1-It's clear that one (may be the main) purpose of Wilders was to incite sentiments, and may be violence, against muslims. He would like to see muslim immigration to Holland restricted. Or even more extreme, to kick them out of the country. What right has anybody to decide who can and who cannot live in a given country?
That would be the people who live in that country, abide by its laws, which they have voted for and pay taxes to enforce.
If a people is to be sovereign, it has to have the right to keep whoever it wants out of its land. If a people is to be sovereign, it has to be able to do so without even having to justify itself to the world at large or even to the people it wants to keep outside of its borders. This is what sovereignty means.
And if you were really serious about your question, then please justify the existence of the
INS in what Americans like to call the "land of the free". I can tell you I'd get kicked out the US pretty fast if I tried to work there without an H1-B visa, which is a pain in the @$$ to obtain, and yet I'm a healthy white male rocket scientist with no criminal record.
I'll say it again : to understand Wilders' point and agree with them, you need to have actually lived in a country with growing Muslim communities. I'm serious here, they are NOT friendly neighbors. They are passive-aggressive at the best of times, and you can hardly find a riot in France where they don't play an active part. I already linked to the
2005 civil unrest in France but forgot about the
2007 civil unrest in France. Once again, Muslims fled the police, got into an accident, died and who did the Muslim community blame ? THE POLICE of course ! They proceeded to injure 130 police officers in riots that included SHOOTINGS.
There's a reason (many reasons, in fact) why an extreme right-wing politician (Le Pen) almost became president in 2002 : the French people is growing increasingly uncomfortable living with Muslims. And just so you know, Sarkozy got elected in part by taking many of Le Pen's points and solutions and coating them in more politically-correct words. When he says "suburbs" and "insecurity", everyone knows who he's really talking about, even if no one will actually say it aloud.
Should Europe ever get around kicking the Muslims out, it wouldn't even be the first time. I don't know if they even teach that in your country's history classes (I'm assuming you're American), but Spain was once conquered by the Muslim, who remained there from the 8th to 15th century : 750 years ! Spanish Jews and Christians were faced with a choice between fleeing to other countries, converting to Islam... or death. Look-up "Reconquista" on Google.
Obviously the Muslims did try to expand to France back then, and they were repeatedly kicked-out with extreme prejudice by heroes we still celebrate : Charles Martel and his grandson Charlemagne being the most famous. Compared to these strategists, the whole Pentagon looks like a mental institution run by its inmates. In fact, Martel started the Reconquista.
It's for this kind of reason that any European with a little knowledge of history looks at Fitna not like a piece of racist propaganda meant only to shock, but as a reminder that we're about to let history repeat itself. The reason why the reactions are so quiet, however, is that even in Europe it's always hard to speak out against a religion, ANY religion.
2-The movie was available for viewing at a website and was then taken out. This happened because the website owners received serious threats. This brings up again the issue of freedom of expression. Are we willing to accept that extremists group impose censorship by issuing threats?
I'm not sure that's the right question there. You have a guy who says something like "Islam is all about intolerance" and immediately he's proven right. Again, this is not the first time it's happened.
What we should be asking is this : we can't prevent Islamic terrorism, so should we still respect Islam because some Muslims aren't terrorists ?
Let me put it another way : imagine you could see into the future and were revealed a second 9/11-style attack, and the ONLY way you could prevent it was by forcibly suppressing Islam : would you choose to let innocent people die just because you want to respect the beliefs of a large number of non-terrorists Muslims ? Or would you choose to put the survival of thousands above the beliefs of millions ? Detail your work.
I'll still answer YOUR question : yes. If you've read what LiveLeak posted about the whole mess, it basically says that they cannot defend their own lives and therefore have no choice but to comply with the demands of those who threaten them. That, my friend, is what happens when your sovereignty is weak. The LiveLeak people acknowledged that Islam has more power in their country than the army, the police and even the people combined !
Freedom of expression was EFFECTIVELY trampled. I'd consider this a great military victory for Islam. To understand why I say that, read the Art of War's very first page. War is for leaders too stupid to be able to win a fight without starting a war.
3-In the movie real quotations from the Koran were presented. These suras call for the extermination of Christians, Jews and infidels in general. This is what Dan Dennett calls a toxic religion. At least it's the toxic part of that religion. In order to be able to live in a better world, it's imperative for toxic (parts of) religions to become extinct.
Yeah, but the toxic parts of religion are like cancer, because religion is not about rationality. Suppose you eliminate all the hateful parts about the Quran ? Well, among what little would be left is the interdiction to eat pork meat. Seems quite inoffensive, right ? Most people have stuff they hate the taste of, without even needing a religion to justify it. I don't eat Rocquefort cheese because I hate its smell. Never even took a taste of it.
Well, in France, there have been many cases of Muslim uproar because it turned out some dish served in some school restaurant to some Muslim kid might have contained pork. Cue the demonstrations, insults and car-burnings as a perfectly honest mistake (not even a mistake, really) gets turned into a hate-crime against the entire Muslim world. Never mind the fact that no one forces kids to eat at the school restaurant every single day, the menu of which is always displayed a week in advance for parental consumption. The way this usually ends is with the cook being fired to appease the crowd. Medieval but true, sadly.
My point is, religion creates division, and human beings like to fight and hate whoever is not like them. It's a primal, prehistoric tribe thing but it's real nonetheless. We will use the silliest reasons to kill each other, and if all that remains of the Quran was its punctuation, you'd still find people killing each other over it.
Which is why all religions should be relegated to the history books and everyone should embrace facts and science : you'll never see people killing each other over whether 1 + 1 actually equals 2 or not, or the fact that a proton is 1836 times heavier than an electron. Because if it weren't true we wouldn't be having this conversation : the Internet wouldn't work the way we've designed it. There is no room for division or alternate gospel here.
Besides, in the age of computers, you really can't hope to excise only parts of any holy book : there will always be intact copies somewhere, and there will always be a country where you DON'T have sovereignty (say, Afghanistan) where people will maintain the hate alive and intact and spread it. And the Afghanis do have global reach, using both the internet and kamikazes, as 9/11 proved.
The kind of social engineering Dennett suggests is what engineers call a "perfect world scenario" : meaning a scenario where you actually have all the time in the world, and no petty thing like a limited budget or the ideas of a stupid boss are taken into account. As any engineer will tell you, when this kind of scenario collides with reality, it ends-up drowning in compromises until it has become a whole new scenario entirely. You end-up with software that's buggy on its release date and requires multiple patches, or cars that have to be recalled because of a severe defect.
What it means for social engineering is you start with a good intention and sound plan, but you end-up making so many concessions and trade-offs you create a whole new beast instead of killing the old one. In other word, you create a
schism and, as we all know, the source for even more violence.
Nefastor
Edited by nefastor, 03 April 2008 - 11:00 PM.