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Fitna, free speech and Schism

Right-wing Dutch politicos-turned-producers watch out — free speech cuts both ways. From NPR:

A video portraying aggressive behavior by Christians matched with verses from the Bible is gaining traction on the Internet.

Raed al-Saeed, a young businessman from Saudi Arabia, is the creator of Schism, a six-minute video response to Fitna — a short film released last month that portrays Islam as a violent, fascist-like ideology. "Fitna" provoked anger in many parts of the Muslim world.

In case you don't remember, Fitna (a word meaning "ordeal" in Arabic) overlaid verses from the Quran over acts of violence — suicide bombings, beheadings, planes crashing into the World Trade Center. It was produced by Geert Wilder, a Dutch politician who happens to be unabashedly anti-Islam. Some found the film to be an act of bravery — Jonah Goldberg compared it to the Darwin fish — while Dutch Muslims greeted it with disgusted silence.

Nonetheless, it's interesting to see a response to Wilder's celluloid screed — the point being that you can find nasty bits in many different religious texts, including Christianity. Unfortunately, Saeed didn't find footage of many nasty people saying those verses out loud — and his substitution of the political for the religious (such as images of the bombing of Baghdad and the beating of prisoners) detracts from his point.

But, to my utter surprise, Saeed did strike darkly comic gold with some unassuming Christians whose rhetoricSchism runs pretty close to that of radical Islamists. One woman — who looks like she could have run my preschool daycare — explains , "I wanna see [young people] as radically laying down their lives for the Gospel as they are in over in Pakistan and Israel and Palestine and all those different places, because we have — excuse me, but we have the truth!"

And later, at the center of a roomful of kids, upper arms jiggling with righteousness: "Take these prophecies ... and make war with them .... This means war! This means war!"

But Saeed is quick to point out that this video isn't an attack on Christianity or any other religion. The final text of the video reads,

It is easy to take parts of any Holy book that are out of content and make it sound like the most inhuman book ever written. This is what Geert Wilders did to gather more supporters to his hateful ideology. To create schism.

A fair observation, spelling errors aside — and yet, according to NPR,

A day after Saeed posted his video on YouTube, it was taken down for having "inappropriate content." He immediately reposted it with a message arguing that if his video was inappropriate, then Wilders' Fitna also should be removed. For now, both videos are available on the site.

And it still is. Go check it out — there are a few versions up, but the most-watched one has racked up more than 350,000 views so far, and more than 4,000 comments. Looking through what people had to say about Islam and Christianity made me wonder: How many viewers who made generalizations about Islam based on 'Fitna' were fully prepared to give Bible-lady's comments a pass?

And while the film means to make a point about not judging a religion by radicalism, I have to say, those angelic-looking children dancing around with what looks like warpaint on their faces is a little too Lord-of-the-Flies for me to handle.

Comments

Typical liberal media bias and double-standard in full effect.

Remember when Fitna was preparing to debut? How was the movie and its creator portrayed?

Right wing, racist, anti-Muslim, bigoted, biased, hateful, bla bla bla.

Here comes the Saudi's attempt to not only counter Geert WIlders and Fitna, but to demean Christian's and somehow attempt to show moral equivalence between Christianity and Islam - which can't realistically be done.

In fact, even in the LAT piece, it's all glowing for the "young Saudi businessman" even though he doesn't even come close to countering Fitna.

He's clearly anti-Christian and pro-Islam but because he puts a disclaimer out there, we're simply to believe he is a great guy with no bias. Really? Look at the lame clips he came up with. US soldiers in Iraq or Afgan and we are supposed to believe these are radical extremist Christians? Hello - there are Muslims in the US Army! The US is training the Iraqi, Jordanian, Palestinian and Pakistani military's. The US helped establish Kosovo - a Muslim country in the heart of Christian Europe! How radical and extreme and anti-Muslim is that?

The only example he can materialize is one lady who hasn't inspired anyone to commit any crime or even talk about killing anyone in the name of Christ - and even she claims she would like Christians to be what.... MORE LIKE PALESTINIANS!!!

Anyway, this piece of anti-Christian Saudi propaganda should be analyzed far more sternly and we'd even challenge this "lone blogger" to make another film of equal quality and length in 24 hours as he claims he did this film while we film him.

It's all to unlikely yet no one in the media will even scrutinize the basic premise upon which this government produced hit piece is based.

For more analysis check out A Tale of Two Movies Fitna & Schizm (click to read)

The rules of Youtube make it abundantly clear that inciting hatred on the basis of religious, ethnic, national and political differences is not permitted. In this light, if Youtube allows the presence of either Fitna or Shism, both of which are intended to provoke hatred, it should be clear that it is violating its own rules.

What goes for the goose, as the old adage goes, must also go for the gander.

Fitna was scary, but short on facts and analysis. It depended largely on images and cross-cutting to make its point. While Fitna raises an important question, its lack of reasoned argument makes it hard to evaluate, either to confirm or rebut. What I would like to see is the reasoned moslem case against the arguments made in a more calm and cogent documentary like "Islam: What the West Needs to Know." The arguments there have some structure, and if there is a good rebuttal to them I would like to see it. I am not interested in personal attacks on the makers or blanket denunciations. I would like to see evidence that factual premises are wrong or inferences are faulty. They may be, for all I know, but I have not seen that case made.

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