WASHINGTON, Sept 14: As protests against a hate film continued on the fourth day on Friday, US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton described the offensive video as “disgusting and reprehensible”.

But in a message to Muslims across the world, she also urged them to avoid violence, saying that “there is never any justification for violent acts” witnessed during the last four days.

“The United States government had absolutely nothing to do with this video,” she told reporters at the State Department. “We absolutely reject its content and message.”

“To us, to me personally, this video is disgusting and reprehensible,” Mrs Clinton said. “It appears to have a deeply cynical purpose: to denigrate a great religion and to provoke rage.”

The film – “Innocence of Muslims” – was made in the United States by a mysterious Egyptian Coptic and is backed by a controversial Christian cleric, Pastor Terry Jones. Both have a history of hate crimes, financial fraud and attacks on Muslims.

At an Eid dinner at the State Department, Secretary Clinton told her Muslim guests why she believed violence would not help heal the wounds caused by the offensive video which led to the deaths of US ambassador and three other diplomats in Libya this week.

“When all of us who are people of faith – and I am one – feel the pain of insults, of misunderstanding, of denigration to what we cherish, we must expect ourselves and others not to resort to violence,” she said.

Secretary Clinton urged people of all faiths to learn “answering ignorance with enlightenment, answering hatred with understanding, answering darkness with light”.She invited them to work together to create a world where if one person committed a violent act in the name of religion, “millions will stand up and condemn it out of strength”.Her boss, President Barack Obama, however, had a stronger message for those committing violence.

“I want people around the world to hear me. To all those who would do us harm: No act of terror will go unpunished,” he told a campaign event in Colorado. “I will not dim the light of the values that we proudly present to the rest of the world. No act of violence shakes the resolve of the United States of America.”

But despite such pleas and warnings, protests against the film spread across 20 Arab and Muslim states on Friday. Although protests outside the Middle East remained peaceful, there were attacks on US embassies and American properties in Sudan, Lebanon, Yemen and other places.

Reports in the US media, however, rejected the suggestion that the violence reflected a clash of values between the Western and Islamic civilisations.

In an article posted on a popular news site, Global Post, Erin Cunningham, noted that Terry Jones was a fringe pastor who headed a church of roughly 50 followers in a country of more than 300 million people.

“In Libya, locals fought — and were killed — defending the US consulate and Libyans on Twitter expressed an outpouring of apologies and grief for the deadly attack,” she wrote.

Other writers pointed out that the protests did not draw large crowds anywhere in the Muslim word. Even the most violent protests did not have more than a few hundred people.

Libyan Ambassador to the US Ali Suleiman Aujali said at the Eid dinner that the attack on the US consulate in Benghazi had also shocked him. US Ambassador Chris Stevens, he noted, played a key role in ending dictatorship in Libya “We were shocked by the death of four American diplomats … it is our responsibility, and the responsibility of the Libyan people … to protect all the diplomatic missions in our country,” particularly Americans who had been wronged.