Hmm. You may be right. I remember reading somewhere that Hitchens came up with it, but that attribution might have been wrong. Fallaci certainly made use of it more prevalently.

In America we would call those mobs “sheeple” for a combination of sheep and people: human, but incapable of thinking for themselves and dumb enough to follow anyone who will lead them.

Smart people who hate — KKK leaders, for example — wouldn’t be nearly as dangerous if they didn’t have mobs of violent sheeple to use as weapons.

http://www.slate.com/id/2169020/

The term is quite apt in describing a phenomenon in the Muslim world we’ve all become too familiar with.

And Huma you hit the nail on the head when you imply that none of these protestors actually read the book. This is so true and only proves the unworthiness of these protests. The people involved are nothing but embarrassingly uninformed.

I remember during the London protests against the pope, a Muslim blogger posted about the absurdity of the protestors, where he asked one “what exactly do you have against the pope?” and the guy said the pope attempted to re-write the Koran to make it pro-Zionism. Another thought the pope was a political leader of the UK. Can you see the level of ignorance that almost always accompanies these type of protests? It’s a shame that they are the ones representing us in the media!