The Fitna Farce
Geert Wilders' film, Fitna, fails to interest or provide insight,
making one wonder why it aroused so much attention in the first place
I just watched Dutch right-winger Geert Wilders' film, Fitna, The Movie.
He had promised it would be too shocking, too frightening, too
disturbing - and much of the world was holding its breath in a morbid,
anxious wait for its release. The media feared rabid violence by those Muslims.
My initial reaction is a yawn. I blame production. The soundtrack is
Tchaikovsky's mellow classical piece called "Arab Dance". Anyone who has seen terrorist propaganda films is familiar with most
of the scenes and most of the disgusting conflations of the Quran with
acts of violence, murder, kidnapping and antisemitism. The scene of the hanging of the gay boys Mahmoud Asgari and Ayaz Marhoni in Iran still gives me shivers...
Such behaviour
has been condemned resoundingly among Muslims. The same could also be done with clippings of the Bible.
The film is a mixture of conflating the most painful and
heart-wrenching images from terror-strikes with extremist imams, in an
effort to turn the entirety of Islam into a demonic edifice. This is
neither new, nor interesting.
What the film really shows is that Wilders doesn't know the
difference between Islam and Islamism - and when it comes to the latter
he is completely lost.
PS: The transformation
of "Fitna" into "Fin" at the end was pretty cool ;-)
