The Fitna Controversy
If you haven’t been reading the news lately, Dutch MP Geert Wilders has released a 17 minute movie called Fitna, which means ’struggle’ or ’strife’ in Arabic. Fitna is causing a lot of controversy around the world because of its extreme anti-Islam stance. On the heels of the Muhammad cartoon controversy, Islamic extremism and general religious kafuffles going on around the world, it’s basically Wilder’s way of saying “Hey Muslims, fuck you, and get out of my country!” Way to throw some gas-soaked logs on the fire, Wilders! I downloaded it using BitTorrent last night and watched it with some friends, one of whom spent 14 years in Pakistan growing up. Now, I’ve never talked about my religious beliefs on my site before, but here they are in short form: Despite being raised Christian, I think religion - all religion - is probably the worst thing to have happened to us in the history of our species; a vile joke that has run on waaaayyyy too long, and something we’d all be much better off without. But holy shit; my friends and I agree - Fitna is awful.
To be honest, I generally (and sometimes ignorantly, I must admit) sniff in the face of religion and automatically pity those who believe. One of my favourite jokes is: why did the blonde go into the church? Because she heard there was a guy hung like this! (stretch arms out in a crucifiction pose). To me, that’s funny. Tell me any similar joke about Allah, Buddha, Ganesh or L. Ron Hubbard and I’ll laugh just as hard. However, I wholeheartedly support the freedom to choose your religion, just as I believe in your freedom to choose a pair of shoes. This is why I see nothing wrong with Fitna being made - but what I do see wrong with it is how big a pile of pretentious, propagandist shit it is. It’s essentially a slideshow, displaying particularly violent verses of the Koran onscreen, followed by a few scenes from 9/11, the Spanish bomb attacks and general douchebaggery carried out by Islamic douchebags.
It’s an amateur, boring, narrow-minded attempt to stir some shit up, a viewpoint that this excellent article by Irshad Manji sums up quite nicely.
The bottom line is that you could do the same thing with nearly any facet of society and come up with a similar product - my first thought would be Christianity (as this hilarious letter does very nicely), as there’s lots of awful, horrific bloodshed in the Bible - and you wouldn’t even need the help of the lunatic fucknuts at the Westboro Baptist Church! You could target practically anyone if you tried hard enough.
As one poster on IMDb.com said, “With this kind of movie, you could make ANY group of people look bad. You could make such a collage about cops, politicians, midgets, chinese people or redheads.”
Lame, lame, lame.
If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
Comments
No comments yet.
Leave a comment