Fitna: Sensationalism at its Worst and Situational Irony at its Finest

Quite frankly, I found Fitna atrocious. The choice of medium-- the internet and, of all sources, live leak (the original source to which Fitna was released)-- was not appropriate for political discourse, which to me suggests that Wilders did not intend to seriously contribute to the (non) integration debate but rather to incite unrest. The politics here are inexcusable-- how far will he go to misrepresent a population and terrorize the Dutch people unnecessarily in order to win seats in the Parliament? In my opinion, Fitna was an alarmist piece of hate and fear mongering, as perhaps best exemplified by the bar graphs of Europe and the Netherlands' Muslim populations that richocheted past the top of the screen, utterly removed from any context (the fact that there has been a simultaneous increase in European population as a whole, albeit not proportional to the number of Muslim immigrants but still enough to make these statistics less alarming).

Beyond the blatant lack of context provided for many of the "facts," I felt this collection of scences was an unfair and unrepresentative sample of Muslims. Many of the verses cited in the Qur'an have counterparts in the Abrahamic religions-- in the Bible's Old Testament, for example. While Wilders' footage shows passages of the Qur'an promoting the violent killing of "the enemies of Allah and your enemies," he neglects to inform us that the Old Testament promises a war-like Messiah to destroy the enemies of God's chosen people. The "uniquely Muslim" intolerance of homosexuality, adultery, and other religious faiths as portrayed by Wilders is in fact paralleled by Christian movements across the world, and in a twist of situational irony, immediately after watching Fitna I walked into Red Square only to hear a Christian evangelical screaming "Escape is folly, the only way to God is through our Lord. Convert or burn in the eternal hell fires." I feel I could reproduce Fitna in such an alarming way with insert religion here as the subject, perhaps featuring my teen daily devotional (which in today's breif explicitly declared that "Some people believe we should allow people to worship in their own way. They are wrong. We are meant to lead people to the ways of Christ," Jerry Falwell, some crazy televangelist and the guy from Red Square today in a slandering montage of Christianity. While it would be true that these people exist and are sincere in their radical beliefs, they would be no more representative of the entire Christian population that Ahmedinijad is of Islam. Wilders is simply exploiting (and I would argue causing) a growing fear of Islamic society in the wake of 9/11 and the context of increased immigration into Europe from the Middle East.

I noticed that Fitna did not only prey upon these contemporary insecurities (immigration and other political issues) but also the collective Dutch experience, or more specifically the memory of WWII. Footage lingered on a "God Bless Hitler" sign and emphasized Islamic hatred and violence towards Jews, thus targeting a sensitive spot in recent national memory and confusing group and individual feelings of guilt (for refusing to house Jewish refugees and cooperating with Hitler) and fear of Nazism with fear of Islam. I also noted the ending analogy-- like Nazism and communism, Islam is another ideology to be condemned and eradicated. Wilders has managed to tap into a wellspring of not only current unrest but bad past experience and a communal sense of guilt and fear; I can only hope that this badly-mad alarmist montage of radical, unusual, and unrepresentative scenes is poorly recieved in the Dutch community.