US News

In‘glory’ous bastard riot: Muslims rip flag, kill over flick

A low-budget anti-Muslim hate film sparked a wave of violence across the Middle East yesterday — leaving one American dead and another wounded on the anniversary of 9/11 — after rioters stormed a US consulate in Libya and clashed with guards at the embassy in Egypt.

The tense relations between the Western world and Muslims reached a crisis point when the video portraying the Prophet Mohammed as a sex fiend — and made with the help of a radical Florida pastor — appeared online.

It prompted a mob of Islamic hardliners in Benghazi, Libya’s second-largest city, to fire automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenades at the US consulate. The horde set fire to the building after looting it.

Both the dead and injured American had worked in the consulate.

“We are heartbroken by this terrible loss,” said Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Earlier, hundreds tore the American flag to shreds at the US Embassy in Cairo.

In place of Old Glory, the militants raised a black flag bearing a Muslim declaration of faith: “There is no god but God, and Mohammed is his prophet.”

Florida pastor Terry Jones aided in the production of the movie, titled “The Innocence of Muslims.’’

Jones triggered riots in Afghanistan in 2010 by threatening to burn the Koran — and then did so earlier this year.

“It is an American production, not designed to attack Muslims but to show the destructive ideology of Islam,” Jones said, according to The Wall Street Journal.

The paper identified the film’s writer and producer as Sam Bacile, an Israeli- American real-estate developer.

The incendiary video depicts Mohammed as a fraud — showing him having sex and calling for massacres. It also compares him to a goat.

“This movie must be banned immediately and an apology should be made!” demanded Ismail Mahmoud, 19, one of the protesters in Cairo.

The incidents raised new US fears about post-Hosni Mubarak Egypt, where protesters chanted, “We are all Osama bin Laden!”

In Benghazi — the center of the US-backed revolt against Moammar Khadafy last year — a government official said the consulate’s guards tried to hold off the wave of demonstrators.

“The US consulate’s security guards inside the building fired at the militia as it was trying to enter and attack it,” said Abdel-Monen Al-Hurr, the spokesman for Libya’s Supreme Security Committee, who described “fierce clashes.’’

The US Embassy in Egypt released a statement condemning the video.

Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential nominee, blasted the apology by saying, “It’s disgraceful that the Obama administration’s first response was . . . to sympathize with those who waged the attacks.”

A White House official told Politico.com that administration officials had not approved the statement before it was released.