Fitna
So what did I think of the Geert Wilders film Fitna?
I thought it was very effective, and very shocking, in showing that the inspiration for the evil acts of which it showed such horrifying glimpses lay in the Koran. It shows very clearly the precise nature of what the civilised world is up against, a war of religion with striking similarities to Nazi ideology and murderous mass hysteria.
It was, however, very careful not to call for the Koran or Islam to be banned. Instead it confined itself to calling for Muslims to reform their faith by removing the bad bits of the Koran, and for an end to the Islamising of Europe. To that extent it was not extreme at all, and indeed reformist Muslims themselves say much the same thing.
On the other hand, it did not make any acknowledgement of those Muslims around the world who do not subscribe to the application of their religion as represented in the film, and who live pacific and unthreatening lives in both Muslim and non-Muslim countries.
It was nevertheless accurate in its depiction of the religion and therefore could not be considered insulting. As a result, reaction from the Muslim world has so far been muted (although that may change). As the Financial Times reported:
Omar Bakri, the Libyan-based radical Muslim cleric who is barred from Britain, did not think the film was very offensive. ‘On the contrary, if we leave out the first images and the sound of the page being torn, it could be a film by the [Islamist] Mujahideen,’ he said.Quite so. Which leaves people like UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon looking pretty damn stupid:
I condemn, in the strongest terms, the airing of Geert Wilders’ offensively anti-Islamic film. There is no justification for hate speech or incitement to violence. The right of free expression is not at stake here.Ah yes, Wilders has obviously incited the threats to his own life. Thanks, Ban, for that ever-handy insight!
It was left to al Qaeda to use the film as another pretext to whip up some more anti-Islamic jihadi feeling and, in order not to disappoint us, it came up with this:
‘The correct Sharia (Islamic law) response is to cut (off) his head and let him follow his predecessor, van Gogh, to hell,’ a member of Al-Ekhlaas wrote on the al-Qaeda affiliated forum, according to the SITE Institute, a US-based terrorism monitoring service.Yup, as Ban has so helpfully already told us Wilders’s crime is to incite hatred and violence by Islamists through saying that they practise hatred and violence. Or to put it another way, they are saying to us: ‘If you insult my faith by saying it’s violent, I’ll kill you’ and we're supposed to endorse the logic.
There’s a comedy in here somewhere underneath the horror.