly concerned that this false notion that an Israeli Jew and 100 Jewish backers were behind the film now has legs and is gathering speed around the world," Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League said Thursday. "In an age where conspiracy theories, especially ones of an anti-Semitic nature, explode on the Internet in a matter of minutes, it is crucial for those news organizations who initially reported on his identity to correct the record."

The Simon Wiesenthal Center also blasted the early media coverage of the story.

The center said Thursday it is "deeply troubled that the project was initially falsely and widely depicted as a project of an American- Israeli and that the $5 million was raised by 100 Jews. We remain deeply worried that those initial media reports are being used by Islamist extremists to further fan the violent anti-Semitism that is a part of that sub-culture of hate."

A production staff member who worked on the film told CNN that when the two spoke on the phone during production, the filmmaker said he was in Alexandria, Egypt, raising money for the film. There has been a long history of animosity between Muslims and the minority Copts in Egypt. http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2012/09/14/jewish-groups-mad-about-initi
al-reports-on-anti-islam-film/?iref=obnetwork]
I wondered where this rumor came from, then found this:

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When news of his movie first broke, the filmmaker identified himself as Sam Bacile and told the Wall Street Journal that he was a 52-year-old Israeli-American real estate developer from California. He said Jewish donors had financed his film.

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Well, his SAYING where the financing came from doesn't necessarily mean that's the truth.

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The amateurish production of the film was one of the biggest clues that it could not be backed by millionaires of any faith, Rob Eshman, editor-in-chief of the Los Angeles-based Jewish Journal, said. "It looks like it was made with 29 dollars really,"

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That's a valid point. How do we know it was financed with five million dollars? I sure don't see that kind of money in it, so do we know that's the truth? Also, this man is reported as having said "film"--is that a misstatement, incorrectly reported, or IS there an actual "film"?

Also noticed

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Muslims have been livid over a 14-minute trailer for "Innocence of Muslims," an obscure film that mocks the Prophet Mohammed as a womanizer, child molester and ruthless killer.

Two months after the film's trailer was posted online on YouTube, and days after it got attention in Egyptian mediaSame

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The movie, backed by hardcore anti-Islam groups in the United States, is a low-budget project that was ignored in the United States when trailers were posted on YouTube in July. But after Egyptian television aired certain segments, violent protests erupted in Egypt, Yemen, Tunisia, Morocco, Sudan, Iran, Iraq, Israel and the Palestinian territories. http://www.cnn.com/2012/09/15/world/anti-islam-filmmaker/index.html?ii
d=article_sidebar]

Unless that's bad reporting, it's not the "movie" that incited all this, it's the TRAILER...I wonder if there actually IS a "movie" of any kind, or just the trailer? The one cite mentions "the movie", but I can't find anything on an actual movie existing. And "backed by hardcore anti-Islam groups in the United States"--how do they know this; it's not stated as "apparently", "supposedly" or with any such qualifier...I wish someone would come out and explain this.


I found Fareed Zakaria's impressions interesting. He is one person who seems to know the situation over there pretty well, and I rather trust him to give good information and make good assumptions.

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Q: Russia's Vladimir Putin is quoted as warning that the Arab world could descend into "chaos." Is that fear is overblown?

ZAKARIA: I think it is overblown. I think what you have here is one of these periodic crises that take place.

You will remember there have been these around the Koran burning and around the Danish cartoons, and they're all signs of a fundamental problem within Arab societies, a fundamental lack of tolerance and an extremism.

So, what you're dealing with is a certain degree of extremism in these societies and weak governance in many of these countries. That's different from a kind of grand revolution.

Q: Not downplaying the deaths and the violence, but do you think too much is being made of this when you listen to people yelling on the streets saying President Obama should apologize to the world and to the Muslim world for this?

ZAKARIA: Here's how I put it. I think clearly we live in a world in which the images can go viral. Protests can go viral. These things become global very quickly and a kind of feeding frenzy develops, both on the ground and in the media.

I think that that has to be separated from the real issue, and the real issue is a level of extremism in some Arab and Muslim societies that is worrisome. But let's not exaggerate it. Let's not also turn this into a problem of all of Egypt or all of Libya when we're dealing with some isolated groups that have been jockeying for power in various ways.

And, as for President Obama needing to apologize, I think it's absurd. It's ludicrous. I think what we are all waiting to hear is a proper apology from Egyptian President Mohamed Morsy, who is the one figure in all of this that has been most disappointing.

The Egyptian government has not provided the protection the United States needs. It has not reacted to the violence in the way that it should, let alone the fact that Egypt gets a lot of aid from the United States [$2 billion a year] ...

