Wilders' movie Fitna released

Yesterday evening, Dutch MP Geert Wilders has released his movie Fitna (mirror). The movie had already generated plenty of hype before the release because of its expected anti-Muslim and anti-Koran theme. After watching the movie, however, to this viewer, it seems to contain little to upset Muslims. That's good news for the Dutch living in the Middle East.

The movie is a collection of old images of Muslim terrorists' actions. So we again see the attack on the World Trade Center, now with dramatic recordings of phone calls from people trapped within the building to their loved ones, we see masked men decapitating one of their hostages, imams calling for destruction of all non-believers and so on, and so on. It's a 15 minute recap of these kind of events that happened during the last few years.

Sure, these are shocking images, but it gets quite boring after a while. We have seen it before, there's nothing new here.

In between, he has inserted violent passages of the Koran, like a call to kill all the enemies of the Muslim faith, etc. A Muslim expert made an interesting comment yesterday on Dutch TV by saying that Wilders has copied the exact style of the Al Quaeda recruiting tapes, as these tapes have a similar mix of violent images and references to the Koran.

At the end, Wilders shows the Koran, then the image fades to black and you hear the sound of a page being ripped out. To avoid any misunderstanding, this is followed by the statement that the sound was made by ripping a page out of a phone book. Wilders then states that he will leave it up to the Muslims to remove all the hateful passages of the Koran.

The only "shocking" element of the movie is that Geert Wilders seems to equate the Muslim faith with all these terrible terroristic events. That's as intelligent as holding all Christians responsible for blood baths by the IRA in Northern Ireland, or blaming all the Christians for the killing of doctors who perform abortions in the USA.

Other than that, the movie doesn't bring any new insight to the table. It doesn't try to formulate a solution to the violence by fanatics, and perhaps worst of all for Wilders, he might find that many Muslims would join him in condemning the violence and the hijacking of their faith.