Watch Geert Wilders' Film: Fitna

UPDATE, March 28, 2008: LiveLeak was forced to pull the film due to "threats to [their] staff of a very serious nature," but you can still see a copy of "Fitna" here.

The quality isn't great, but it's clear enough to view.






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*WARNING* GRAPHIC IMAGES




(If player doesn't load, view here.)
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UPDATE, March 28, 2008: Muslims denounce film on Islam

Hundreds of angry Muslims marched Friday in Pakistan and denounced a Dutch legislator's film that portrays Islam as a ticking time bomb aimed at the West. Dutch Muslims were more restrained, saying they had expected worse.

The 15-minute film — titled "Fitna," or "Strife" in Arabic — was made by anti-immigrant lawmaker Geert Wilders and was posted on a Web site Thursday.

...Wilders told reporters he made the film because "Islam and the Quran are dangers to the preservation of freedom in the Netherlands."

He argues in the film that Islam's objective is to rule the world and impose an Islamic order without Western freedoms, where gays would be persecuted and women discriminated against.

The Pakistani Foreign Ministry summoned the Dutch ambassador to deliver an official complaint against what it called a "defamatory film which deeply offended the sentiments of Muslims all over the world."

Small groups of demonstrators, mostly followers of hard-line religious groups, rallied in Pakistan's major cities, demanding Pakistan cut diplomatic relations with the Netherlands. A banner at one demonstration read: "We hate the uncivilized West."

Militant Qari Mohammed Yusuf warned before the film's release that revenge attacks were being planned.

"I am telling you now that after this maybe you won't be able to come to Peshawar like this. Foreigners will not be able to come so easily anywhere in Pakistan," he told The Associated Press last week in an interview in Peshawar, Pakistan.

Condemnations also came from the government of Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim nation, Iran and Jordan.

"It is not Islam that should be stopped, it is fear-mongers like Geert Wilders who should be stopped from spreading their hatred," said Zakaria al-Sheik of the Rassoul Allah Yajmana, a Jordanian group formed to protect the image of Islam.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon also condemned the movie.

"There is no justification for hate speech or incitement to violence. The right of free expression is not at stake here," he said in a statement. "The real fault line is not between Muslim and Western societies, as some would have us believe, but between small minorities of extremists, on different sides, with a vested interest in stirring hostility and conflict."

The Council of Europe said the film was a "distasteful manipulation" that exploits fear, and three U.N. rights experts said it showed a distorted vision of Muslims.

The World Council of Churches said the film failed to distinguish extremism from mainstream Islam.

...Dutch Muslims said the film misrepresented Islam, but that Wilders had largely stayed within the bounds of acceptable political discourse. Wilders praised their civil reaction.

Mohamed Rabbae, leader of a group representing the Netherlands' large Moroccan immigrant community, said the film was "less bad" than expected from Wilders' prior comments. Rabbae called on Muslims abroad to be calm and let Dutch Muslims deal with Wilders, adding: "Harming Dutch people harms us."

"I wasn't personally offended," said Imad el Ouarti, a worshipper at El Umma mosque in Amsterdam. He said Wilders had taken Quranic texts out of context and had reused images that have been seen thousands of times since Sept. 11, 2001. "It's just tasteless and non-creative, as if a child had pasted it together."

Kurt Westergaard, the artist who has lived under police protection since the Muhammad cartoon was published two years ago, objected that Wilders had violated his copyright. "I won't accept my cartoon being taken out of its original context and used in a completely different one," he told Denmark's TV2.

A Rotterdam court said it would rule April 7 on a petition by the Dutch Islamic Federation seeking to gag Wilders and order him to publicly apologize.

Wilders' lawyer Serge Vlaar said the federation "wants to ban a point of view," which he said was not possible under Dutch law.

Federation lawyer Ejder Kose countered that "my clients are not attacking freedom of speech. This is about ending the unjustified insulting of Islam."

Fitna

UPDATE, March 27, 2008: Watch "Fitna" here.
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There's trouble in Dutchland and Islam...

THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) -- Protesters already have torched Dutch flags in Afghanistan ahead of a new Dutch film portraying Islam's holy book as a "fascist" text that incites violence and preaches the oppression of women and homosexuals.
A Dutch Cabinet minister postponed his trip to Somalia on Friday due to "specific threats" linked to the film, and the Dutch government has urged lawmaker Geert Wilders to scrap his film for the safety of its citizens abroad.

But Wilders said Monday he has begun negotiations with Dutch broadcasters about airing the 15-minute film, "Fitna." He said he will only allow them to show it in its entirety, and if they refuse, he plans to show it to the media and post it on the Internet.

"We have never learned to be intolerant toward people who are intolerant toward us, toward cultures that are intolerant toward us," he said in a recent Associated Press interview.

The right-wing legislator previously warned of a "tsunami" of Islam swamping the Netherlands and said Muslims should tear up half of the Quran if they want to live here.

Wilders has lived under round-the-clock security since the 2004 murder of filmmaker Theo van Gogh by an Islamic radical enraged by his short film, "Submission," a fictional study of abused Muslim women with scenes of near-naked women with Quranic texts engraved on their flesh.

The film "Fitna"—an Arabic word meaning discord—puts the centuries-old Dutch traditions of religious tolerance and freedom of speech on a collision course.

If it airs, Dutch Muslims are expected to file criminal complaints for racial or religious vilification. Prosecutors would then have to decide whether to charge Wilders with any offense.

"Our law is very clear—anybody can make a film. We have freedom of expression and you cannot restrict that," says Moroccan-born Sadik Harchaoui, chief of the Forum Institute for Multicultural Development.

"Can you offend people? The answer is yes. I'm not saying you should do it or it is desirable, but you can," he added. "But if the film is insulting and preaches hate, then the law has to take action."

The Dutch government says it cannot ban the film but is attempting to distance itself from Wilders, the leader of the Freedom Party, which holds nine of Parliament's 150 seats.

...Already the film has provoked reactions from Damascus, Tehran and other capitals of predominantly Muslim countries.

Pakistan's government ordered Internet providers to restrict access to YouTube, allegedly to prevent Pakistanis from accessing a clip of Wilders in which he makes derogatory remarks about Islam. The move inadvertently caused a brief worldwide outage of the video sharing site.

In Afghanistan, protesters set fire to Dutch flags over the weekend and Islamic clerics called for the withdrawal of Dutch troops.

NATO's Dutch secretary-general, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, says he too is worried about the "potentially serious consequences" for alliance troops in Afghanistan, where 1,500 Dutch troops serve in the NATO-led force in the volatile south.

"If they are put in the line of fire because of the film, I am concerned," he told Dutch television news show "Buitenhof."

De Hoop Scheffer says people around the world, including some in the U.S. administration, have been asking him about the film.

So far, the reaction among the 850,000 Muslims living in this country of 16 million has been muted, but the Dutch government has warned municipalities to be on alert for rioting if and when the film appears.

This is Danish cartoons déjà vu all over again.

Free speech isn't always pretty.
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Read more about "Fitna," from Reuters.