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 on a U.S. Consulate in Libya, is a longtime religious-right activist who 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 鈥淚nnocence of Muslims鈥澛 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 鈥渨ho are awaiting the trigger date and will begin randomly killing as many of us as they can,鈥 according to an in the Spring 2012 issue of the .
Over the years, Klein has worked with a variety of far-right groups, including the , which the 人兽性交 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 鈥淒utch鈥 Johnson (aka Dutch Joens), a longtime antigovernment veteran of the militia movement. Johnson looks forward to the battle that will begin when 鈥淒ictator Obongo鈥 institutes martial law. He has called Mexicans savages 鈥渨ho can鈥檛 run their own government鈥 and recommended sending guns to drug cartels to 鈥渄ecrease the excess population in Mexico so they don鈥檛 come north.鈥
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 鈥渁 giant crime syndicate鈥 and hopes his group will become 鈥渢he most feared militia in the world.鈥 The Church of Kaweah鈥檚 website has advertised joint trainings with the Guardians, describing them as a 鈥渦nique system of learning how to survive the Muslim Brotherhood as we teach the Christian Morality of Biblical Warfare.鈥
Klein that Bacile is a pseudonym and that he knows little about the filmmaker but that he is committed to the film, 鈥渓ike the rest of us.鈥 Klein said that he did not feel guilty about Stevens鈥 death. 鈥淚t鈥檚 not our fault, we told the truth,鈥 he said.
that he and Bacile expected the movie would make Muslims mad, and he said that he also warned Bacile that he could be the 鈥渘ext Theo Van Gogh,鈥 a reference to the Dutch filmmaker who was murdered in 2004 by a Muslim extremist angry about a film Van Gogh made that was perceived as insulting to Islam. Bacile鈥檚 film promotes the idea that the prophet Muhammad was a philanderer and a fraud who sanctioned rape and child abuse.