Right now I'm watching the short film by Dutch right-wing anti-Islam politician Geert Wilders. It's pretty disgusting. Ironically, in a country that is still highly sensitive about the atrocities of World War II, it looks very much like a Nazi propaganda film. Everything in it is real, and it shows a very ugly side of Islam and it's very most extremest believers, but I realized while watching it that you could make the exact same film about the Catholic Church and the evils that have been done in its name throughout distant (and recent) history.
The focus of the movie is some of the most violent verses of the Koran and how people use them to justify horrible and unspeakable philosophies of world domination and violence. It's about converting the world to Islam or killing those who won't. It's about a 3-year old girl who has been trained like a monkey to say that Jews are pigs. And it's obviously meant to create great fear among Islamophobes who are afraid that their culture will be overrun by people of different beliefs that they can't relate to.
What I'm having difficulty with (and I assume this was Wilders' goal) is deciding whether this is deplorable propaganda that only spreads hatred of a major world religion and its followers, or whether it is a valid wake-up call; a concentrated and shocking message that is meant to alert the world to the dangers of Islamic extremism. I've been thinking of it more and more in terms of the Germans who ignored the initial signs of danger from Nazi-ism. The complication here is that this particular ideology of Islamic hate comes from a religion, not a political movement, which makes it even less open to inspection, debate and criticism because of the liberal, tolerant, sometimes overly politically correct nature of modern (Western) society. So we may be getting into a situation where the very values that we are trying to defend in Western society are the ones that will cause us to ignore the danger out there.
I'm a generally very liberally minded person, so I usually tend toward wanting to embrace tolerance at almost any cost - God knows it would be pretty hypocritical for any gay man to do otherwise. But at the same time, this film pretty effectively links violent acts from an increasingly large (and effective) but still FRINGE group to the holy scriptures of a very large group of people, and shows the unprecedented death and destruction these people are causing in modern times. Perhaps it would be easier to defend Islam if there were more Islamic moderates who were out there condemning extremist violence. I've yet to ever see a prominent moderate Islamic movement that strongly rejects the Islamist doctrine of the spread of their religion through violence. Is it because the media doesn't find it as interesting as the fanatics? Could very well be. Still, if I as a Christian were faced with a significant, global violent movement of people from my faith, I would be out there fighting it tooth and nail.
I also look at this from the perspective of a gay man who has found refuge in a liberal European country that embraces me for who I am, and I do feel threatened by the (often not very religious) Muslim youth in The Netherlands who usually have a very different attitude toward homosexuality than their Dutch counterparts - and over the last year have been increasingly expressing this through anti-gay attacks in our larger cities. And that is surviving into the second generation that is pretty well culturally integrated into Dutch society as well. I of course have a major problem with that - I moved to this country to embrace its values and its culture, so in many ways I can very much relate to the Dutch who feel threatened by a group of people, some of whom actively reject Dutch culture.
Anybody who is fanatical is dangerous and should be fought against. Christian, Muslim, Jew, makes no difference at all. But how do we fight against them without becoming fanatics ourselves and becoming exactly who we hate so much? That is the challenge and the difficulty here. That is the challenge of a liberal society, and I don't know if it can be won. Wilders has obviously decided to cross that line with this film and fight fanaticism with fanaticism, and I can't support that. But I also don't think we have the luxury of political correctness anymore. The other side has already gone past that point, and we need to find ways to respond that are effective but that don't compromise our integrity and values. And I have no answer to how to do that.
