U.S. Internet company has cancelled Wilders’s website to stop him from releasing his anti-Islamic documentary. The Czech National Party has offered Wilder to post his movie on their website; the Czech NP also offered him protection and asylum. (From Prague Daily Monitor)
(Thanks to George) From the Prague Daily Monitor article:
The Czech extra-parliamentary nationalist National Party… (NS) says the film must be broadcast all over Europe as “a response to the Islamist terrorists destroying European countries by extortion and attacks.”
This is why the party has offered help with the film’s release to the Dutch politician “in reaction to the media’s blatant concessions to Islamists.”
Well, they did attack London and Madrid, destroyed properties in France, Denmark, and other European countries. How many more people need to die, Balak, for the “rhetoric” to be taken seriously?
I just want to add that I agree with Scott Atran that those who committed the attacks were not motivated by Islam. They did, however, justified their actions with the help of Koran. Criticizing their religion seems like a good start to me.
I just watched Wilder’s Fitna on YouTube. I am not sure what he is being blamed for as the only thing that was added to the many footages we have all seen on CNN, BBC documentaries, etc., are Tchaikovsky’s Arabian Dance and Grieg’s Ase’s Death.
I’ve seen the movie too. I think that it is not a good movie, because it suggests (not by saying it, but by the way the movie is cut) that all moslems tend to be violent and terrorists. By insulting moderate moslems, it might become a kind of selfullfilling prophesy.
Wilders is not looking for solutions, he is looking for attention and power.
There is a very interesting comment on the dutch ‘World news service’ it is english:
I think that it is not a good movie, because it suggests (not by saying it, but by the way the movie is cut) that all moslems tend to be violent and terrorists.
Well, yes. If they showed the Muslims going grocery shopping on the weekend and added music from the Benny Hill Show, the movie would seem less violent.
Imagine the cut-and-splice job that Muslim radicals could make from footage out of Fallujah, Abu Ghraib, Beirut, the West Bank, Auschwitz, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, My Lai, some clips from “Triumph of the Will” and ‘the Hunt for America’s top Model’; just throw on a Celine Dionne soundtrack and you’d have a pretty powerful propaganda indictment against this fiction called ‘the West’…
I doubt that partisans of the ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis ever consider how imperialism actually looks on the receiving end (i.e. to most of the world’s population).
Thanks to its lapdog media, the U.S. public (including CFI) seems to be blissfully unconscious of the wars of occupation currently being waged by Washington and Tel Aviv. Rarely, if ever, are they shown the images of dead children and blasted human body parts spattered accross the walls of distant cities by U.S. ordnance; but do you really think such images are not constantly on display most everywhere else, especially in the Muslim world?
Balak--I’m a relative newcomer to this board but, so far, all your posts on a variety of threads really have just one one theme- the critique of US imperialism. Now that’s an interesting subject but not particularly relevant to CFI’s program which is the scientific study of religion and it’s relationship to society. Did you get kicked off some other boards?? Why post here??
I do not quite understand your position. Movies made in this matter (as the fictious one suggested by Balak) are setting people up against each other. In whose interest is that? Why would you not care?
If humanism would mean that ‘Because I am a humanist, I am more peaceful than you are, and if you deny this, I’ll kill you’, then we can stop right now. I know I exaggerate, but I think it is not a good strategy to yell to people (muslems in this case) that they are wrong. In my opinion, a dialogue begins with trying to understand, and accept each other as dialogue partners. This is difficult when hate is strong already, but put more oil on the fire might be worst idea of all.
There is a nice story of Sören Kierkegaard: a lunatic escapes from the madhouse, but because he is a little rational, he thinks he must convince other people that he is not a looni. So he decides to say again and again ‘the earth is round’. Who could deny this? But just because he does this, he attracts attention, and he is caught again. Why? Because the world is not round? No, because he behaves so strangely with this simple truth.
Having right is one thing. How to deal with it is another story, and often much more difficult.
