Dutch politician’s Islam film continues to stir trouble
by Jura Watchmaker, 29 March 2008
Far-right Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders‘ 15-minute film on Islam has been removed from the servers of London-based web forum LiveLeak.
LiveLeak decided to pull “Fitna” following threats to its staff “of a very serious nature”. In a statement the company explained its position:
“This is a sad day for freedom of speech on the net but we have to place the safety and well being of our staff above all else… Perhaps there is still hope that this situation may produce a discussion that could benefit and educate all of us as to how we can accept one anothers culture.”
A bit anodyne, perhaps, but I can understand LiveLeak’s position.
This may be a free speech issue, but only in part. It goes way beyond freedom of speech, and those who defend Wilders risk being co-opted to a dodgy political cause. Reducing this to an issue of free speech is politically infantile and deeply reactionary.
Wilders is a politician is of the extreme right – nationalist, populist and demagogic. The man is a racist, and no defender of the rights of individuals or groups with whom he disagrees. Wilders the fascist is as much a hypocrite as those on the left who object to his film on the grounds that they do not wish to offend Muslims.
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon condemned the film as “offensively anti-Islamic”, adding:
“There is no justification for hate speech or incitement to violence… The right of free expression is not at stake here.”
Ban is right. Free expression isn’t at stake here, and those who claim it is are either fools or wilfully serving a reactionary political agenda.
Saturday 29 March 2008 at 15:32
That ugly looking weird cunt has a face just made for punching. A veritable fucking fist magnet.
Saturday 29 March 2008 at 19:54
I watched Fitna, don’t understand what all the fuss is about… It just comprises quotes from the Koran, images of Islamic terrorist attacks, and the Immams that defend/sanction them.
Saturday 29 March 2008 at 19:55
After watching the film, I can’t imagine what the Islamist nutcases would be angry about; so the joke’s on them. The entire thrust of the film is to affirm the case that the Koran supports everything jihadists do, which is precisely the affirmation jihadists claim to justify their lunacy.
With a different soundtrack, a few seconds of footage trimmed here and there, and some editing at the very end, it would come off like some sort of al-Qaida propaganda film.
I’m a bit yes-and-no on Ban Ki-Moon’s position. No, there is no legal free speech prohibition at stake here. But yes, there is a threat of horrific violence that confronts the exercise of free speech in these matters.
That threat hangs heaviest over the Muslims of the world. And what does Wilders care about that? What purpose does his film serve in aid of those Muslims?
Nada.
Saturday 29 March 2008 at 20:32
You could make a similar film, this time splicing together select quotes from the Jewish bible, and some dodgy bits from the New Testament. Spice it up with a few recordings of hellfire preachers and oleaginous telly evangelists, and a soundtrack that in the present context sounds ever so slightly sinister. The result would be anti-Judeo-Christian propaganda that gives right-wing bigots and otherwise lumpen idiots a mighty hard-on. Rhetorical devices – some crude, some not so crude – employed in the service of a fascist political agenda.
Saturday 29 March 2008 at 21:00
Here’s my problem. The film’s poor, even as propaganda. Wilders’s politics are an anathema to me. Terry’s analysis seems sound. However, given Liveleak’s notice the statement:
seems wrong, unless you believe Fitna is an incitement to violence (I’m less convinced by terms like “hate speech” which could equally be stretched to emcompass Hitchens et al by enemies of free speech). If you merely think it is shit propagated by a right wing cunt, then the fact that people are being threatened for distributing it automatically makes it an issue of free speech.
Do people think the corn dealer rule applies?
And if it does, do they think it applied in the case of the motoons?
Saturday 29 March 2008 at 21:02
Sorry corn dealer rule.
http://www.signandsight.com/features/1668.html
Saturday 29 March 2008 at 21:10
The Netherlands have in recent years seen an increase in attacks on the country’s ethnic minorities, and Dutch Muslims are being targeted. Geert Wilders is a politician in the same mould as the late Pim Fortuyn, and Fortuyn’s speech and off-camera politicking is believed by many to have incited violent attacks on Dutch Muslims and their mosques.
So yes, I do believe that the film Fitna is an incitement to violence.
Saturday 29 March 2008 at 21:39
Certainly the preachers within it are guilty of incitement to violence, but at what point does Wilders incite violence? (except agaisnt himself?)
The last third of the film is obviously a more parochial right wing vilification of Muslims (he fails to make a distinction clearly between Islamists and Muslims) and has the Mark Steyn Eurabia dross on the end. But he is no more guilty of inciting violence than Channel 4’s undercover Mosque (I do not for one minute suggest an equivalence in journalistic standards!) or Melanie Philips.
Saturday 29 March 2008 at 21:56
You will not find a Dutch MP – even a fascist one – appearing on TV and directly appealing to his followers to torch a mosque. The incitement is in the “parochial right wing vilification of Muslims”, and Wilders’ deliberate association of Islamists with Muslims as a whole.
Saturday 29 March 2008 at 22:31
“You could make a similar film. . .” etc. Aye, that very thought occurred to me when I was watching it. But drawing from either the dodgy bits of the Jewish bible or the new testament, would it be “an incitement to violence”?
I don’t think so. In this case, who is being incited to violence, and against whom? If it’s intended (and intent does matter) as an incitement of some kind against Muslims (it wouldn’t take much to convince me that this is what Wilders is about), in fact, the film is far more likely to incite is violence carried out on behalf of Muslims (witness the cartoon affair).
It would normally depend upon the context, and the corn dealer rule does help in that respect. The problem is, these expressions occur everywhere now, all at once. The internet isn’t about old wine in new bottles - it’s wine without bottles, and its content unfolds in every location and in no location.
