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This post has been updated with a response from Jim Caviezel’s attorney and additional protester accounts.

The now-deleted Facebook event instructed participants to “be ready for a Quran roast” and called for people to come to the White House on Saturday to “stand up against islam and the islamic immigration which is illegally being implemented on our nation.” [sic]

No one was more ready than a group of counterprotesters.

They shouted down the participants and surrounded them with sheets to prevent people from seeing them. They also stole the Quran the group planned to burn.

Actor Jim Caviezel, who was filming his CBS show Person of Interest outside the White House, made a cameo appearance as well.

“He got out of a van and walked over to see what was going on,” says Matt Kirkland, the organizer of the counterprotest. “He chose to insert himself, saying, ‘You all are wrong. I know Islam. Islam is evil. All the men want Sharia.'” Kirkland says that Caviezel said something in Farsi to a bystander, “as if to affirm that Islam is scary,” and then walked away.

Kirkland said that the group didn’t recognize the The Passion of the Christ actor until after he had already left.

“The Statements are completely fabricated,” Martin D. Singer, an attorney for Caviezel, wrote in a letter to DCist. “Mr. Caviezel did not make the Statements attributed to him, nor did he say anything like them. The claim that my client made the Statements is an utter fabrication.”

Other protesters affirm Kirkland’s account of the events.

Jordan Denari was holding a sign that said “I am Christian and I love the Quran” when she says Caviezel approached her, though she didn’t realize who he was at the time. “It was a tall man in a really nice suit who looked familiar,” she says. “He started talking about Sharia law, and then he told me to watch the movie The Stoning of Soraya M., which he said would tell me everything I need to know about Sharia.” The film, which stars Caviezel, is about a woman in Iran sentenced to stoning under Sharia law. “At one point, he started speaking in another language. I said, ‘That’s not Arabic,’ and he said, ‘No, it’s Farsi.’” She does not know what he said in Farsi.

Protester Tiana Trutna was standing nearby and also saw the exchange. “He started speaking about Sharia law [to Denari], he started speaking Farsi, and then he was pushed along by a handler,” she recalls. “It all happened really fast.”

A fourth protester, who asked not to be named for fear of reprisals, says that Caviezel, “was super intent on Sharia and Islam being evil.”

CBS has not responded to multiple requests for comment.

Kirkland found out about the plan to burn a Quran on the way home from work on Friday.

“Muslim people, and brown and black people seen as Muslim, face the threat of violence all the time, and those threats are constantly escalating,” Kirkland says. “Something like this can’t go unchallenged. It’s up to non-Muslims to show how unacceptable this is.”

About 100 people joined him to shut down the six demonstrators, who called themselves the “Sons of Liberty.”

The “Quran Roast” follows other instances of anti-Muslim threats in D.C., including an evacuation from the Council on American-Islamic Relations after receiving a suspicious substance in the mail.

Filed Under: islamophobia, protest, white house,