Jenny’s Pennies

Dutch politician Geert Wilders has released his anti-Islam film “Fitna”. It was quite comical today when editorial writer Per Gudmundsson (Svenska Dagbladet) on page 4 in the paper questions whether the movie really exists and complains how it has been stopped by politicians, the media and companies like Google, and then in the same paper, on page 21, there is an article about how the movie is available on the internet. And it’s very Google-able. Per Gudmundsson has noted his mistake.

From what I have read about the movie (I’m sorry, but I’m not going to watch it. Scold me all you want for it, but I’m not) it doesn’t really seem like an insightful work of art. Selected quotes from the Quran blended with pictures of the terrorist attacks on New York, London and Madrid, of executions and stonings and other such terrifying things. More pictures of the Quran, and then in the end the sound of a page being ripped out, said to be a page from a phone book, and then a call to the Muslims themselves to rip the “evil pages” out of the Quran.

Some commenters I have read are of course hailing Wilders’ film as a very important wake up call to us in the west. How? What does the movie accomplish? To me, it seems to add nothing new - any one can pick up a Quran at a book store (albeit translated unless you read Arabic) and the movie clips are of the same kind readily available on the internet, and in many cases, on our TV screens during the evening news. An internet documentary, of which there are twenty a dozen. A tired provocation.

It seems as if the right wing populist parties and the extremist islamists are living in some kind of symbiosis - they can’t exist without each other. For the extremist islamists, the movie is yet another reason to preach their hate, and for the anti-Islam populists, the protests become yet another reason to preach their hate and make yet another movie or caricature. And on and on it goes. Sigh.

What I want to know is - if the anti-Islam crowd are so hell-bent on defending our freedom and our way of life against the said onslaught of scary scary Muslims, what is their proposed solution to the “Islam problem”? Because all of the solutions which comes to my mind run quite contrary to that beloved freedom and democracy they so want to defend. So, what do they propose? Deporting all Muslims? Converting them to another religion by force? Forbid all expressions of Islam (however that one will work)? Invade all Muslim countries, kill their leaders and forcibly convert the population to Christianity (the Ann Coulter solution)? Make being a Muslim a punishable crime (and what should be the punishment? re-education? death? prison?)? Round up all Muslims and put them in special camps? What is the idea?

I haven’t heard anyone in the right wing populist anti-Islam crowd actually propose a solution to the perceived problem. It’s like when pro-choicers ask the pro-life crowd what the punishment for having an abortion should be. The answer is — crickets. Or some mumbling about “but that’s not what I meant”. It’s easy to rail and chant and make movies and provoke, but when they are called on the consequences of their ideas, they are mostly speechless.

PS. nowhere in this post have I questioned the right of Geert Wilders to make the movie and to show it. He has every right to do that, no matter how stupid it is. That is not the point.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 28th, 2008 at 3:41 pm and is filed under Europe, Freedom of speech, Migration issues, Nationalism, racism etc, Politics, Religion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.