Jim Quilty
Daily Star staff
BEIRUT: There is one good line in Antoine Fuqua's otherwise forgettable 2004 movie "King Arthur." Clive Owen's Roman-looking Arthur confronts the villainous Saxon warlord Cerdic (an unkempt Stellan Skarsgaard) and says something defiant. After he leaves, Skarsgaard briefly ponders the challenge and grunts, "At last. A man worth killing."
Cerdic's plight has been easy to empathize with recently, thanks to Geert Wilders' "Fitna: The Movie." It's not that the Dutch MP's jejune effort at online cultural criticism will get him killed by Muslims, whom he depicts as barbarian interlopers bent on undermining all the Dutch hold dear. Quite the contrary, cultural journalists confronted with "Fitna" are, like Cerdic, a little resentful at being forced to waste their energy on such inferior tripe.After plenty of fanfare, Wilders' 15-minute "movie" was finally posted on the Web a few days ago. The question of how to address this tiresome piece of video-borne anti-Muslim cant has got muddled up with one of how to respond to its self-righteous maker. Wilders' less-benighted political adversaries and the spokesmen of Dutch Muslims have suggested that the best thing non-Dutch could do is just ignore it.
It's sensible advice, not least because Wilders' brand of fear-mongering populism thrives on attention. To ignore Wilders' handiwork is not unlike leaving a screaming child alone (ideally in a room that can be hosed-down easily afterward) rather than picking it up every time it opens its yap.
To ban the video would have been akin to giving the noisome little beast a public thrashing, which - satisfying as it may be, and warranted as it may seem - would be to give in to the base instincts of the child itself.
There's good reason cultural journalists should ignore "Fitna" too. It is, above all, a political beast, cynically assembled (and repeatedly amended) to advance the career of a politician advocating certain populist, anti-immigration policies.
On the other hand, "Fitna" has risen to the top of the cultural septic tank at a time when artistic and cultural expression have entered the political arena - specifically in the current battle between "the West" (the self-appointed forces of light) and the Islamist/authoritarian Other.
While Wilders casts himself as the defender of free speech and secular humanism generally, other politicians, functionaries and attendant public relations firms (European and otherwise) have professed great interest in sponsoring and funding artistic and cultural initiatives to advance "dialogue" with, and within, this region.
This business invariably has an impact upon elite cultural production like film, video and plastic arts, which typically relies upon external sources of funding. Pop culture too provides a fertile ground for such benefaction and various nominally apolitical initiatives have surfaced - witness the anti-stereotyping YouTube project just announced by Jordan's photogenic Queen Rania.
In Lebanon, where rival forces of light share the same Levantine bed, there are additional points of engagement. In the last year the Culture Ministry has intervened to de-ban at least one local play (Rabih Mroue's "How Nancy Wished Every Day Were an April Fool's Joke"), pleading freedom of artistic expression, and one foreign film (Marjane Satrapi's "Persepolis"), evidently to defend freedom of consumption.
Wilders' agenda may be reactionary compared to these seemingly high-minded activities, but he too is addressing issues of cultural dialogue via similar media, and for reasons about as selfless. That his argument is ignorant and his means of deploying it amateurish, is another matter.
The film is simple enough. The politician has employed someone to find five passages from the Koran that are likely to offend liberal-minded Europeans. These he juxtaposes with newsreel and documentary footage of terrorist attacks carried out in the name of Islam and unedifying remarks from gentlemen professing to speak for Islam - selected to demonstrate that Muslims do what their holy book tells them to do.
Wilder's begins with sura 8, verse 60, translated into English as follows: "Prepare for them whatever force and cavalry you are capable of gathering to strike terror into the hearts of the enemies of Allah and your enemies."
This passage is followed by stock images from New York on September 11, 2001, and other transit bombings. He then samples a video recording of an Arab fellow in sheikhly garb. "What makes Allah happy," he posits rhetorically. "Allah is happy when non-Muslims get killed. Annihilate the infidels and the polytheists, your enemies and the enemies of religion. Allah, Count them and kill them to the last and don't leave even one."
