'Innocence of Muslims' Filmaker: No Regrets

Filmmaker Nakoula Basseley Nakoula recently granted an interview for the first time since being put in jail nearly two months ago.

He made it clear that even now, he did not regret making the video: “I thought, before I wrote this script, that I should burn myself in the public square to let the American people and the people of the world know this [is the] the message that I believe in.” 

Nakoula said he simply wanted to communicate what he believes to be the “actual truth” about Muhammad, and Islam to a greater extent. 

In this way, the video was part of a greater reaction to what Nakoula viewed as Muslim “atrocities.” These included incidents like the 2009 terrorist attack at Ft. Hood where soldiers and civilians were shot “under the sign of Allah,” and the campaign to build the mosque at Ground Zero.

Nakoula’s son, Abanob, says of his father: 

My dad is not an evil man. He has had a hard life. He did something — the movie, something he felt strongly about — that was not frowned upon by the Constitution. He would always say, “Don’t fight Muslims, fight their ideology.”

The filmmaker has zero regret for fighting that fight.