Newzity

Depends who you ask. The far right wing Dutch politician Geert Wilders just released his anti-Islam movie Fitna, meaning civil strife, on the Internet.

In his film Wilders mixes violent and graphic images of terrorist attack on New York twin towers and Madrid train bombing, rants of Islamic extremists, and versus of Koran - the holy book of Islam. The effort is to equate Islam with violence. What his motivation for doing this? Well, he wants to stop immigration to prevent Islamization of the Netherlands. Does he have a right to produce and release such film? As an exercise in freedom of speech, absolutely. But again freedom of speech is not absolute: you cannot yell fire in the proverbial crowded movie theater. What he is trying to say is either true or false. In either case there is no rational reason to get angry. If a little film can insult a religion as old as Islam, then people are being overly sensitive. And I know there are people, lot more than expected, who would be offended and angry. But that gives the film more credit then it deserves. And that is the bait provocateurs use.

I understand how one feels depends who they are. For a devote Muslim it would not feel the same as others. For those the film is just an intellectual argument about freedom of speech, try this: how about a movie focusing the violent aspect of your favorite religion? I cannot think of any major world religion - with possible exception of Buddhism - that does not have violent past or contains texts that can be construed as promoting violence. Before we judge others’ reaction, we should think hard about how we would react if such a movie was made public.

In life anything of importance is complex: narrowing down to one aspect and simplistic interpretation never does justice. Fighting extremism with extremism is not the best way. Exploiting a volatile situation for narrow political gain is not responsible.

But at the end, the impact of the film depends on the rest of us. We can all be mad as hell and start fighting, fulfilling the purpose of its creator. Or we can choose to see with rational mind and judge for ourselves what truth does it really show.

Here is a clip of Fitna on YouTube