Pakistan Cabinet Minister Offers $100k to Murder Anti-Islam Filmmaker

*Source: RT

Pakistani students carry swords at a protest rally in Lahore on September 22, 2012, against a US-made anti-Islam film (AFP Photo / Arif Ali)

Amid protests that killed more than 20 people throughout Pakistan on Friday, the country’s Cabinet minister offered a $100,000 reward for the murder of the US filmmaker that ridiculed Islam’s Prophet Muhammad.
­Minister Ghulam Ahmad Bilour told the Associated Press that he encourages the Taliban and al-Qaeda to perform this “sacred duty.” He himself would pay the reward out of his pocket, he said.
“I announce today that this blasphemer, this sinner who has spoken nonsense about the Holy Prophet, anyone who murders him, I will reward him with $100,000,” he said at a news conference in Peshawar Saturday. “I invite the Taliban brothers and the al-Qaeda brothers to join me in this blessed mission.”
Worldwide, offended Muslims have expressed their outrage against the film titled “Innocence of Muslims,” which was allegedly produced by 55-year-old filmmaker and Egyptian-born Coptic Christian, Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, also known as Sam Bacile. Death threats against the alleged filmmaker are being made across social media websites, causing the Californian man and his family to go into hiding.
“I also announce that if the government hands this person over to me, my heart says I will finish him with my own hands and then they can hang me,” the minister said. The government of Pakistan has already proclaimed that it has disassociated itself from the minister’s statement. But as protests raged on, anger at the filmmaker continued to brew among those who felt personally offended by the 13-minute anti-Muslim YouTube clip.
“Insallah, we will kill him,” wrote one Facebook user from Karachi, Pakistan.
And as more than 5,000 protesters marched towards the parliament in Islamabad Saturday, there was much chanting about the filmmaker who enraged so much of the world. Knowing that he was committing a crime by endorsing murder, Minister Bilour said he was ready to carry out the deed himself.
“Punishment for those who humiliated our Prophet,” the protesters chanted while rallying in the capital, just a day after exceptional violence erupted throughout the country.

Joseph Kony 2012: growing outrage in Uganda over film

*Source: The Telegraph

The 30-minute video, Kony2012, was produced by three American videographers campaigning for greater efforts to capture Joseph Kony, the leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA).

But Kony and his diminishing troops, many of them kidnapped child soldiers, fled northern Uganda six years ago and are now spread across the jungles of neighbouring countries.

“What that video says is totally wrong, and it can cause us more problems than help us,” said Dr Beatrice Mpora, director of Kairos, a community health organisation in Gulu, a town that was once the centre of the rebels’ activities.

“There has not been a single soul from the LRA here since 2006. Now we have peace, people are back in their homes, they are planting their fields, they are starting their businesses. That is what people should help us with.”

Joseph Kony, a former church altarboy, has spread terror through eastern and central Africa for almost three decades, as he has pursued an aimless war that has killed thousands of people and at one point forced hundreds of thousands from their homes.

The video, from Invisible Children Inc, an activism organisation, was posted to YouTube and Vimeo, a film-sharing site, on Monday night and by late on Thursday it had been viewed 32,600,000 times.

It aims to make Kony “famous” by encouraging supporters to plaster US cities with posters, in order to make the fight against the Lord’s Resistance Army an issue of “national interest” to Washington.

That, the video’s makers claim, will ensure funding for 100 US military advisors sent to train African armies to find Kony will continue.

“Suggesting that the answer is more military action is just wrong,” said Javie Ssozi, an influential Ugandan blogger.

“Have they thought of the consequences? Making Kony ‘famous’ could make him stronger. Arguing for more US troops could make him scared, and make him abduct more children, or go on the offensive.”

Rosebell Kagumire, a Ugandan journalist specialising in peace and conflict reporting, said: “This paints a picture of Uganda six or seven years ago, that is totally not how it is today. It’s highly irresponsible”.

There were criticisms that the film quoted only three Ugandans, two of them politicians, and that it spent more time showing the filmmaker's five-year-old son being told about Joseph Kony than explaining the root causes of the conflict.

Invisible Voices has faced criticism over its finances. Of more than £6 million it spent in 2001, less than £2.3 million was for activities helping people on the ground. The rest went on “awareness programmes and products”, management, media and others.

“It is totally misleading to suggest that the war is still in Uganda,” said Fred Opolot, spokesman for the Ugandan government.

“I suspect that if that’s the impression they are making, they are doing it only to garner increasing financial resources for their own agenda.”

Invisible Children said the video focused on Uganda because its "people and government...have a vested interest in seeing him stopped".

"The LRA was active in Uganda for nearly 20 years, displacing 1.7 million people and abducting at least 30,000 children," it said in statement.