The World In Fits Over Fitna

By John Bloom | 03/31/2008

Having spent some time around the movie business, I can attest that the most dreaded words you can hear are normally “Will you watch my short film?” So we may have set a world record for triumphs by a first-time short-film director last Thursday when Geert Wilders, leader of the Party for Freedom in the Netherlands, released his 15-minute impressionistic documentary Fitna. Three million viewers in the first 24 hours.

But it’s even better than that. By Friday afternoon you had to stand in line at the United Nations to make your speech condemning the film, and the number of actual heads of state who had spoken out against the movie were already into the double digits by the weekend. (By the way, nobody in the English-speaking world knows what the Arabic word fitna means, especially not the confused writer of the quickie Wikipedia article on the subject. But it’s used in Sura 8 of the Koran, the chapter that talks about violent jihad, and the most reasonable choice among the many ways you could translate it is simply “War.”)

Not since the Danish Muhammad cartoons of February 2006 have so many people come out of the woodwork to scream “Blasphemy!” on the one hand and “Censorship!” on the other. We even had the Secretary-General of the United Nations himself condemning the film, not because it’s blasphemous, but because it’s “anti-Islamic.” (Wilders was so proud of that that he put the Reuters report on his homepage.) You also had the mainstream media, led by the New York Times, refusing to deal with what the film actually says and instead offering up a dry description of its content and generally portraying Wilders as an extremist, similar to the way we portray fringe politicians like David Duke.

And they all totally wimped out on publishing the website where you can watch the film: www.themoviefitna.com.

Maybe sometime in the next decade or so the mainstream media will start to figure out that people want to judge for themselves. Would they have been similarly reticent to name the website if this had been an anti-Christian film by Christopher Hitchens? Of course not. There are documentaries on the History Channel all the time about “the Jesus the church doesn’t tell you about.” Does anyone take the microphone at the United Nations to say “This is irresponsible and anti-Christian”? Of course not. Some of the most shocking statements by the Muslim fanatics in Fitna are anti-Semitic, including the coaching of a three-year-old girl to tell the camera that Jews are “apes and pigs.” If a rabbi were to step forward and say the Saudis (who broadcast that clip) were being blasphemous, everyone would ignore him. If a Muslim cleric says the same thing, European governments actually take his calls!

This “crisis,” if you can call it a crisis, was caused entirely by the actions of the Netherlands government when Wilders first announced that he was going to release a film about Islam. In fact, this may be one of the first cases in history where the censorship efforts started before he had actually made the film! Because Wilders is under a death fatwa, and since death fatwas in Holland have to be taken seriously ever since filmmaker Theo Van Gogh was knifed to death by fanatic Mohammed Bouyeri (interviewed in Wilders’ film, by the way, saying “If I had the opportunity to get out of prison, and I had the opportunity to do it again, what I did on November 2nd, Allah!, I would have done exactly the same”)—since this is the altered landscape of Holland ever since they decided that multi-culturalism is not working, there was agitation from the moment Wilders said he had a film.

The government, instead of saying, “So what? Many people have films,” agreed to meet with delegations from 30 Muslim countries. (This is all before the film has been seen by anyone. So they’re meeting ... to discuss what? Whether Wilders had sufficient film school experience to handle the mise-en-scene?) Then there was more drama as Wilders went in search of a Dutch broadcaster. All of them insisted on editing the film, if they showed it at all, and Wilders didn’t trust them. As a last resort Wilders went to the Internet—which is a shame, because it looks like the film was shot on 35-millimeter filmstock—but as soon as he was ready to go, his server pulled the plug on him! We’re used to hearing those stories out of China, but his server was Network Solutions in the good old USA. Finally Liveleak stepped up and agreed to host the site. Liveleak is the same place that ran the execution of Saddam Hussein after it was censored by YouTube in 2007.

So now that we’ve seen the film, the question should not be, “Is it unfair to Islam?” There are lots of films, books, tv shows that are unfair to many religions, and that’s a subjective call anyway. The question should be, “Is it presented in such a way that it’s a coherent statement of a position, or is it just the ravings of a lunatic?” Not only is it coherent, it’s exceptionally moving. It’s powerful. It’s dramatic. I don’t even think the scenes of actual violence are the most chilling parts of it. I think it’s the footage of radical Muslim sermons. You can see the anger. You can see the hatred. To the argument made by critics that it equates the Koran with terrorism, I would answer that the film is about people who do justify their terrorism by verses in the Koran. To those who say, “Yes, but 99 percent of Muslims are peaceful,” I would answer that, yes, I agree, but that’s not what this film is about—this film is about the 1 percent, because 1 percent is all it takes! And for those of you who are wondering whether you should watch it because you’re worried about seeing the beheadings, I’ll give you the opposite of a spoiler: the editor cuts away before the head is actually cut off. Why show such a scene? To answer the question people are putting to Geert Wilders: Why do you have to put this on film? Look at what they put on film. Shouldn’t that be where our outrage is directed?

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