All around the world, right this very minute perhaps, protests are taking place in 28 countries over a simple video, a video that has sparked a type of controversy previously unheard of. The protesters are primarily Muslim and the video is an anti-Islam “film” made by a Copt, a follower of Christianity in Egypt. The film entitled “The Innocence of Islam” was originally published on YouTube in a series of 14-minute segments and intended to serve as a biographical story of the Islamic Prophet Muhammad and the creation of Islam.

The video is crudely made using low-tech green screens, sloppy voice-overs and poor acting. Furthermore, the content is blatantly crude and disrespectful to the Islamic population, which comprises 23 percent of the world. However, what is unsettling about the video is not its content, but rather the worldwide uproar that it is causing. With a little online research, one can literally find millions of offensive YouTube videos. Yet why has this one gained such a great amount of international recognition? The fact of the matter is that the video has received overemphasized media coverage in countries whose media outlets are controlled by governments that provide little freedom of speech.

The globalization of worldwide media and news coverage has made this world the connected and fast-paced place it is today, but in countries where there exists little freedom of speech, the “truth” can be far from true. By doing only a few quick searches of Middle Eastern, North African and Central Asian news organization websites and broadcasts, one can find several headlines that read along the lines of, “American-Made Film Causes Major Uproar.”

However, the film at hand was neither made nor sponsored by the U.S. government as some Asian and African news organizations have reported, but rather by an amateur filmmaker named Nakoula Nakoula, a Coptic Christian extremist who admittedly wrote the scripts of the movie to pass the time during a prison sentence.

As is clearly apparent, the video is poorly and crudely made, yet foreign media outlets continue to proliferate blatant manipulations of the true maker of the video. The main controversy surrounding Nakoula’s video is not the content of the video itself but the widely accepted public perception that it was made by one of the most powerful governments of the world: the U.S. government.

People across the world and media outlets in particular need to come to the realization that the U.S. government cannot be blamed for a video made by one of our 314 million citizens. The American government does not promote or produce videos of this type and is definitely not the source for this video that, like many other YouTube videos, is filled with hate.

To get a further grasp on the effects this video has had on the Middle East, I called my extended family in Iran and asked them about the video. Most of them told me how they have been told that the U.S. government directly made this video and that the government refuses to take responsibility for its actions.

In addition, they told me about several large protests they encountered that were filled with cries of reproach and anger. What they told me, however, was not surprising because they live in Iran, one of the more censored Islamic countries in the Middle East.

Despite a long and tumultuous relationship with the United States, the countries of the Middle East and North Africa need to realize that this video cannot be used as a scapegoat for other conflicts with the United States. Those matters must be settled diplomatically and lawfully, not with wasteful protests that resolve nothing. In the end, the countries are only protesting a YouTube video that is not worth their time or resources—a video that had its true origins blown way out of proportion.