Opinion: Fitna, free speech and Schism
This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.
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 rhetoric 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.