A few friends and I have been looking into it, posted by this blog:
A Plague O' All Their Houses
First, Sam Bacile seems to be fictitious. The following article at Religion Dispatches has several great links:
Who Is “Sam Bacile?”
Post by Sarah Posner
A detail I failed to note earlier this morning from the AP story: “Israeli officials said they had not heard of him and there was no record of him being a citizen. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they are not permitted to share personal information with the media.”
Also, Laura Rozen raises some questions about Steve Klein, who told the AP that he was a "consultant" on the film who warned Bacile he would be “the next Theo van Gogh.” Klein told the AP that Bacile was concerned for relatives in Egypt, something Bacile would not confirm.
Rozen:
And there were some hints that Bacile may be a pseudonym for someone affiliated with the Egyptian Coptic Christian diaspora.
A consultant on the film, Steve Klein, told the AP that Bacile has family members in Egypt. A 2007 interview with Klein, a self-styled terrorism expert and former Marine Corps Vietnam vet, mentions his ties to the Copt diaspora community.
Klein’s author biography in a self-published work, “Is Islam compatible with democracy,” states: “With 9/11 2001, I immersed myself with Islam in America; went to every major Mosque in SoCal with Arabic speaking Christians as translators and uncovered useful information about many Mosques being the head quarters of terrorism in America.”
If that is true, and “Bacile” was claiming to be Jewish and to have raised money from Jews for the film, it only multiplies the incendiary nature of his project.
FURTHER UPDATE, via Jeffrey Goldberg at the Atlantic, who talks to Klein:
Klein told me that Bacile, the producer of the film, is not Israeli, and most likely not Jewish, as has been reported, and that the name is, in fact, a pseudonym. He said he did not know "Bacile"'s real name. He said Bacile contacted him because he leads anti-Islam protests outside of mosques and schools, and because, he said, he is a Vietnam veteran and an expert on uncovering al Qaeda cells in California. "After 9/11 I went out to look for terror cells in California and found them, piece of cake. Sam found out about me. The Middle East Christian and Jewish communities trust me."
Klein also tells Goldberg that he doubts "Bacile" is Jewish, and that the claims he is were a "disinformation campaign." He added, about the people involved in the film, "Some are Copts but the vast majority are Evangelical."
As for Klein, it turns out that he has been noticed for his activities by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Consultant for Anti-Muslim Film Provided Combat Training for Hate Group
Steve Klein, who served as a consultant for the Islam-bashing film that sparked the deadly assault on a U.S. Consulate in Libya, is a longtime religious-right activist who has helped train paramilitary militias at a secretive church in California.
Four American citizens, including U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens, were killed by mobs enraged by the depiction of the prophet Muhammad in the film “Innocence of Muslims” produced by Sam Bacile, a California real estate developer.
Klein is a Marine veteran who served in the Vietnam War and is based in Hemet, Calif. He believes that his state is riddled with Muslim Brotherhood sleeper cells “who are awaiting the trigger date and will begin randomly killing as many of us as they can,” according to an article in the Spring 2012 issue of the SPLC Intelligence Report.
Over the years, Klein has worked with a variety of far-right groups, including the Church at Kaweah, which the SPLC lists as a hate group. The Church of Kaweah is a secretive cohort of militant Christian fundamentalists in California who are preparing for war and who believe that churches should avoid government regulation and answer only to God. Kaweah has its own militia, headed by David “Dutch” Johnson (aka Dutch Joens), a longtime antigovernment veteran of the militia movement. Johnson looks forward to the battle that will begin when “Dictator Obongo” institutes martial law. He has called Mexicans savages “who can’t run their own government” and recommended sending guns to drug cartels to “decrease the excess population in Mexico so they don’t come north.”
Klein also conducts drills with the Christian Guardians, a San Francisco-based group headed by Andrew Saqib James, an American-born Pakistani Christian who calls Islam “a giant crime syndicate” and hopes his group will become “the most feared militia in the world.” The Church of Kaweah’s website has advertised joint trainings with the Guardians, describing them as a “unique system of learning how to survive the Muslim Brotherhood as we teach the Christian Morality of Biblical Warfare.”
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