LOS ANGELES (ANS) -- The maker of the film "Innocence of Muslims" duped a Christian charity into providing its headquarters for the movie, the charity's leader said.

According to a story by the LA Times, Joseph Nassralla, president of Media for Christ, said he offered the charity's broadcast studio for 10 days of filming but had nothing further to do with the movie, which depicted the prophet Muhammad as a buffoon and sexual deviant. The low-budget anti-Islam film has stirred anti-American protests throughout the Arab world.

“The final product ... bore no resemblance to the film I thought he was making,” the LA Times reported Nassralla wrote. “Nakoula altered the film without anyone's knowledge, changing its entire focus and dubbing in new dialogue.”

The LA Times reported that Nassralla made the statement in a statement posted on the website of anti-Muslim blogger and activist Pamela Geller.

Nassralla wrote that a fellow Egyptian immigrant named Nakoula B. Nakoula had approached him last year for help making a movie about Christian persecution and said “it would examine the culture of the desert and how it is related to what is going on right now.”

The LA Times said Nassralla, who said he was in hiding after receiving death threats, was drawn into the firestorm over the film because his charity's name was listed on permits for the movie. In his statement, Nassralla said he was unaware that Nakoula had listed his organization on government documents.

The LA Times said his charity runs a satellite television network, The Way TV, which airs sermons and hymns alongside anti-Islamic rhetoric. The host of one such program is Steve Klein, a “militant evangelical Christian” from Riverside County who worked as a script consultant for “Innocence of Muslims.”

The LA Times said that even as Nassralla distanced himself from the movie, he wrote that blame for the worldwide violence triggered by the film's trailer that was posted on YouTube lay not with the filmmakers but “those who are rioting and murdering.”

The LA Times said his account of the movie's origins heightened the focus on Nakoula, a convicted felon and acolyte of Zakaria Botros Henein, an Orange County-based televangelist known for scorning the prophet Muhammad.

Nakoula, an operator of service stations in Hawaiian Gardens, spent most of the year before the film shoot in federal custody on bank fraud charges. A fellow inmate told The Times that Nakoula obsessively read the Koran for ammunition against Islam and said he had been “enlightened” by Botros, a Coptic priest disavowed by the mainstream church.

The LA Times said two months after his release, Nakoula arranged the film shoot, telling the cast and crew his name was Sam Bacile. He used that name last week in media interviews in which he identified himself as an Israeli American director backed by 100 Jewish donors. He subsequently acknowledged he was a Christian, but told the Associated Press he was a logistics manager for Bacile. The Times found no evidence of a Bacile with any involvement in the film.

The LA Times said Nakoula later called Bishop Serapion of the Coptic Orthodox Diocese of Los Angeles to deny any involvement with the film. He and his family left their Cerritos home last weekend and are in hiding. Attempts by the LA Times to reach Nakoula, Nassralla and Botros were unsuccessful.

According to an earlier story in The Wall Street Journal by Devlin Barrett, Tamara Audi and Erica Orden, the views of Media for Christ and The WAy TV appear to be far from the norm among Egyptian Christians, known as Copts. They are mainstream group of Christians with moderate views similar to those of other major Christian religions. The Coptic Church, like the Greek Orthodox Church, has its own hierarchy and leadership.

Southern California's small Coptic community is responding to the film with "extreme concern," said Father Gregory Bishay, of the Three Holy Youth Church, a Coptic congregation in Orange, Calif.

“Christians never retaliate with force,” the Wall Street Journal reported he said. “We respond; we do not initiate.”

Bishay estimated the Coptic church has 30,000 members in Southern California.

The Wall Street Journal reported that as troubling as the film itself is to Bishay, he said he is not worried that it will engender violent attacks on Coptic congregations in the U.S. In Egypt, he said anti-Coptic sentiment is so normal that he doubts the movie could make things much worse.

Jeremy Reynalds is Senior Correspondent for the ASSIST News Service, a freelance writer and also the founder and CEO of Joy Junction, New Mexico's largest emergency homeless shelter, http://www.joyjunction.org He has a master's degree in communication from the University of New Mexico, and a Ph.D. in intercultural education from Biola University in Los Angeles. His newest book is "Homeless in the City." Additional details on "Homeless in the City" are available at http://www.homelessinthecity.com. Reynalds lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico. For more information contact: Jeremy Reynalds at jeremyreynalds@comcast.net.