The Netherlands haven't received much good press over the past few years with respect to Dutch-Muslim relations, and for good reason: xenophobic politicians such as Geert Wilders and the late Pym Fortuyn have tarnished The Netherlands' image. So when the Dutch do something right in this area, they need to be congratulated.
Above is one of three new ads that have been produced for Discriminatie.nl, the anti-discrimination agency (along with the below video).
A Saudi blogger, Raed AlSaeed, has come up with a response to Geert Wilder's hate film, Fitna. Visually, Schism is divided into three parts: numerous American soldiers beating up a couple of Iraqi men (to the growing excitement of a warped American GI who was filming the scene from above), various clips from the movie Jesus Camp, and CNN coverage of Baghdad being bombed by the US Air Force at the start of the Iraq War in 2003. Interspersed are various quotations taken from the Bible (primarily the Old Testament) that, without context, make Judaism and Christianity seem particularly bloodthirsty.
However, Raed's purpose for making Schism is not to attack either Judaism or Christianity, but to show how and why a film like Fitna makes an intellectually dishonest argument. At the end of the movie, Raed wrote:
It is easy to take parts of any Holy book that are out of content [sic; he means "context"] and make it sound like the most inhuman book ever written. This is what Geert Wilders did to gather more supporters to his hateful ideology. To create schism.
Leon in Amsterdam cuts Geert Wilders down to size over Fitna (which, by all reviews I've read so far, rates between "quite boring" and "a yawn"). Be sure to read the remainder of the post; it's fairly short.
Geert Wilders has managed to do what few people thought would be possible: to make himself look even more ridiculous.
I do wonder though, if the targeted community's reaction was something like 'lame', what would the few (yet very vocal) supporters of Geert Wilders feel? Disappointed? Silly? Irrelevant?
