Fitna for purpose: Geert Wilders stokes the fires of anti-Islamism

Australia has joined the chorus of disapproval for Geert Wilders’ film Fitna with foreign minister Stephen Smith calling the film “highly offensive” last week. He joins UN chief Ban Ki-Moon who said it was "offensively anti-Islamic.” He said there was no justification for hate speech or incitement to violence. "I acknowledge the efforts of the Dutch Government to stop the broadcast of this film and appeal for calm to those understandably offended by it,” he said. “Freedom must always be accompanied by social responsibility."

Muslim countries have been particularly outraged with Iran and Bangladesh warning the film could have “grave consequences” and Pakistan protesting to the Dutch ambassador. In Indonesia, the government sponsored a student protest in Central Java demanding authorities shut down websites that show the video. A senior Iranian cleric Ayatollah Ahmad Khatami claimed that “Zionists” were behind the video. Khatami said Wilders has made 40 trips to Israel and is close with a number of Israeli officials. He called Wilders “a Zionist puppet” who “has made this outrageous film to win favour with his masters”.

“Fitna” was released on the Internet to a storm of publicity on 27 March 2008. Wilders’ film is a superficial litany of Koranic verses that apparently condone violence against unbelievers, mixed with propaganda message from radical Islamic clerics all interspersed with images of violence and terrorism carried out in the name of Islam. The film has opened up a new faultline in Western-Islamic relations still badly scarred after the 2006 debate on the Danish cartoons about Mohammad.

As well as objecting to the violence, some Muslims have also complained that Wilders’ film implies that the Koran was torn up and burned. While apparently this was Wilders’ initial intention it was omitted from the version released last week. The film explicitly states it was a telephone book that was torn not the sacred book as the narrator says “it is not up to me, but to Muslims to tear out the hateful verses of the Koran”.

The Netherlands has long been on the frontline of the debate between Western permissiveness and Islamic sensitivities. Filmmaker Theo van Gogh was murdered after making a film critical of violence against Islamic women. Ayaan Hirsi Ali who scripted the film was forced to flee the country. Now there is a threat of a “jihad” against Wilders himself and anyone associated with his video. Liveleak.com pulled the video from its site last week following threats to its staff. Many Dutch people eager to dissociate themselves from the sentiments of the film have taken to the web to apologise for the controversial video.

“Fitna” is an Arabic word which has proven notoriously difficult to translate. It can mean schism, secession, upheaval or anarchy depending on context. The term originated as the process of refining metal to remove dirt and was first used to describe militant Arabic Wahhabism as fitna an Najdiyyah or "the trouble out of Nejd.” Geert Wilders sees today's Fitna as the trouble out of the Arab Middle East.

Wilders is a right wing parliamentarian who in the past has called the Koran a "fascist" book that "incites violence". Fitna quotes four passages from the Koran which have been quoted by radicals to justify terrorist attacks. He opens with Sura 8 Verse 60 which leads into footage of the 9/11 and Madrid attacks . The film says this verse is “prepare to destroy them with all force, terrorise Allah’s enemy and your enemy.” However the text for 8:60 at Submission.org reads “You shall prepare for them all the power you can muster, and all the equipment you can mobilise, that you may frighten the enemies of God [and] your enemies”. The emotive words “destroy” and “terrorise” are missing from Submission’s version.

The second verse quoted is Sura 4 Verse 56 “Those who are disbelievers will be burned in fire and when their skin is crispy like a turkey’s, we will replace it with another skin so they will know their punishment”. Submission.org has this one as “those who disbelieve in our revelations, we will condemn them to the hellfire. Whenever their skins are burnt, we will give them new skins. Thus, they will suffer continuously.” The vividness of the crispy turkey image is absent.

The third verse quoted is Sura 47 verse 4. Fitna says this verse reads “when you have an encounter with a disbeliever, cut their throats with a sword and spill their blood” whereas Submission says 47:4 is “If you encounter (in war) those who disbelieve, you may strike the necks. If you take them as captives you may set them free or ransom them, until the war ends”. Again the nastiness of Wilders’ image is not present in the authorised version.

The final passage quoted in Fitna is 4:89 which Wilders has as “they would like to see you become disbelievers, don’t trust these people as they don’t follow Allah, when they escape kill them wherever you find them, don’t trust them it will be your grave”. Submission has this verse as “They wish that you disbelieve as they have disbelieved, then you become equal. Do not consider them friends, unless they mobilize along with you in the cause of God. If they turn against you, you shall fight them, and you may kill them when you encounter them in war.” While the threat of violence is there, it is only invoked in the case of revenge.

