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Originally Posted by Happy Times
I love LiveLeak! I think the film isn't very good, Min is just too short. Its the principle that was under threat.
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Agree on both. but actually, a reasonable film about Islam today would have no effect and would be talked to death. I also think that Wilders knows that and for that reason chosed a more brute directness to deliver the call. If getting talked into subtle beauty and reasonable relativising anyway, way keeping on to whisper?
However, some reactions to him are simply wrong. As Germany's Henryk Broder pointed out, there is little sense in accusing him to be a rightwing populist: first, so Broder, politically Wilders is an extreme liberalist (says Broder who usually writes for Der Spiegel, a weekly politics magazine associated with the centre and slight Left, and Die Welt, associated with the political centre, so he is hardly suspicious to be a "rightwing populist" himself), and second, what Wilders is doing is not popular at all. but this label "rightwing populist", so continues Broder, today has the same defaming overkill-capacity like "communist" in the 50s and 60s and "fascist" in the 70s and 80s - it holds no argument or justification in itself and puts all responsibility of the consequences onto the shoulder sof the perpetrator triggering them. "
If Wilders would have started to rumble with the dutch association of flower traders, Wilder's private life still would be intact" (and he would not need police protection and sleeping in a different house every night), says Broader: "
Sadly, in this context one has to point out that it is not obsessive enthusiasm that strips Wilders of his private life, but the memory of why and how a dutch film maker named Theo van Gogh was murdered (...) who still would have had an untroubled private life today if he wouldn't have made the mistake to make an Islam-critical film. Comforting it is, that Wilders 'did not repeat the mistake that van Gogh was making: to connect sexuality with Islam what back then was not taken well by the less-moderate Muslims, that surely would have multiplied the explosive danger', wrote a Muslim woman at Spiegel Online who did not felt offended by Wilders movie at all, she said. And she went even that far to point out that Wilders 'in principle only showed obvious facts - just a bit one-sided' ".
Ignoring for a moment that it appears to be a bit exaggerated to kill somebody just because he has a different opinion - could facts be described any different than one-sided?
Is there a way to document the murdering of Theo van Gogh, the beheading of Daniel Pearle, the execution of a woman in Kabul, the hanging of homosexuals and the stoning of adulteress' any different than "one-sided"? Accordingly, would one not need to point out when reporting on a plane disaster that just took place, that this does not happen any day, and that most airliners land in one piece - just for not getting accused of reporting "one-sided"?
Wilder's film is as "one-sided" as Michael Moore's films are "anti-capitalistic". the hostility is not in the eye of the beholder, but the nature of the to-be-watched object. to the regular set of rites, by which speakers of Muslim communities react to the statement that Islam is not purely and always the religion of peace, belongs the practice to threat violence if this "offence" is not being taken back."
Broder ends with what I have said from the very beginning in this thread: that the movie's content is not the important part anyway, but the ridiculous reactions amongst Western politicians he was able to trigger by just saying that he is doing that movie. It reveals the EU to be a paper-tiger only, while the UN's president was condemning the film to the maximum.
"This were reactions and statements for which we wait in vain when Islamists call for djihad, fanatics commit another massacre of infidels, or holocaust-deniers organise conferences. Because the only purpose of these statements was to avoid consequences like in 2006 when a dozen of harmless Muhammad caricatures started an extensive fire of indignation from Jakarta to Rabat and made western politics to call for "de-escalation" - but their appeal did not address the fire raisers who burned Danish flags and devastate foreign embassies - but the Europeans who watched the events unfolding without any idea of what to do.
It was like this when a harmless British teacher was giving a teddy-bear the name Muhammad. It was like this when Salman Rushdie received knighthood by the Queen: Muslims clamoured against it, and the Westerners went low and took cover.
And now the "rightwing populist" Wilders gets sacrificed on the altar of appeasement. He is no artist, and his film is no masterpiece. It is a brute demand just to take note of the obvious reality, at least this."