Fitna: Helpful To The Cause?
By Dirty Harry on General
Libertas
Filmmaker Geert Wilders…
After getting booted from its original web host for what were undoubtedly politically correct reasons, Fitna, a fifteen-minute documentary about the dangers of Islam, is currently making its way virally around the web and getting a lot of attention. But is it helpful to the cause of exterminating radical Islam? No, and probably just the opposite.
Created by Dutch filmmaker Geert Wilders, Fitna is an extremely graphic film, a warning about the growth of the Islamic population in the Netherlands and Europe. And it’s more than just a criticism of militant Islam, using selected quotes from the Koran, it condemns the religion itself as one based on intolerance and violence.
Is the film a wake up call to those not already awake? I doubt it. While the images and statistics are sensational, like most documentaries it preaches to the choir. I’m not sure the best way to startle a population into action is to try and connect the extreme of the extremists with the general Muslim population. If, in fact, the general Muslim population is a bigger threat to Europe and the Netherlands beyond a cultural upheaval, filmmakers need to dig that up.
In other words, what filmmakers need to do is expose their own countries’ Jeremiah Wrights. I realize that’s a helluva thing to say, but the exposure of Wright’s venemous attacks on all things white, American, and Jewish was a healthy moment for this country. The horror of those videos wasn’t so much in the watching of a demagogue racist spewing hate — we’ve seen those before — it was in the watching our friends and co-workers in the pews applauding him — it was watching seemingly intelligent people on television defending him — it was listening to Barack Obama excusing him.
The effect of the Wright videos has just begun. Because I believe in the innate goodness of all the American people, I’m convinced that some real soul-searching is now taking place and that it will result in a healthy reform and re-examination of what is and isn’t acceptable in a church that considers itself mainstream. Shame is a powerful motivator, and some good people have been shamed.
If a filmmaker believed an insidious movement was afoot in some black churches, video of the Black Panthers would not make a case to that effect. Rather, it would only insult and anger reasonable people because of the unfairness of it all. Fitna feels like that to me. You will not appeal to mainstream Muslims by conflating who they are and what they hold dear to terrorism and terrorists. If something’s going on within the mainstream — if there’s a Jeremiah Wright stirring up hate within the mainstream — expose that.
We must appeal to mainstream Muslims, not insult them. Fitna is a lazy piece of agitprop, doing more harm than good. It’s not difficult to find scary news footage and edit it together with alarmist, Al Gore-ish bar graphs and cherry-picked quotes from the Koran. What is difficult is finding an honest way to convince and motivate — to appeal to one’s better nature. And the best place to start is with reason and truth.
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