“FITNA” FRENZY – IT’S NOT LIKE MUSLIMS EVER OFFENDED ANYONE

By Don Feder

Posted April 09, 2008

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            It’s important for Muslims to keep reminding us that there is absolutely, positively no relationship between Islam and violence. Otherwise it’s easy to forget.

 

            The latest excuse for Islamic bonhomie is the documentary “Fitna”by Geert Wilders. In the 15-minute film, showing on YouTube and other Internet sites, the Dutch MP says that far from getting Islam wrong, terrorists understand their religion only too well.

 

            “Fitna”  (Arabic for “upheaval” or “ordeal”) has verses from the Koran -- which Wilders calls a “fascist book” -- artfully interspersed with scenes of carnage from 9/11 and the March, 2004 Madrid train bombing, as well as fragments from an interview with Theo van Gogh, the Dutch filmmaker murdered by an Islamist assassin in 2004.

 

            Mostly, Wilders provides a forum for Muslim self-expression.

 

Imams rave about the joys of killing Jews and “Crusaders.” Iranian President Ahmadinejad calls for global jihad. Muslim protestors are seen holding signs proclaiming “Be prepared for the real Holocaust” and “God Bless Hitler.” And a 3-year old girl tells an interviewer that Jews are “apes and pigs.” How does she know? Allah told her so (in the religion-of-peace handbook).

 

            Despite vigorous efforts to suppress it, “Fitna” is all over cyber-space. A posting on the British video-sharing site LiveLeak was viewed more than 2.5 million times in English and 2.7 million times in Dutch, within 72 hours,

 

            The reaction in Prophet-land was excruciatingly predictable.

 

Malaysia’s former prime minister called for a boycott of Dutch products. The Organization of the Islamic Conference (representing 59 countries) condemned the film as “a deliberate act of discrimination against Muslims.” Half of the Jordanian parliament voted to sever ties with the Netherlands.

 

            The Indonesian Foreign Minister said “Fitna” “has a racist flavor and is an insult to Islam, hidden under the cover of freedom of expression” (something that -- Allah be praised -- you’ll never find in a Muslim country).

 

            Ambassadors to the Netherlands from 26 Muslim countries demanded that the Dutch government ban the film. And demonstrators from Karachi to Jakarta called for Wilders’ death.

 

            Equally predictable was the reaction from Crescent-kissers in the West, who immediately went into appeasement-overdrive.

 

• Dutch Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende frantically rejected the film’s premise, reminding us that “The vast majority of Muslims reject extremism and violence.” If so, they are the ultimate Silent Majority.

 

• The Dutch prosecutor’s office is preparing to take legal action against Wilders. In a nation that just legalized gay sex in public parks, some things are beyond the pale.

 

• Australia’s Foreign Minister Stephen Smith found the film “highly offensive” and “an obvious attempt to generate discord between faith communities,” whilst the Russian Foreign Ministry said Moscow “fully condemns the showing of the film and considers it a provocation.” Do the blockheads in the Kremlin ever ask themselves what motivates the Chechens who keep bombing and shooting Russian civilians?

 

• The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights thinks free speech isn’t one of them (a human right) -- at least in such circumstances. Louise Arbour urged governments to enact “appropriate restrictions” on freedom of expression to protect Muslim sensibilities.

 

• U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon declared, “There is no justification for hate speech or incitement to violence.” Have you noticed many Christian mobs rampaging through the streets of Western cities, randomly attacking women in veils after being incited by Wilders’ film?

 

• The Secretary General assures us that, “The right of free expression is not at stake here” – thus demonstrating once again that the United Nations is worse than useless. It’s a threat to free peoples everywhere.

 

Where are the voices of censure from champions of religious tolerance when Muslims defame Jews in the most vile terms imaginable?

 

In 2002, during Ramadan, Egyptian state television broadcast a dramatization of “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” as a 41-part series. The Czarist-forgery supposedly reveals a Jewish conspiracy to conquer the world. While confined to lunatic-fringe reading lists elsewhere, the book is a bestseller in Muslim world, along with Arabic translations of “Mein Kampf.”

 

 

When Pope John Paul II visited Damascus in 2001, Bashar Assad told the Pontiff that the Jews are “the enemies of all true religions.”

 

An article in the April 1^st New York Times (“In Gaza, Hamas’s Insults to Jews Complicate Peace”) noted that at the Al Omari Mosque, the imam regularly cursed Jews and “Crusaders,” while making the obligatory reference to the former as “the brothers of apes and pigs.”

 

Writing in the Toronto Sun on April 5, Salim Mansur, who tells us he stopped attending services in mosques after 9/11 (“ and severed relations with ‘official Islam’ and its spokesmen who are the most egregious practitioners of bigotry with their hate-filled language that fuels violence”), says Obama’s pastor is “a mere sophomore when it comes to the Friday tirades of Islamist imams denouncing and damning America, Israel, Christians, Jews, Hindus, and Muslims who reject their lies and venom.”

