The anti-Islam film Fitna, posted by Dutch politician Geert Wilders on the Internet last week, amounts to nothing more than a hate speech about the hate speech coming from the Muslim world. Wilders is just as guilty of spreading hatred through his lies about Islam as the Muslims who preach and use violence against what they perceive to be the enemies of Islam.

The documentary is part of an Islamophobia industry that seems to be growing rapidly in the West. And Wilders is hiding behind freedom of speech to engage in hate speech. Let's just hope Europeans have the common sense to dismiss Fitna as nothing more than a propaganda tool for the Dutch politician's anti-immigration platform.

The Muslim world would also do well to dismiss the film without further thought. A strong or violent reaction is just what Wilders was looking for in producing and releasing the film. Such reactions would vindicate his claim that Islam, instead of being the religion of peace that it is, preaches violence.

Wilders conveniently picks and chooses verses from the Koran (the translations of which are dubious, and all of them taken out of context) that seem to call for the use of violence, and runs them alongside clips of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States and other terrorist attacks since then that were perpetrated in the name of Islam.

He also includes hate sermons by radical Muslim leaders, and adds a quotation from Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for good measure.

Voila, in 15 minutes, the film manages to convey the message that violence is an inherent part of the Islamic faith. By way of implication, since the teaching is violent, so are the adherents. In the film, Wilders warns that the presence of 54 million Muslim immigrants in Europe, including close to one million in the Netherlands, is a threat to freedom and to the European lifestyle.

The film shoots down the argument commonly presented by the Muslim world that terrorist attacks are carried out by a tiny minority who do not represent the Muslim majority. It also dismisses the notion that Islam is a peaceful and tolerant religion, or that by and large, Muslims are comfortable living side by side with non-Muslims.

The video does not turn out to be as vicious as had been hyped in the months before its release.

There were none of Wilders' claim likening the Koran to Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf, which actually does preach violence. And there was none of the tearing up of the Koran in the video as was earlier claimed, an act that would surely have upset Muslims and provoked strong and violent protests of the kind we saw in 2006 in response to the publication of offensive cartoons lampooning Prophet Muhammad in a Danish publication.

Instead, at the end of the video, the screen turns black and there is the sound of a page being ripped from a book, and a voice suggesting that Muslims themselves should tear out the page(s) of their holy book that preach violence.

Depending on how the public receives the video, the first and foremost concern is the fate of the millions of Muslims who live in Europe, as they are the real target of Wilders' message.

The vast majority of them have nothing to do with the violence Wilders' talks about in the film. A worst-case scenario would be the persecution of Muslims as Islamophobia grows in the same way Christian Europeans persecuted Jews in the 20th century. As it is, Muslims in some European countries have already begun feeling the heat in recent years.

Thankfully, after failing to prevent Fitna's release, the Dutch government disassociated itself from the film as soon as it became publicly available on the Internet, as has the Danish government. This is a first step in calming the situation and easing tensions in their own communities, as well as in their relations with predominantly Muslim countries.

Their next task is to deal with the growing Islamophobia in their societies. Muslim minorities, most arriving through decades of immigration, are a fact of life in Europe. They are reminders of the growing presence of peoples of different cultures and religions in the once predominantly white and Christian Europe, and the need for everyone to learn to live side by side in peace despite their differences.

Some tensions are inevitable during such a process of integration or assimilation, and it is therefore all the more important for governments to get a handle on the situation and start promoting multiculturalism or pluralism to ease the tensions.

If there is anything good coming out of Wilders' film, it is to remind Europeans of the urgency for them to deal with the problems and challenges of the ever-growing diversity of their societies.

The author is chief editor of The Jakarta Post.

Popular

Why Indonesia must write ASEAN’s green rules

Freeport Indonesia pushes back full copper mine restart

Growth without gain: Why Indonesians don't feel the economy