Where Was Hollywood When The DOJ Jailed an LA Filmmaker?

The Obama DOJ Did More Than "Threaten." They Imprisoned.

Those of us who know even a little recent history can only snicker at the CNN headline, “Jennifer Aniston, Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks join 400 artists to back Jimmy Kimmel against ‘government threats.’” To “back” here meant signing an ACLU letter. Such bravery!

The letter reads, “We the people must never accept government threats to our freedom of speech. Efforts by leaders to pressure artists, journalists, and companies with retaliation for their speech strike at the heart of what it means to live in a free country.”

Although I agree with the sentiment, I am astonished anew at Hollywood’s selective outrage. They sat in silence these past four years while the Biden administration used every lever of power to silence critics on the internet, even to the point of imprisonment. Those offenses they could pretend not to notice, not so the hunt through the Hollywood Hills in 2012 for filmmaker Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, a hunt that the media gleefully joined.

Just three days after the September 11, 2012, disaster in Benghazi, the New York Times Ian Lovett reported that the feds were inquiring into whether Nakoula “had been the person who uploaded the video to YouTube.” The video was actually a 14-minute trailer for a proposed film titled, “The Innocence of Muslims.”

Lovett perpetuated the lie that the video “helped set off protests” at the Benghazi consulate. If Nakoula had uploaded the video, Lovett continued much too knowingly, he would have violated parole restrictions “against his using the Internet without permission from a probation officer.”

A few days later President Barack Obama went looking for a reliably clueless audience to hear his take on Benghazi and found one, of all places, at the Ed Sullivan Theater in New York, home of the David Letterman Show. Obama knew he could count on Letterman to spare the “Prophet Muhammad” his usual irreverence.

“Here’s what happened,” Obama told his wide-eyed host a week after the assault. “You had a video that was released by somebody who lives here, sort of a shadowy character who made an extremely offensive video directed at Mohammed and Islam.”

Letterman reeled back in disbelief. “Making fun of the Prophet Mohammed!” he said solemnly. “Making fun of the Prophet Mohammed,” confirmed Obama. The fact that the Christian Nakoula was an American citizen troubled neither Obama nor Letterman.

Obama pulled his description of the filmmaker straight from the pages of the New York Times. The Times had dispatched a crew of ten reporters to do a hit piece on Nakoula, “a shadowy gas station owner with a record of criminal arrests and bankruptcy.” Obama apparently liked the word “shadowy.”

More troubling, from the Times perspective at least, Nakoula had reportedly “expressed anti-Muslim sentiments as he pushed for the making of the film.” In 2011 alone, when Nakoula was making his film, there were at least ten attacks on his fellow Coptic Christians in Egypt, several of them lethal, one resulting in the death of twenty-four Copts. This relentless persecution made “anti-Muslim sentiments” as understandable for Copts as anti-Nazi sentiments were for Jews in pre-war Germany.

The fact that Nakoula and his family had received serious death threats, something of a norm for critics of Islam, did not deter the Times from doxing him. The reporters tracked Nakoula to his Southern California home and staked it out. To assure their readers and the world’s imams they had found the right suspect, the Times reporters inspected the interior of the house “through a window in the door” and pointed out the features that were also seen in the trailer.

With Hollywood cheering on the administration, federal probation officers took Nakoula into custody on September 15, just four days after the Benghazi attack, and held him in secret without charge or without access to an attorney. Nakoula was vulnerable. He was on parole for his involvement in a check-kiting scheme. Even more worrisome, he had quietly cooperated with the feds and fingered the scheme’s ringleader.

Less than 48 hours after Secretary of State Clinton first alluded to Nakoula’s video, someone in the Obama administration had unsealed the indictment and exposed Nakoula to retaliation. “Why did the government release the deal?” Nakoula asked me when I first spoke to him after his release from prison. “Why did they put my life in danger?”

They put his life in danger because they knew they could get away with it. With Nakoula silenced, they could perpetuate the lie that the attack on the consulate in Benghazi was not a result of the administration’s disastrous policies but of a spontaneous protest inspired by Nakoula’s “hateful” film trailer.

Finally, they put his life in danger secure in the knowledge that the media mavens of Hollywood were scarily indifferent to the First Amendment rights of anyone but their own political allies. That a filmmaker was about to spend a year in federal custody for producing a perfectly legal satire inspired not a single major media personality to cry foul.