 

Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah insists: “Anyone who has read the Koran and the holy writings of the monotheistic religions sees what they (Jews) did to the prophets, and what acts of madness and slaughter the Jews carried out throughout history … Anyone who reads these texts cannot think of co-existence with them, or about accepting their presence, not only in Palestine of 1948 but even in a small village in Palestine, because they are a cancer which is liable to spread again at any moment.”

 

Does the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights think there should be “appropriate restrictions” on such genocidal rhetoric? Silly question!

 

The demented reaction to Geert Wilders’ film is but the latest instance of Islamic rage and Western compliance. In February, Danish police broke up a conspiracy to kill one of the Muhammed cartoonists.

 

In 2005, Danish newspapers published a number of cartoons depicting Islam’s founder. In response, Gaza gunmen seized the local European Union office, Danes were beaten in Saudi Arabia, there were riots in Turkey and a Catholic priest was murdered in the Turkish city of Trabzon, by a youth shouting “Allah Akbar.”

 

The quisling chorus also raised its voice here. The National Council of Churches called for “solidarity” with Islamic groups in the U.S. who, though justly provoked, yet demonstrated “disciplined self-restraint” by not rioting or killing priests.

 

The following year, in a speech at a German university, Pope Benedict XVI quoted a 14^th century Byzantine Emperor on the critical shortage of Muslim pacifists.

 

To show how offended they were by this equation of Islam and violence, Muslims shifted to storm-trooper mode.

 

Pakistan’s legislature unanimously condemned Benedict XVI. The pope was burned in effigy throughout the Muslim world.

 

In Cairo, demonstrators chanted “Death to the Pope.” Iraq’s Mujahideen Shura Council called the Pope “Satan’s hellhound in the Vatican,” and vowed to “break the cross and spill the wine. … The day is coming when the armies of Islam will destroy the ramparts of Rome.”

 

In Somalia, an elderly Italian nun was shot to death as she left the hospital where she’d worked for decades.

 

And Wilders has the audacity to make a film insinuating that Islam is, by its very nature, violent. Where did he get an idea like that? – probably from reading newspapers, watching television and listening to radio newscasts.

 

In response to what they consider an insult, try to imagine Muslims, say writing letters to the editor instead of cutting off a journalist’s head.

 

Outside of the Muslim world, the notion that Islam is inherently violent is controversial in only three places – at the U.N., in Western foreign ministries and on Mars.

 

• In March, in incidents over the course of a week: An Anglican priest in the U.K. was attacked by Muslim youth in his churchyard; in New York, a Hassidic rabbi was assaulted by Arab teens shouting “Allah Akbar;” and the bullet-ridden body of Paulos Faraj Rahho, a Chaldean Catholic archbishop, was discovered outside the Iraqi city of Mosul. On April 5, an Assyrian Orthodox priest was killed in a drive-by shooting in Baghdad.

 

• In February, terrorists blew up the library of the YMCA in Gaza City.

 

• Within weeks of that incident, a gunman attacked a Jerusalem yeshiva, killing eight students. The victims ranged in age from 26 to 15. There was no immediate response from the Secretary General. The U.N. is too busy passing resolutions equating Zionism with racism to notice of such atrocities.

 

• Spanish authorities just arrested two Moroccan men believed to be involved in a terrorist cell. One of the suspects has been linked to the May 2003 Casablanca bombings, where 33 died.

 

• In London, the trial began of eight men charged with plotting to blow up several trans-Atlantic flights in 2006 by mixing explosives from liquids carried on board. Had they succeeded, thousands would have died. The prosecutor said defendants had planned this mass murder “all in the name of Islam.”

 

• In a just-released poll of Arabs, commissioned by Doha Debates, that asked when violence is permissible, 60% cited interference with a Muslim country, while 55% said offensive comments or conduct were sufficient.

 

During the Easter week vigil, the Pope baptized Magdi Allam, an  Muslim-born journalist.

 

Naturally, Muslims were mightily miffed. The head of Jordan’s Royal Islamic Strategic Studies Center called the baptism a “deliberate and provocative act.”

 

Though ex-Muslims are automatically under a sentence of death, Allam probably felt he had nothing to lose. He already had a fatwa against him for his 2003 criticism of Palestinian suicide bombers. Worse, he defended Israel, observing that international opinion holds: “Everyone has the right to exist except the Jewish state and its inhabitants. Today, Israel is the paradigm of the right to life.”

 

In reflecting on his odyssey, Allam discloses: ”I asked myself how it was possible that those who, like me, sincerely and boldly called for a moderate Islam, assuming the responsibility of exposing themselves in the first person in denouncing Islamic extremism and terrorism, ended up being sentenced to death in the name of Islam on the basis of the Koran.”

 

Thus, Allam wrote in a newspaper column, “I was forced to see beyond the contingency of the phenomenon of Islamic extremism and terrorism that has appeared on a global level, the root of the evil inherent in an Islam that is physiologically violent and historically conflictive.”

 

The root of the evil is “inherent in Islam,” which is “physiologically violent and historically conflictive”? Is this not “highly offensive,” “a provocation,” “an obvious attempt to generate discord between faith communities” and “hate speech” for which “there is no justification” – in the words of Western apologists for the religion-of-peace?

 

By Allah, Ban Ki-moon shall hear of this!

 

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