It is becoming impossible to make the distinction between something that is the mere expression of an idea in “newspapers” and something that is an incitement because it is aimed “directly to an angry mob outside the home of the corn dealer.”
That’s what’s new and weird about this stuff.
Saturday 29 March 2008 at 22:33
So half the British press are guilty of incitement to violence on that basis.
I’m not doubting Wilders is a reactionary right wing git, and he is undoubtedly motivated by a non-Bermanesque critique of Islamism (and deliberately conflates it with Islam as a whole), but in my judgment there is more longterm danger in banning such material, than there is allowing it. You are on dangerous ground when you start to shift the line of incitement to violence to the dog whistle level, even if the dog whistle is pretty damn loud.
http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=X3Hg-Y7MugU
Saturday 29 March 2008 at 22:45
Blimey - all this talk about ‘freedom of speech’ in the abstract for scumbags and fash is giving me a headache.
What people seem to be missing here is the fact that nothing has been banned, nothing has been done to disallow the making of the stupid film in the first place, and anyone with an intertubes connection can access the stupid non-fillum.
Worth also mentioning -
Saturday 29 March 2008 at 23:04
There is no such thing as freedom of speech for scumbags and fash, just freedom of speech.
Saturday 29 March 2008 at 23:16
Scoop - I don’t see anyone here suggesting the the way to deal with fascists like Wilders is to ban them. I’m certainly not. But calling a fascist on his fascism is in my view a moral imperative.
Terry - the incitement is contained in the film and Wilders’ and his party’s wider political activism.
The film is to me sinister. Now I could of course be over-interpreting this in the light of what else I know about Wilders. But the film really gives me the willies, and in it I detect echoes of fascist incitement in history.
Dutch Muslims are in a vulnerable position, as they are in other European countries. I think it’s important to distinguish between violence perpetrated by lone nutters and tiny groups of Islamist extremists in Europe, and racist violence initiated by white Europeans against ethnic minorities.
The wine without bottles point is well made.
Sunday 30 March 2008 at 4:02
“Scoop - I don’t see anyone here suggesting the the way to deal with fascists like Wilders is to ban them.”
I am — anything to defeat the scum should be done. Banning them is only one tactic. Killing them is another. Blowing their fucking brains out with a small firearm is but one option amongst many.
The traditional ‘no-platform’ stance — a very much misunderstood concept that liberals (and for that matter an awful lot of what i call the pseudo-left) have great difficulty in registering in their tiny minds, is not *only* about denying a platform to nazis/fash — it is a tactic that is one part of a strategy — that is, it isn’t done in isolation from political work — it runs parallel to political argumentation, agitation and organisation. Stupid liberals think they can defeat nazis/fash by the power of their immaculate intellects — idealist stupidity and a supremely pompous, vain boastfulness that only liberals are capable of.
Liberals and nazis — not the same but equally stupid beyond belief.
Sunday 30 March 2008 at 4:06
hey Will, how would you classify nervous, pessimistic, left liberals?
Sunday 30 March 2008 at 4:11
Sort of fence sitters?
And equally as stupid and retarded.
Does that satisfy?
Sunday 30 March 2008 at 4:38
at least I’m not a fash or nazi. v.relieved indeed by that
Sunday 30 March 2008 at 4:51
You should be.
I once upon a time kicked a nazi in the heed. His heed hurt for a while and bleeded all over the pavement. Outside the Eldon Square entrance on Northumberland Street it was. He was selling the latest paper that the BNP types sold at the time. He didn’t do it again as far as I know. Short hair is not a sign of hardness. Take the cunts on — they are all cowards and shit. Kill them all.
Sunday 30 March 2008 at 8:11
“The film is to me sinister. Now I could of course be over-interpreting this in the light of what else I know about Wilders. But the film really gives me the willies, and in it I detect echoes of fascist incitement in history.”
That’s fine, just so long as you realise there are people who would accuse this blog of stoking up the same incitement (many of the things in Wilders film have appeared here e.g. Hezbollah doing Nazi salutes). There are people who would accuse this blog of being Islamophobic and seek to suppress it.
http://www.secularism.org.uk/islamiststurnunhumanrightsbodyin.html
The fact they are wrong is besides the point. If they are able to get laws passed that catch Wilders for offending Islam in the future, they will be used to catch the good, as well as the bad, by a different sort of fascist in their attempts to silence people they don’t like.
Besides, the more Wilders is portrayed as a martyr/victim, the more votes he will obtain.
Sunday 30 March 2008 at 17:36
This is not Harry’s Place.
Sunday 30 March 2008 at 17:44
“Besides, the more Wilders is portrayed as a martyr/victim, the more votes he will obtain.”
Then stop portraying him as a martyr/victim.
Sunday 30 March 2008 at 21:52
I’m not the one arguing he should be banned…
Sunday 30 March 2008 at 23:28
It’s simple–’Fitna’ is not being offered as a legitimate critique of Jihadism or a particular reactionary sect. It is propaganda for a racist agenda–closing Dutch borders to migrants from the Middle East, Africa and South East Asia–and perhaps at some future date ‘resettlement’. Socialists–whether revolutionary, reformist or libertarian–should denounce ‘Fitna’ at every turn, not offer a cloak of respectability by complaining about rights which have not been infringed. As has already been pointed out, it is freely available via youtube and other sources.
Sunday 30 March 2008 at 23:34
“I’m not the one arguing he should be banned…”
I’m not the one portraying him as a victim or martyr…
Monday 31 March 2008 at 2:18
PS. This thread is fucking garbage and shit and that.
I want the last word and that.