Los Angeles, USA - For decades, Muslim migrants drawn to Southern California have largely found the region to be welcoming as they built new mosques in the state's rural eastern valleys and urban centers.
But in the past few years, tensions have percolated between the region's growing Muslim communities and local right-wing evangelical groups. A small but vocal number of loosely connected Christian activists have protested at Mosques and Islamic events, saying they feel threatened by the spread of Islam in the U.S.
Two people with alleged connections to the anti-Islam movie that may have sparked deadly protests in Libya live south of Los Angeles—Nakoula B. Nakoula, who has identified himself as a Christian from Egypt, and who law-enforcement officials say they believe was the film's producer; and Steve Klein, a Christian anti-Muslim activist prominent in the region, who has said in media interviews that he served as a consultant on the film.
The tensions here mirror other flash points nationwide, like protests over Manhattan's so-called 9-11 mosque, and Florida pastor Terry Jones's Quran-burning. Hate crimes against Muslims have increased nationwide in the last several years, Federal Bureau of Investigations statistics show.
Southern California's anti-Muslim rhetoric has been quietly on the rise, Muslim advocates here say, culminating in the violence apparently set off by the locally produced "Muhammad Movie Trailer."
Both men allegedly involved in the anti-Islam movie appear to be part of a small, vocal anti-Islam movement in Southern California that incorporates evangelical Christians, a small number of Copts, or Egyptian Christians, and a few other Arab Christians, those tracking the groups say.
Media for Christ, a Christian group based just north of Los Angeles that appears to be run by Copts and other Arab Christians, filed for the permit to make the movie, according to city and filming officials. Its website features writings and video in Arabic and English that are highly critical of Islam.
Unidentified women who answered the phone at Media for Christ said they had no knowledge of the movie.
The Coptic church in the U.S. has condemned the movie, and said the Coptic church, a mainstream religion founded in Egypt that is one of the oldest Christian groups in the Middle East, has no connection to it.
"The film is totally inappropriate and shocking and this person did not secure permissions from the church," said Father Joseph Boules of the St. Mary & St. Verena Coptic Orthodox Church in Anaheim, Calif. Mr. Boules said he is concerned about Muslim retaliation against Christians in Egypt, but not in the U.S.
Muslim leaders here say they have far more friends here than enemies—pointing to numerous religious leaders from Jewish and Christian congregations who work with them and have defended them publicly against protesters.
But some Muslims say they have also been surprised by the level of anger and tactics of protesters, many of whom say they oppose the spread of Sharia, or religious Islamic law in the U.S. These protesters have also blamed Muslims for religious violence in the Middle East and attacks on Christians. And some say they fear Muslim communities in the U.S. will create havens for Muslim extremists and terrorism here.
During a 2010 protest to stop a mosque from being built in Temecula, about 80 miles southeast of Los Angeles, protesters shouted and carried signs that read "No More Mosque in America" and "Allah Not Here." Some protesters shouted "Take our country back" and "Build a church in Saudi Arabia first," according to online videos of the protest.
Some of those opposed to the mosque included one of its would-be neighbors, a Baptist church. On the church website, officials said their primary concern was that the mosque's site, adjacent to their property, was unsuitable for the size of the planned structure. But church officials also cited attacks on Christians abroad by Muslim extremists as reasons for their concern about Islam in general.
"It is our stand for religious freedom that causes us concern when we see the growing influence of the more radical elements in Islam, and the principles embedded in Sharia law which seek to give prominence to the expression of Islam and seek to replace the American Constitution and our Bill or Rights," the pastor of the Calvary Baptist Church wrote on the church's website in 2010.
On Friday, Pastor William Rench of the Calvary Baptist Church said the violent reactions of Muslims to the film underscored his concerns about Islam.
"There are thousands of offensive videos and films that attack Christianity and you don't find the same reaction with Christian people as we see in the Muslim world," he said. "I don't intend to retaliate against anyone or chop anyone's head off, or if they offend me by saying profane and vulgar things about my faith."
Mr. Rench said he has a cordial relationship with the leaders of the Muslim congregation next door, and views them as practicing a "more liberal, moderate" form of Islam.
Mahmoud Harmoush, the mosque's imam at the time, said a few protesters followed him to city hall where he was making a presentation, and then followed him to a local synagogue where he was invited to speak. "At one point, [protesters] started following me to every speech I made," he said.
"We have some pockets of extremists here, just small numbers," he added. "But the level of animosity we saw was great."
City officials last year gave the mosque permission to build.
This past August, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Muslim civil-rights group, asked federal officials to investigate who left pigs' legs outside the site of a planned mosque in Ontario, 40 miles east of Los Angeles, calling the incident a hate crime. Muslims are prohibited from eating pork and consider pigs unclean.
"In the past few years, we've seen an uptick in the rhetoric against Islam," said Munira Syeda, spokeswoman for the American-Islamic council. She said her group urged Muslims here and abroad not to react to the anti-Islamic movie.
Law enforcement officials in Southern California said Thursday that they were providing extra security for people involved in the film. But aside from hordes of reporters outside homes and offices, there seemed to be no threats to their security or threats of retaliation.
Mr. Klein, the anti-Islamic activist who said he consulted on the movie, recently warned in a video of Islamic suicide bombers coming over the border from Mexico and Canada to infiltrate the U.S. He didn't respond to numerous requests for comment.
Alarm about the spread of Islam and what that might mean for the U.S. has coincided with rising numbers of Muslims in the U.S.
There were 2,106 mosques in the U.S. last year, up 74% from 2000, when there were 1,209, according to a report released this year by the Hartford Institute of Religious Research and a coalition of religious organizations. California has the second-highest number of mosques in the nation, 246, with nearly half of them in Southern California. New York has 257.
There are about 2.6 million Muslims in the U.S., according to a 2011 Pew Research Center study. That number is projected to grow to 6.2 million Muslims by 2030, according to the study.
Mr. Harmoush, the former imam of the Temecula mosque, has since started a new mosque in the area. Right now, the congregation is small and meets in a small rented space. "No protests or anything so far," he said. "We'll see what happens if we try to build something."