Dutch MP’s Film “Pure Political Polemic” Singapore Analyst

Text of report by Singapore newspaper The Straits Times website on 4 April

Watching the anti-Islam polemical film Fitna yesterday, I was reminded of the furore over a very different film 20 years ago. Back in 1988, Christian communities were up in (verbal) arms over the release of the film version of Greek writer Nikos Kazantzakis’ The Last Temptation Of Christ.

I had read the 1951 book about two years before the film was released, and recognized it for the great artistic work it was.

I did not find it offensive to my Christian faith that the writer dared imagine a Christ hallucinating on the cross on what life would have been like had he chosen the path more well-trodden and sought a married life with Mary Magdalen.

In fact, I found Kazantzakis’ insight brilliant: that for some individuals, the greatest temptation is not money or power, but domesticity.

A satisfying, cushy family life can be the greatest destroyer of the spark of aesthetic or spiritual fire, lulling it to a slow, quiet demise.

So when the movie came out and angry Christian communities launched a boycott, I was a bit nonplussed. I had read the book, and understood its thesis and did not think it at all anti-Christian.

Last week, another film was released which offends believers’ sensibilities. This time, the maker is Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders and the subject is Islam. Or, to be precise, radical interpretations of some Islamic verses.

The 15-minute filmlet is pure political polemic, not art.

It’s actually a collection of images: of barbarous acts presumably committed by Muslim individuals or Islamic state regimes, or close-ups of Muslim speakers advocating killings of infidels and Jews.

All these are juxtaposed against verses from the Koran which appear to advocate violence.

As polemic, it is powerful.

As a work of art, it has, frankly, little merit.

Even as a documentary, it is deeply flawed.

The documentary commits the to-me-unforgivable journalistic sin of taking an extreme fringe of an issue and portraying it as representing the mainstream -of putting things totally out of context.

Such devices work when viewers understand that what they are seeing is lopsided polemic, not a balanced portrayal of reality. Michael Moore’s Sicko, a devastating expose of the excesses of the American health-care system, is an example. Americans watching it know it represents a partisan, extreme viewpoint and are able to discount it accordingly, while giving credence to its point of view.

Unfortunately, many viewers of Fitna will lack enough context to understand the film as representing a minority, extremist aspect of the Islamic world.

In Singapore, we know better than to tar our peaceful, family- loving Muslim compatriots with the same brush that tars radical militant Muslims.

But thousands of viewers of the filmlet may have never met a real- life Muslim, and would go away believing its central thesis that Islam encourages murders, wants to destroy modern civilisation and teaches adorable little Muslim girls that Jews are pigs and apes.

Fitna -which means strife in Arabic -is actually part of a conversation in the West, especially Europe, on how to accommodate and live with Islam.

Wilders adopts a radical secular liberal position that Islam threatens the roots of Western civilisation. Just as Nazism had to be defeated, so does the Islamisation of Europe, the film argues.

The reality though is that this conversation within the West, will be viewed by the Islamic community as a full frontal assault on Islam.

Say we reverse the situation:

Supposing a group of Muslim film-makers want to warn its young not to buy wholesale into the Western ideal of capitalist democracy.

Say they make a 15-minute filmlet focusing on the excesses of the West but depicting these as mainstream: gratuitous pornography, fat, ugly, monied, old Western men having sex with young boys and girls, teenagers crazed with drugs, tycoons living in palaces while starving children beg on the streets, scenes of fundamentalist Christian leaders preaching perdition to unbelievers, juxtaposed with verses from the Bible calling on God to make footstools of enemies.

No doubt there will be calls to ban such screenings in some Western and Christian circles.

There are several issues involved here.

One concerns freedom of expression. Wilders, and Kazantzakis, and the film-makers of The Last Temptation, exercised their right to express their views.

But freedom is never absolute. As long as one aspires to live in a peaceful civilised society, a certain amount of give-and-take is essential.

For the state, this means allowing leeway for expression, and not banning all works that may offend some.

For the faithful who feel insulted, it means remembering the best tenets of their religion and not issuing death threats against those who may offend.

For the artist, this requires the humility to accept some limits to freedom of expression.

One limit is religious feelings. This is not to say that every artist should pussyfoot around others’ religious sensibilities. As in many things worth pursuing, the best course of option is grey, never black and white.

One rule of thumb may be not to gratuitously insult the faith of others.

I accept that one of the roles of art is to challenge the status quo, subvert the establishment, overturn treasured norms. Provocation, even insult, helps achieve those ends.

On this point, Fitna fails, because the insult to Islam seems to be the point of the film, not the means to another, nobler, end.

Fitna, in fact, belongs to a good-old-fashioned school of film- making: propaganda.

It distorts reality (extremist versions of Islam) and passes it off as truth (that this is mainstream Islam).

It does not provoke in order to stimulate the viewer to a decision of his own; instead it engages in gratuitous insult to push the viewer to the ‘correct’ decision that Islam and modern democratic civilisations do not mix.

In the end, the ironic result of polemical works like Fitna is that in portraying fringe as majority, the politician reveals himself to be one of those he warns against: a radical who mistakes his anti-Islamic secular liberalist viewpoint as one representing the majority.

Vast numbers of people on this planet will find resonance neither in the worldview of radical Islam his film depicts, nor in the radical anti-Islamic worldview his film represents.

Originally published by The Straits Times website, Singapore, in English 4 Apr 08.

(c) 2008 BBC Monitoring Asia Pacific. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.