It's very different from Libya. The Libyan government is actively on our side trying to ferret out these extremists, catch them, capture them, kill them.

In the Egyptian case, one has to ask, are they actually encouraging a certain degree of extremism?

Q: When we hear demonstrators make comments about the president apologizing and this is an insult to Muslims the world over - what aren't they understanding about the U.S. and what isn't the U.S. understanding about them? Many in the U.S. think it's absurd that a terrible, small movie that no one had seen has caused such violence.

ZAKARIA: Well, I think it's fair to say that there is a kind of extremism and a lack of kind of an understanding of freedom of speech and opinion. (seems my guess as to a lack of understanding of freedom of speech wasn't far off in that regard.)

Remember Salman Rushdie, the novelist? He went through this whole period of a fatwa and things like that, precisely because people could not understand that he was exercising his freedom of speech to write a book that was regarded by many Muslims as offensive.

What we don't understand about them, I think, is that this does affect a kind of core sense of their dignity and it affects their sense of whether or not we respect them.

But I think at the end of the day, the West is in the right here. The United States is in the right. It is entirely inappropriate under any circumstances to use violence as a response to freedom of speech.

The way you counter bad speech is with good speech. Let them make a great movie about Prophet Mohammed. That's the way you do it, not by killing people, not by burning people. (An interesting theory, but wouldn't it be impossible to make a movie about Mohammed, given his likeness nor his name are supposed to be portrayed?)

Q: We talked about the amount of money in U.S. aid to Egypt. Obama is going to ask Congress to forgive about a billion dollars in debt that Egypt owes Washington. Do you think that these anti-American protesters are even aware of that?

ZAKARIA: I think they're very ill-informed. I think they know very little, but I think that the government of Egypt knows this. I would hope that we're having serious conversations with the government of Egypt and making clear to them that unless their attitude is much more cooperative and much more responsible, it will be very difficult to forgive any of Egypt's debt and, going forward, it would mean a very different relationship.

Egypt is going to have to come to terms with its own internal dimensions. There is a contest between the Islamists, the Muslim Brotherhood that is in power, and even more radical and extreme groups, which is why the president is clearly trying to curry favor with some of these groups by not condemning the violence more strongly.

But Morsy will have to choose. Does he want to be president of Egypt or does he want to be an Islamic leader of the rabble, of the mob? http://globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com/2012/09/14/qa-what-the-mideast
-protests-reveal/

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I have several disagreements with Zakaria's take on this, one being that when you cut aid to a country (tho' he's not suggesting that specifically), you lose a bargaining chip. Maybe he's right about merely being less willing to forgive the debt, but I think you have to be careful about cutting off aid; money is the only way besides military might that America has had so much influence in the world; take that away, and they have no reason to work WITH us.

The film to me isn't the point anyway, it's who was responsible for the violence that happened during the protest. Apparently,

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A pro-al Qaeda group responsible for a previous armed assault on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi is the chief suspect in Tuesday's attack that killed the U.S. ambassador to Libya, sources tracking militant Islamist groups in eastern Libya say.

They also note that the attack immediately followed a call from al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri for revenge for the death in June of Abu Yahya al-Libi, a senior Libyan member of the terror group.

The group suspected to be behind the assault -- the Imprisoned Omar Abdul Rahman Brigades -- first surfaced in May when it claimed responsibility for an attack on the International Red Cross office in Benghazi. The following month the group claimed responsibility for detonating an explosive device outside the U.S. Consulate and later released a video of that attack.

"According to our sources, the attack was the work of roughly 20 militants, prepared for a military assault; it is rare that an RPG7 is present at a peaceful protest," Benotman said.

"According to our sources, the attack against the consulate had two waves. The first attack led to U.S. officials being evacuated from the consulate by Libyan security forces, only for the second wave to be launched against U.S. officials after they were kept in a secure location."

That analysis is supported by U.S. sources who say the attack on the consulate is believed to have been pre-planned. The sources say the attackers used the protest as a diversion to launch the attack, although the sources could not say if the attackers instigated the protest or merely took advantage of it.

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That's the direction my opinion is going...it took time and preparation, and would make sense that they found this UNNOTICED "movie" a perfect tool which, once given more public notice, would create the perfect protest under which to hide their next (already planned) assault. The protest would cause confusion and chaos, and if they encouraged someone to hold the protest over the movie on 9/11, it would be perfect cover for a military assault.

I hope we continue to get information (always supposing such information is trustworthy....), I'd like to know who was really behind this, if possible. If possible...