Wilders concludes his film with a call to defend Western freedoms saying “it’s up to the Muslims to cut the hate sowing parts out of the Koran”. But the Koran is really not the problem. A billion people worship the book, most of whom don’t resort to violence. While there is no doubt that the Koran contains hostile anti-Muslim passages, it is no worse than the Christian Bible which has over 800 cruel or violent passages. Fitna is a simplistic text which is likely to fan hatred and does nothing to advance the debate about why violent acts occur as a result of fundamentalism. The 10 minute Youtube version of Fitna is available at Prodos.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali: apostasy on tour in Australia

Somali born writer Ayaan Hirsi Ali told a packed Sydney Recital Hall last night that Muslim schools in Australia should be abolished. Speaking at the Sydney Writers festival amid high security, Hirsi Ali said Australians should ask why there is need for Saudi Arabian financed Muslim schools. “Young people should be groomed to be Australians first, to see their nationality first not religion," she said.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali was born in the Somali capital of Mogadishu in 1969. Her father, Hirsi Magan Isse, was one of the leading figures of the Somali Revolution which finally led to the overthrow of dictator Mohamed Siad Barre in 1991. Ayaan is Magan Isse’s fourth daughter and her name Ayaan is the Somali word for “lucky”. Magan Isse was imprisoned by Siad Barre shortly after Ayaan was born. But he escaped six years later. The family fled Somalia and after short stints in Saudi Arabia and Ethiopia they settled in Kenya.

Hirsi Ali was educated in Nairobi where she fell under the influence of an Islamic religious teacher. Ayaan wore the hijab with her school uniform and was in favour of the fatwa against Salman Rushdie. In 1992, Hirsi Ali arrived in the Netherlands in circumstances that remain shrouded in mystery. She claims she was given in arranged marriage to a distant cousin in Canada. In preparation, she went to join family members in Dusseldorf, Germany. There she claims she worked out a plan to escape the marriage plans and fled to the Netherlands where she claimed asylum.

On her Dutch asylum application, Hirsi Ali gave a false name and told authorities she was a refugee from camps on the Somali-Kenyan border. Hirsi Ali was that false name as her birth name was Ayaan Hirsi Magan. Because Somalia was in the grip of a civil war and famine at the time, the Dutch accepted her application. Hirsi Ali took courses in Dutch and took various short term clerical jobs. After learning the language, she worked as a Dutch-Somali interpreter for refugees and studied political science at the University of Leiden. She gained her master’s degree in 2000.

In her time at university, Hirsi Ali was exposed to new ideas that sorely tested her devotion to Islam. Then after 9/11 she suffered revulsion when she saw Dutch Muslims celebrate the attacks. She wrote a book called De Zoontjesfabriek (The Son Factory) which outlined her views on women, Islam and integration, and she quickly became a public figure with appearances on TV debates and news programs.

In 2002 she was introduced to Gerrit Zalm. Zalm was then Dutch finance minister and a member of of the market liberal party VVD. The VVD is a centre-right libertarian party. Zalm urged Hirsi Ali to join the party and stand for election. She was elected in 2003 and continued to attract controversy over her new views about Islam. Among her suggestion was that Muslims be screened for terrorism before being accepted into a job. She was also critical of the position of women in patriarchal Muslim societies.

In 2004, she wrote the script for a ten minute film called Submission (a direct translation of the word “Islam”). The short film was directed by Theo van Gogh. In it a Muslim women is beaten by her husband and another is raped by an uncle while verses from the Koran unfavourable to women are projected onto their bodies in Arabic. Two months after Dutch TV aired the film, van Gogh was murdered in Amsterdam by a Moroccan immigrant Mohammed Bouyeri. Bouyeri implanted a knife in his body with a five page note attached which threatened Western governments, Jews and Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

Hirsi Ali went into hiding for three months. She emerged in 2005 and demanded to live a normal life despite ongoing death threats. Readers Digest nominated her European of the Year in 2006. In her acceptance speech she urged action against Iran to prevent it from developing nuclear weapons. In the wake of the Mohammed cartoons controversy, Hirsi Ali joined a group of 12 writers including Salman Rushdie who signed a manifesto which warned against Islamic "totalitarianism".

