“Fitna” and “Submission” were both slightly disturbing to me for different reasons.
“Submission” was artistic and useful: I still remember reading about a woman in the Middle East heavily punished for adultery while the man got off scot-free. The things these women talked about facing are issues in most societies at some level or another, but this movie did have an extra element of interest to me, due to the fact that what these women must contend with is brought about by a male-dominated society dictated by some of the women’s own deeply held beliefs. By speaking directly to Allah, they voiced their confusion over how they could follow these laws so closely, yet their core ideals could fail them. This movie presented real issues in a way that I thought was moving, albeit somewhat targeted.
The angry organized-religion-avoiding feminist inside of me would love to go deeper into my thoughts on this clip, but must be reined in to instead analyze the disturbing images and religious bigotry that was “Fitna”. As an introduction to the fans of this movie, the “Submission” clip was accompanied by an explanation of “Fitna”. “Submission” was posted by a user named “fuckmohammad” who voiced his support for “Fitna” with, “So let's support freedom of speech and not be intimidated by bunch of savages who are stuck in the 7th century and want to impose their throwback religion on the rest of the civilized world.” I felt that this explained the propagandist viewpoint of “Fitna” beautifully. “Fitna” was all smoke and mirrors, encompassing the extremist sect of Muslims that hardly represents the whole. The news waves are filled with suicide bombings, but on the ground stands average folk.
In terms of freedom of speech, all the power to the producers. Voicing opinions is a beautiful thing. The caveat is that this film was so extreme in its portrayal of Islam that I frankly found it offensive and misleading and wouldn’t advocate showing it to an undiscerning populace anytime soon.
I did find one bit of this film ironic. The misinformation included a large section about how Muslims are all supposedly out to get the Jews. Targeting Muslims for what appears to be religious persecution by showing them as targeting what is arguably the most persecuted religious group in history is right out of an O. Henry tale, a very scary and twisted O. Henry tale that pits person against person with hyperbole and lies.
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I also noticed the emphasis on Muslims targeting Jews, and I found this ironic given Holland's history of shunting Jewish refugees fleeing Nazism into segregated regions and finally concentration camps (at least this is what I thought Ran Hennes told us). Do you think perhaps this targeting is designed to confuse remnants of guilt and fear from WWII still present in the Dutch collective memory with fear of immigrants today?
True; I was also kind of looking at the part of "Murder in Amsterdam" where supposedly all the Dutch feel bad about their actions, yet have the whole thing about emulating "gas chambers" by hissing at soccer games. A large part of the movie seemed to be about Jews and how badly they would fare under Muslim rule, yet there are vestiges of religious intolerance against them in Dutch culture as a whole, which seemed a little bit hypocritical almost.
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