ME protests: the hardline 'tele-Islamist' who brought anti-Islam film to Muslim world's attention

Telegraph - UK ^ | September 15, 2012 | Nick Meo, Cairo, Colin Freeman, Richard Spencer in Cairo and Ruth Sherlock in Beirut

[Cincinatus' Wife]

His inflammatory chat show on satellite television has long prided itself on baiting liberals, Christians and Jews, but last week saw Sheikh Khalid Abdullah stage the broadcasting controversy of a lifetime.

The rabble-rousing Egyptian tele-Islamist knew he had found a ratings-grabber when he found an obscure, badly-made film on the internet called the Innocence of Muslims.

It had actually been online since July, but nobody had paid attention to its crude libels against the Prophet Mohammed until Mr Abdullah's show broadcast clips from it last weekend, calling for the film-makers to be executed.

Within hours the hardline Salafi Islamists who watch his programme, and who have been growing in strength since last year's revolution, were demonstrating in Cairo's Tahrir Square and outside the US embassy, which they stormed on Tuesday, burning the US flag.

..........."I don't have a bad conscience about it, I did not call for violence," Mr Abdullah told The Sunday Telegraph yesterday in an interview at his home in a middle-class Cairo suburb. "It's not like I made this film. I only transmitted the news. It is funny that people in the West imagine that showing only two and a half minutes of the film on my channel was responsible for this whole crisis."

Mr Abdullah, 47, whose "New Egypt" talk show started last year, exemplifies the way the Arab Spring movement of the past 18 months has unleashed two vocal and diametrically opposed forces within the Muslim world.

One is that of the "Facebook Generation" who initially led the protests in the likes of Tahrir Square, who are generally liberal, educated and secular.

The other is that of conservative, voraciously anti-Western Islamists who were likewise viciously suppressed by dictators like Egypt's Hosni Mubarak, and who are also now exercising their freedom of speech.....

[EternalVigilance]

Amen. And THANK YOU for the ping.