Around 30 people gathered at the Islamic Foundation in Brno, south Moravia, May 5 for the screening of Fitna, a controversial new film by Dutch right-wing Deputy Geert Wilders.
The film starts off with the first lulling tones of the Arabian Dance from The Nutcracker ballet as a mock-up of a page from the Koran appears onscreen, along with an English translation of an excerpt from a verse: “Prepare for them whatever force and cavalry ye are able of gathering / to strike terror … into the hearts of the enemies, of Allah and your enemies.”
After several seconds, the Nutcracker music stops, replaced by news clips depicting the destruction of the events of Sept. 11, 2001. The remainder of the film follows a similar pattern, interweaving violence-oriented excerpts from the Koran with footage of terrorist attacks, beheadings and Islamic extremist rhetoric…
[T]he Islamic Foundation in Brno organized its own screening of Fitna.
“We wanted to illuminate the parts of the Koran that were left out of the movie,” said Brno Islamic Foundation Chairman Muneeb Hasan, an Iraqi immigrant who has lived in the Czech Republic for 23 years. “The film depicts Muslims as people who are rigid in their views, so we wanted to show that we are not afraid of criticism, that we are open to discussion.”
For Hasan, Fitna is particularly dangerous because it instills the idea of a link between Islam and terrorism into the audience’s subconscious. “The film alleges that Muslims lack the ability to live in peace with other cultures, that women have an inferior position in society than men,” he said. “It’s biased and xenophobic.”
That’s how you respond to speech you don’t like and you think is dangerous. You engage it and show it for what it is. Geert Wilder’s publicity stunt is a dismal failure, endorsements from Robert Spencer, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Mel Phillips, and the rest of the xenophobic alphabet soup notwithstanding. Shaking fists at the Dutch government is stupid, not in the least because it shows a fundamental misunderstanding of what open societies are and do.
