As I said earlier this week, if you follow this blog you should know Wilders by now for building a career by exploiting Islamophobia and drawing attention to himself with media stunts. The most recent of which being his anti-Islam movie, Fitna, which he had threatened to release since the middle of last year, but which only released an hour ago, via Liveleak. It had to be done that way because he couldn’t find any Dutch broadcaster to show it and his own website got taken off the air by his American provider. Actually, there was one broadcaster that did want to see it, but that was a Muslim broadcaster, who wanted to show it during an evening of debate with Wilders, but this was just a little bit too scary for him…
I don’t really want to pay too much attention to his silly little film, because it is nothing but the usual warmed over Islamophobic cliches. You know the drill: the Islam is threatening your freedom, it wants to subjugate the entire world and kill all the unbelievers, it leads to terrorism (cue images of the September 11 attacks) and so on. Bo-oring.
It’s just the impact this will have that I’m worried about. Not so much the inevitable reaction of Muslim hotheads, but there’s already a climate of fear and hatred surrounding Islam in the Netherlands and this movie is deliberately throwing oil on the fire. Wilders is intelligent enough to make use of the wave of unreasoning hatred that followed the September 11 attacks and the murder of Fortuyn to make his political career, so he should be intelligent enough to know his movie is one big lie. The question is, is he cynically using this lie just to further his career, or does he wants a Reichsdag fire? What’s he going to do with all the media attention coming his way?