By Rich Lowry
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.”
After Benghazi, the administration was evidently filled with a fierce
resolve — to bring Nakoula Basseley Nakoula to justice. Charles Woods,
the father of a Navy SEAL killed in Benghazi, said Secretary of State
Hillary Clinton told him when his son’s body returned to Andrews Air
Force Base: “We will make sure that the person who made that film is
arrested and prosecuted.”
Lo and behold, Nakoula was brought in for questioning by five Los
Angeles County sheriff’s deputies at midnight, eventually arrested and
held without bond, and finally thrown into jail for a year. He sits in
La Tuna Federal Correctional Institution in Texas right now, even as the
deceptive spin that blamed his video for the Benghazi attack looks more
egregious by the day.
Two things must be said about Nakoula upfront. One is that his video,
made with an $80,000 budget, can barely be called a video. Even Lindsay
Lohan would hesitate to appear in it. The thing is low-down, low-rent,
and should be offensive, not just to Muslims, but to all people of
goodwill.
The second is that he has a history of fraud. A few years ago, he was
sentenced to nearly two years in jail on bank fraud charges. He has
more aliases than P. Diddy. Using a false name, Nakoula gulled actors
into appearing in his video on the pretense that it was a desert epic
and then went in afterward and dubbed in the anti-Muhammad lines. He is
not going to win any good citizenship awards and violated the terms of
his probation by using an alias (something Nakoula admits).
A violation of probation, though, usually produces a court summons
and doesn’t typically lead to more jail time unless it involves an
offense that would be worth prosecuting in its own right under federal
standards. Not for Nakoula.
This wasn’t a case of nailing Al Capone on tax evasion. As Nina Shea
of the Hudson Institute points out, Al Capone’s underlying offense was
racketeering and gangland killings. Nakoula Basseley Nakoula’s
underlying offense wasn’t an underlying offense. He exercised his First
Amendment rights.
His case has symbolic significance in the ongoing battle over whether
the Muslim world will embrace modernity, and the panoply of freedoms
associated with it, or whether it will continue to slide backward by
adopting blasphemy laws punishing expressions deemed offensive to Islam.
The administration has been dismayingly willing to accommodate the
latter tendency. Nakoula’s jail time appears indistinguishable from what
the 56-nation Organization of Islamic Cooperation, devoted to pushing
blasphemy laws around the world, calls “deterrent punishment” for
“Islamophobia.”
His video, which did spark violent protests in the
Muslim world by the kind of people who are looking for an excuse to
protest, should have been an object lesson in freedom. Obama should have
explained that our culture is full of disreputable film directors and
producers. Some of them are even honored by the Academy.
Instead, Nakoula ended up the patsy in a tawdry
coverup. The State Department Operations Center reported to Washington
immediately that the the Benghazi attack was an assault carried out by
Islamic militants. The falsehoods about Benghazi weren’t a product of
the fog of war; they were the product of the fog of politics. Desperate
to minimize the attack and deflect responsibility, Team Obama evaded and
obsfucated.
Steve Hayes of The Weekly Standard notes that even the politicized
anodyne talking points left over after the administration’s spinmiesters
had thoroughly edited the CIA’s original talking points about Benghazi
didn’t mention the Nakoula video. During her infamous Sunday show
circuit, Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice nonetheless said, “What
sparked the violence was a very hateful video on the Internet. It was a
reaction to a video that had nothing to do with the United States.”
Very few people have been willing to stick up for Nakoula (with
“Instapundit” Glenn Reynolds a prominent and dogged exception).
Nakoula’s character is sketchy and his work is execrable. Yet the First
Amendment applies to him all the same, even if he might have reason to
doubt it as he serves out a sentence that never would have come about if
he hadn’t offended the wrong people.
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