Saturday, March 29, 2008

Fitna, documentary about violence, hatred and Islam from The Netherlands

Geert Wilders has recently gotten a lot of attention for making a short documentary that shows the rise of Islamic violence in the Netherlands and against the west. The film, Fitna, presents passages from the Koran that advocate violence against non-believers along with troubling footage of honor killings, executions by Islamic radicals, terrorist bombings, and Imams thundering hatred to eager audiences. Children are recruited to hate and kill Jews, gays are hung on gallows, and threats for world domination are issued.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

While there's definitely room for a intelligent documentary on the deep veins of militancy, group exclusiveness and advocacy of violence in the Koran, this work certainly isn't it. Fitna is an absurdly superficial piece of propaganda that focuses exclusively on the most extreme forms of Islam, with no attempt to contextualise them or give any indication of how widespread they are.

I fear that this extraordinarily limited and blinkered film is going to create (or is creating) a reaction that is entirely incommensurate to it's value. It simply deserves to be ignored, in the hope that someone with a little more insight, perspective and reflection approaches the same topic.

You can't raise the level of debate by presenting a pastiche of inflammatory newspaper headlines...

Anonymous said...

You also can't raise the level of debate by advocating a violent reaction to something that offends you because it portrays you as violent, as the Taliban has done. They are so extreme they are beyond irony.

Anonymous said...

I haven't seen _Fitna_, and I would like to, but what exactly is propaganda about focusing on theistic hate groups actual words and deeds?

What kind of balanced picture needs to be presented?

When David Koresh gave the order to burn his parishioners to the ground, should a documentary have been delineating some of the good work he and the other Davidians did?

Anonymous said...

"muslim responses fitna debunked"
Type that on google, on the muslim responses site by Sami Zaatari.