But her life began to unravel in May 2006 when a Dutch TV program Zembla exposed the fiction of her asylum application. Hirsi Ali was forced to admit she had lied about her full name, her date of birth and the manner in which she had come to the Netherlands. The Dutch media she could lose her Dutch citizenship thereby rendering her ineligible for parliament. An official investigation corroborated the TV report and Hirsi Ali resigned from parliament.

Although the Government eventually ruled she could keep her citizenship, Hirsi Ali moved to the US to take up a position with the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think-thank based in Washington with close ties to the Republican Party. Here she remained under the watchful eye of security guards after threats from US based Muslim organisations. Her protection is carried out by American security personnel commissioned by the Dutch Justice department.

In April she incurred the wrath of Pittsburgh imam Fouad ElBayly who demanded the death sentence for her when she arrived for a lecture at the University of Pittsburgh. "She has been identified as one who has defamed the faith. If you come into the faith, you must abide by the laws, and when you decide to defame it deliberately, the sentence is death," said ElBayly, who came to the US from Egypt in 1976.

Her current visit to Australia has also attracted controversy and attracted angry remarks from local Muslims. Islamic law lecturer at Sydney's University of Technology, Jamila Hussain says Hirsi Ali’s ideas are extreme. “She's obviously had some dreadful experiences, but they're not typical, “ she said. Nada Roude, of the New South Wales Islamic Council also claims her visit has the potential to incite hatred. “Anyone who causes harm to our society because they have the right to express their opinion is not welcome,” she said.

Dutch lurch a little to the left

Incumbent Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende, the Christian Democrat (CDA) prime minister, has claimed a narrow win in the Dutch general election. The election was held on Wednesday and the centre-right wing CDA has claimed victory despite only claiming 41 of the available 150 seats. Though this represents a loss of three seats from the last election in 2003, this makes them the biggest party in the new parliament and they expect to rule in coalition with minor parties.

Balkenende acknowledged it will not be easy to form a new government. Under the Dutch system of proportional representation, it is practically impossible for one party to get an absolute majority. He told Dutch reporters “It will take time,” said Balkenende. “All parties will have to analyse how we can rule the country together. How can we give an answer to the questions of the Dutch electorate,” he asked. Balkenende’s coalition ran on an anti-immigration and pro-business platform and it may take weeks or months of haggling to form a workable government. Even then, it is likely to be too unstable to last the four year course.

Gerrit Zalm of coalition partner People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD) acknowledged the uncertainty of the result “It’s chaos. It is extremely difficult to distil a government out of these results,” Zalm was finance minister in the last administration. The chaos saw voters turn to more extreme parties. Many people turned to the fringes to put the brakes on what they saw as frightening change. All centrist parties including the CDA and VVD lost votes in this election and the Opposition Labour party did even worse shedding 10 seats to end on 32. The far-left Socialist Party made the biggest inroads by tripling its vote on the promise to shield the Netherlands from the excesses of economic liberalism.

The Socialist Party (SP) is by led by a former communist, the charismatic Jan Marijnissen. Marijnissen has argued that the Dutch tendency to cry poor for the EU in comparison to the US is inaccurate despite the better US growth rate in the last ten years. Marijnissen claims it is due to the rapid population growth in the US and that if the measure is income per head, the EU comes up just short of the US and would be level if not for Germany. The real reason for the exaggerated pessimism, Marijnissen claims, is to create the conditions under which it can carry out a programme of drastic cuts in social provision. His words resonated with voters and the SP’s share of seats has increased from 8 to 25. Many Muslims also voted for the party in protest at the hardline stance on immigration adopted by the main parties.

Balkenende is unlikely to include the SP in his coalition but nonetheless will need to work with some left leaning parties or else risk an unworkable and unpredictable coalition of multiple ‘rats and mice’ parties. As many as 12 parties could win seats in parliament including the Party for Animals, which is on course to capture two seats. The hard right Party of Freedom also did well gathering 8 seats. Its leader Geert Wilders told the Guardian that "Islam is a violent religion".

There were 24 parties in all contesting the election. Faced with this dizzying choice, many voters turned to Internet sites that offered to draw up their political profiles and match voter and party. Sites such as Vote Matcher and Voting Compass offered multiple-choice questions before suggesting the best party to vote for or giving the respondent an idea where they fitted on the political pendulum. These two sites received three million hits in a month in a country with 17 million people. Opinion polls confirmed the importance of the sites by suggesting that up to one third of voters had not made up their mind on who to vote in the week prior to the election.

Despite the help of the internet, Dutch politics is no clearer as a result.