Fitna up and down in a day
On Friday the 28th March Geert Wilders released his anti-Koran movie Fitna on Liveleak:
As you can see, within hours Liveleak was forced to take it down when some idiots, presumably Muslims, decided to prove the point of the movie by threatening violence. UPDATE (2 April): It is up again. The threats can’t have been that scary.
Fitna is an unsubtle piece of anti-immigration propaganda, and makes extremely unpleasant viewing. Having said that, most of the unpleasant realities it portrays are simply the words and actions of Muslims speaking and acting in the name of Islam.
The UN head Ban Ki-Moon condemned the film, saying
There is no justification for hate speech or incitement to violence…The right of free expression is not at stake here.
Presuming he is accusing Wilders of hate speech, he misses the point completely. The film does show hate speech by radical Muslims calling for the “kuffar” to be killed. But reporting the hate speech of others cannot in itself constitute hate speech.
Indeed this weird double- think is endemic within the UN. When High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour says that governments should “they should prohibit any advocacy of national, racial, or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence,” we do not know if she is talking about the hate-spewing imams shown in Fitna, or Wilders the messenger.
They should offer strong protective measures to all forms of freedom of expression, while at the same time enacting appropriate restrictions, as necessary, to protect the rights of others.
What does she mean by “rights of others”? It is not a no that your silly supremacist beliefs be respected, the UN Human Rights Council’s recently-expressed“deep concern” about the defamation of religion (read “Islam”) notwithstanding.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the blindest, most morally bankrupt and least self-aware condemnation of the movie came from the OIC’s Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, who claimed that it “defamed Islam” and – as always – caused “insult to the sentiments of more than 1.3 billion Muslims in the world”.
Anyway, if you want to see the movie its still up on YouTube at the time of writing:
Well, that was unpleasant viewing but nothing that I hadn’t seen before – some of it had been censored (just as well).
Irony was meant for Islam.
Religious clerics in saying unpleasant things shocker! The hype for this truly pathetic piece of propaganda has been staggering – there’s far better unsubtle dissections of radical Islam all over the net, just they’re not produced by populist politicians with high opinions of themselves. That said, if just one Muslim thinks there’s anything worth getting upset about in the film, then he’s proved his point.
I have seen the film, thanks mww, its a pretty high dose of right-wing, fear provoking, not ver subtle nor clever piece of propaganda. In this way, it reminded me of the films that their Islamic counterparts produce, where, for example, “the west” is out to get the “muslim world” any day now.. (You can find these on archive.org by searching iraq, al-qaida, jihad, and other such terms..)
All in all, it’s just the old fear tactic – be afraid, be very afraid – now give me your money/vote/life – as I am the only one who can ever save your soul.
Tickets anyone? 😉
“reporting the hate speech of others cannot in itself constitute hate speech.”
Exactly.
Did I miss MWW writing about this?
http://blogs.salon.com/0003494/2008/03/28.html
Yes, unsubtle, yes, propaganda, and, yes, predictable. I think more was said by the mere fact of his making the film (and threatening to release it) than by the film itself. Perhaps it was a social experiment (as if one were needed!) to show how certain elements within politics and religion would go into a hissy fit about religions’ rights not to be “offended”. Must say, I got the impression that Wilders copped out of actually showing a tearing of a page from the Koran, though I may be wrong.
I’m no friend of religion and especially not radicalised politico-religious fanatics.
But it’s ironic that Geert Wilders (who wants to ban Islam from the Netherlands – doesn’t that sound rather censorious to you?) can say anything whatsoever about censorship!
To be honest, he’s every bit as fascist and confrontational as the radical Islamists, and he wants the “clash of the civilisations” to arrive every bit as much as they do too.
Two sides of the same coin and two faces of the same fascism and deliberate warmongering if you ask me. Fuck them both, because without religious nutters and without authoritarian power-mad politicians, we’d be two steps closer to creating peace on Earth.
@Anne R Key:
True. But aren’t you worried about the appeasers? Appeasing the islamofascists has not worked and will not work, just as it didn’t work with Hitler. Defending our right to have an opinion simply *has* to be defended. If we don’t do it then the right-wingers like Wilders, the BNP, and UKIP will do it. Ordinary, middle-of-the-road people like my father and his father before him ended up having to go to war because appeasement didn’t work the last time.
(It’s back up on Live Leak, BTW. Good for them.)