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Geert Wilders' film "Fitna" reveals West's cowardice towards Islam
From spiegelonline no less!Excerpt from a long, excellent opinion piece. Dutch politician Geert Wilders may be many things, but he is not the right-wing populist he is accused of being. What the debate over his film "Fitna" reveals most clearly is the West's cowardice towards Islam. There's a key for every lock, just as there's a perfectly fitting label for everyone who refuses to fit in. At the moment, the term "right-wing populist" is hot. Everyone and his brother is calling Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders by that name at the moment, but hardly any commentators or reporters have taken the time to explain what a "right-wing populist" actually is. And what distinguishes it from other political standpoints like, for instance, "left-wing populists." Geert Wilders may be many things -- he is self-confident to the point of vanity and stubborn to the point of sacrificing himself. But he's not a right-wing populist. For one thing, he's a radical liberal. For another, what he's doing at the moment is extremely unpopular. Six years ago, Pim Fortuyn, who was murdered by an animal rights fanatic, was also called a "right-wing populist." He was indeed very popular -- not because he was "right-wing" but because he insisted on drawing attention to things that the traditional elites of Dutch society had steadfastly ignored. The label "right-wing populist" resonates negatively today the same way that "communist" did in the '50s and '60s, "fascist" did in the '70s and '80s and "climate change denier" does today. It saves the speaker from having to engage with the actual content of the argument and makes the bearer of the term solely responsible for the consequences of his or her actions. If fanatical Muslims do in fact go ballistic over Wilder's film "Fitna", it's not because they have a flawed relationship to freedom of speech and religion, but because they've been insulted and provoked by Wilders -- or so the reasoning goes. So it comes as no surprise that TV presenter Tom Buhrow opened the Friday late-evening news on the German TV channel ARD with a report on the "anti-Islamic video of the right-wing populist" Geert Wilders -- as though there were a central authority in the otherwise censor-free Federal Republic of Germany that is responsible for prescribing the vocabulary of Euro-Islamic affairs. It was followed by a report on the relaxed response of Dutch Muslims, who were shown sitting in their cafes peacefully drinking coffee while Wilders raised havoc outside. According to Buhrow's narration: "The knives are already being sharpened -- but only for the doner kebabs." But he forgot to mention that, by that point, "Fitna" had already been pulled off the video portal LiveLeak, where it had been first published (more...). The British provider had received death threats that it took as seriously as they were intended -- a not entirely irrelevant bit of information that the ARD anchorman opted to omit, so as not to confuse his viewers with too many details. According to this interpretation of events, Wilders has only himself to blame for the fact that he has to be under 24-hour police protection and sleep in a different location every night. If he'd taken on the federation of Dutch floriculturists, say, his private life would be fully intact. Posted by: mrp 2008-04-01 |
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=235708 |