Subsequent suras, stock footage and ranting sheikhs are trotted out in much the same manner. Wilders doesn't play favorites, sampling the remarks of Farsi- as well as Arabic- and English-speaking Muslims. And "Fitna" doesn't deliver on its promised money shot - Wilders' destroying a copy of the Koran. Instead, he pretends to tear a page from the book and, striking a sage pose, intones it's up to Muslims to tear out the Koran's hateful verses.
The upshot is that Wilders sees Muslims as anathema to Western values, claiming they want to rule the world and are presently trying to "Islamic-ize" Holland - a process Wilders is heroically working to prevent.
Wilders may share some of the late Leni Riefenstahl's political dispositions but he has none of the German director's filmmaking abilities. Glistening with the production values of a late-night infomercial, the "aesthetics" of this paper-thin slice of cultural production are meager but informative. It opens with a shot of an ornate edition of the Koran. The book opens to reveal caricature of the Prophet Mohammad with a bomb in his turban - the work of Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard, now infamous for causing such a ruckus a couple of years ago.
When Wilders wants to portray the unfortunate victims of Islamist terrorism, he accompanies his propaganda with the melodramatic "Aase's Death" from Grieg's "Peer Gynt Suite." He opens with a lush performance of Tchaikovsky's Orientalist "Arabian Dance," from the "Nutcracker Suite." The other oriental soundtrack element he revisits is the sound of Koranic recitation, played whenever he cites a sura.
The meaning of these choices are clear: "Fitna" doesn't represent Islam as it's lived and practiced by millions of people, but Islam as it's been interpreted to be useful to Europeans.
To call "Fitna" a "documentary" would be a grave disservice to that genre. As a document, it manages to be trebly ignorant: at once narrow-minded, inaccurate and ill-informed. Witness the litany of complaints and threats of court action Wilders faced the day after the video was uploaded to the YouTube-style Web site LiveLeak.
He was flagged by a journalist, bits of whose interview with murdered Dutch provocateur Theo Van Gogh were pirated for "Fitna." Another arose from Salah Edin, the Moroccan-Dutch hip-hop artist whose image Wilders included in the film, represented as that of Mohammad Bouyeri, Van Gogh's murderer - evidently all Muslims look alike to Wilders. Yet another came from Westergaard, the Danish cartoonist, because Wilders used his bomb-in-the-turban caricature without permission. There's been no word yet as to whether any Muslim scholars have taken Wilders to task for his translations of his selected suras.
For a video with such a loose grasp of even the most basic facts, it should be no surprise it has no appreciation of nuanced matters of Koranic rhetoric, Islamic doctrine or the cultural ramifications of imperialism and neocolonialism in the Islamic world. It seems beyond the movie's IQ to recall that the Judeo-Christian Bible has passages as objectionable as anything in the Koran, or to wonder how representative of Muslim opinion the voices he's chosen are.
At one point "Fitna" shows black-clad Hizbullah militants arrayed behind a row of sheikhs, their hands raised in what is supposed to be seen as a Hitler-ific "Sieg Heil!" As recently as 2005's Independence Uprising, of course, this style of salute was also popular among members of Lebanon's Hizbullah-critical Christian parties, until it was deemed unphotogenic.
"Fitna" is emblematic of the fact-check-free world of contemporary (often Web-based) news and information services. It's significant that the unregulated world-wide Web proved to be the only willing host for Wilders' screed. It never occurs to the politician that there is plenty of atavistic video on the Web that has nothing to do with Islam, or Islam-baiting.
Though restrained, the international fallout from "Fitna" has been more or less what you'd expect. Devout Muslims in several countries were offended by Wilders' calculated insults. Those who would claim to speak for Islam in order to advance their political agendas contacted the press. The press was pleased to record their outrage, just as it has obliged Wilders himself in the months since he declared his intention to make the video.
The Netherlands is a far from perfect polity, of course - a fact the electoral viability of Wilders' Freedom Party will confirm. Still, the state and its citizens must be credited with enough political maturity that (to this point, anyway) "Fitna" has been met with little more than a shrug and a sigh.
In another country, if the self-appointed spokesman of one group set out to provoke members of a religious minority, it would likely be met with burning barricades, volleys of Kalashnikov fire, or worse.
Daily Star
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