And I think Balak is a little bit to aggressive in his style: but as regards content, he surely has a point. Not seeing the totally different background of radical american christians at one side, and radical muslems at the other would be a rather poor approach for a strategy how to cope with them. It does not suffice to say that it is the same problem, because both groups are ‘religious deluded’.
GdB
Edit: please read the link in my previous posting. Just an excerpt:
Habermas wonders at the same time whether a similar complementary learning process isn’t also required of the secular side. If secular citizens continue to foster reservations about people with a religious mindset as people who are not to be taken seriously, they abandon the very basis of mutual recognition that shared citizenship entails. Habermas says that secular citizens must remain open to the possibility that even religious utterances, when translated into a secular context, can have meaning for them. “Not everything can be achieved by political decision and legal enforcement.”
I must say again I agree with Scott Atran that Islam is not the problem here. In my opinion it is the clash of civilizations that is inevitably going to affect our lives. The Arab culture is primitive compared to the European one, and Islam is merely a reflection of their mentality adequate to the style of living in the Middle East. Due to biological reasons we are all racist, but having evolved far enough we can overcome this and at least try to make some order in the 21st-century world. Calling ourselves humanists, trying to pretend we are all one loving species won’t get us very far. The Muslims must know that stoning women do death is not an acceptable way of living in the west anymore. Now, I believe that it is their nature and not their religion that’s causing them to behave the way they do. They use religion to justify their behaviour and it seems only logical to let them know through criticizing their religion that their primitive way of living will not be tolerated in the west.
Thanks for your answer. I surely partially agree with you: stoning women seems really not a good idea to me, and is not acceptable for us. I do not want to just tolerate everything, I think we should firmly stand for what we believe in: human rights, equality for the law, freedom of press, etc. The questions is how to reach that: by trying to insult those moslems, the moderates, that are closest to us?
I think that one of the problems in western Europe here, is that even western culture is decaying. We are forgetting our Enlightenment heritage. Our local people do no realise what is precious in our society: it is not our wealth, but our values. If everybody is allowed to take the chance for their selfish interests, then the muslems in our countries do the same. Then we do not have the strength to oppose Islam, when they believe so much stronger in their values, than we do in ours.
I do not just want to ‘love everybody’, but we must design the best possible strategy to cope with this. Making exessive generalising movies, or to say that is their ‘nature’ seems a dangerous approach to me, sounds like giving up that people might change. I assume it is their culture, which gives me hope of improvement. But hope is not certainty…
I must say again I agree with Scott Atran that Islam is not the problem here. In my opinion it is the clash of civilizations that is inevitably going to affect our lives. The Arab culture is primitive compared to the European one, and Islam is merely a reflection of their mentality adequate to the style of living in the Middle East.
There is a problem with Atran’s assesment and yours in general. Sure tribalism is a cause, or more specifically WAS if you think that afghanis are Arab’s or the English bombers were Arab, and so on. The largest rising populations of Islamics are not Arabic, and more so than tribal affinity, muslims recognize muslims not races or ethnicities. There is no great divide between Arab Muslims and converts native to specific areas.
The biggest problem I have is when moderates and secularists dismiss what the Islamic-fascists are saying. If they say they are doing it for religious reasons, who are we then to contend they aren’t? We can’t know their mind better than they do, or see past the justification for their actions and merely dismiss it because of larger ramifications.
Islam is not a religion of peace. It never has been. It has always been political and activist oriented. It is a faith justified by actions and righteousness. Muslims simply have not endured the systemic failures politically and culturally that the Jews or Christians have at various points in time and haven’t had the massive secularist reforms in the religion itself. Judaism was a bloody religion based on activism and war at one time too. But repeated failures and brutal captivities, has filed their teeth to a very large extent. But we need to stop allowing muslims to get away with the, “Well you do it too” defence. Regardless of whether or not christians do or have done or jews do, continue to do or have done things, can never be a justification for THEIR behaving badly, suppressing freedom and so on. It simply does not wash.
And really, the issue isn’t these backward people from a land lost in time. These are the best of the best. The well educated and so on. Even Atran concedes that what makes the Jadhists so powerful and effective is BECAUSE they are so well educated.
