Geert Wilders Screens “Fitna” and Exposes the Problem of Radical Islam in Europe Today

Last Friday I attended a talk organized by the Legal Project of Daniel Pipes’ Middle East Forum. The speaker was Geert Wilders, the Dutch Parliamentarian known for his controversial statements about Islam and Muslim immigrants to Europe, as well as for producing the film “Fitna.”

The film, whose title in Arabic means “disagreement or division among people,” has earned its producer numerous death threats and legal prosecution by the country of Jordan, where officials have deemed the film “demeaning to Muslim feelings” among other alleged offenses such as being insulting to Islam and to the prophet Mohammed.

While I found the film, which intersperses scenes of Islamist terrorism with suras, or chapters, from the Koran, unexceptional, the way it has been greeted–with death threats and prosecution–highlights its importance. Wilders may be a provocateur (although in my observation, while blunt to the point of political incorrectness, he did not seem prejudiced or intolerant of anyone who is not intolerant of him), the way radical Muslims have attempted to intimidate him highlights the problem that afflicts Europe today.

Wilders’ situation seems to be a microcosm of the battle playing out in Europe–demographically, ideologically, and physically–between Western, liberal societies and their people, and Muslim immigrants, the extremists among whom seek to dominate Europe rather than assimilate.

Mr. Wilders himself refuses to be intimidated. He released the film last May. Since then it has been banned from numerous web sites due to death threats against employees. Mr. Wilders is presently traveling around the U.S., screening it.

Personally, I found what Mr. Wilders had to say more interesting than the film, which offered the requisite shots of the planes crashing into the towers and groups of radical Islamist demonstrators in the capitals of Europe bearing hate-filled signs like “Death to the U.S.A.” that evidently (and why am I not surprised?) are granted immunity from European political elites’ efforts to ban “hate speech.”

Mr. Wilders says he intended the film to serve as a lightning rod for discussing the problem of intimidation of free thought and free speech in Europe.

“A single film often says more than 1,000 words; that’s why I made Fitna,” he told the assembled group.

As a New Yorker with many Muslim friends who are dear to me, and as a journalist who interviews successful, contributing immigrants to New York, many of whom are Muslim, for the New York Daily News, I am sensitive, I believe, to the ignorance of stereotyping and the dangers that can accompany alarmism. In other words, creeping fear–fear of extremists that is justified–can color one’s perceptions in such a way as to make all Muslims seem menacing, and that is bigotry. I also do not believe in denigrating other people’s religion. On the other hand, excessive political correctness that prompts people to contort their thinking in ways that are not in keeping with facts, and that makes it easier to deny real threats, is not the answer. Nor is it acceptable in a free society to use threats of physical intimidation to prevent people from writing or saying something that hurts your feelings.

I was pleased when a man at the screening asked Wilders to clarify his statement, made after he showed the film, that he “do[es] not believe in the moderate Islam.”

Wilders said, “The majority of Muslims are not terrorists or crazy people; they are trying to do their best. But Islam is a threat [because] the Koran is used today as a source of inspiration, a justification for violence.”

That Europe’s Muslim population is burgeoning is a well-known fact, but some of the facts Mr. Wilders shared were news to me. He said, for instance, that in the Netherlands, some Muslim parents have protested the teaching of Holocaust history to their grade school children – and prevailed.

“The History of the Holocaust can’t be taught in my country for fear of offending Muslims,” he said. “Muslim parents were making threats, and many of the teachers gave in.”

While I had read of such shameful realities in the United Kingdom, I was not aware the same was occurring in Holland. Indeed, I have not been able to find documentation online of this repression taking place in schools in the Netherlands, but according to Mr. Wilders, it is occurring in his country.

It is one thing to subvert the truth by donning politically correct glasses that blur the black and white elements of the geopolitical landscape so they appear a more comforting gray. Saying, for instance, that Jewish and Christian extremists are just as grave a threat to world peace as Muslim extremists is one way to attempt this. But what is happening in Europe–agreement to stop teaching the history of the Holocaust for fear of offending radical Muslim sensibilities–is far worse. I do not think it is alarmist to say it reflects the appeasement mindset of a people who know they are under siege, and have opted for preemptive surrender.

“We have no Winston Churchills, we only have appeasers, Chamberlains, today,” Wilders said, adding it is not purely fear but that there are also “political and economic reasons [European] politicians are surrendering our freedoms.”

“Nobody likes war, but we are in a war in Europe,” he said. “Not a conventional war, but a soft jihad, using immigration” on the part of Muslims who, he contends, by and large do not want to assimilate and accept liberal values such as freedom of speech, gay rights, and women’s rights. For this reason, he favors cutting off immigration of Muslims to his country.

For that view, he has been branded a reactionary and intolerant, even a bigot. But it seems to me a thorny problem, this demographic explosion of Europe’s Muslim population, that is easy to judge from across a great sea but which does not affect us in the same way as it’s affecting Europe, at least not yet. Even though most Muslims are decent people, the radicals are surely strengthened in a situation where they perceive they are in the majority, or at least have greater numbers.

These are a very potent factors–turf and numbers. If radical elements that seek to subvert a society feel they are insulated, they are far more likely to attempt to influence political policy, and they are far more likely to succeed in doing so. And if they are not inclined to respect Western values, including women’s rights, gay rights, the teaching of history, and free speech, those values will come increasingly under attack.

“America is the last one standing,” said Wilders. “You are losing Europe every day, every month. If you don’t take it seriously, in a few years or decades you may be the only ones to defend the values of Athens, Rome, and Jerusalem.”

This entry was written by Heather Robinson and posted on October 18, 2008 at 6:40 pm and filed under Blog. permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Keywords: democracy, human-rights. Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL. */?>