"Fitna": Islamist Univeralism and Western Civilization

I just finished watching "Fitna" at Dr. Sanity's page. She urges readers to watch the film with this recommendation:

...if you haven't seen "Fitna" yet, take 15 minutes to watch it....

Watching it is an act of freedom and defiance against those forces that want nothing more than to destroy the very values upon which western civilization is based.

The film includes footage from the September 11 attacks, as well as video of various imams calling out death to the infidels.

But "Fitna" also includes images from the Madrid train bombing of 2004, and by God there's few images of terrorist attacks after September 11 which demonstrate the fullness of Islamist depravity - the explosion itself rocks the train station in a fireball of hell, and no one can imagine the degree of fear and horror in the civilians fleeing the landing platform. Remind people of this next time some Bush-basher ridicules you as a "fear-mongerer."

FrontPageMagazine's got a brief article on Fitna as well:

Even before its official release, Fitna, the new film by Dutch politician Geert Wilders, served to demonstrate the dire threat that radical Islam poses to the West.

Muslim indignation at the film has fueled a phenomenon that has habitually stifled honest discussion about Islamic terror and its origins. When non-Muslims point out that Islamic jihadists commit acts of violence and are inspired to do so by the Qur'an, many non-Muslim and Muslim apologists for jihad, including many who are widely known as "moderates," respond by claiming that those who point to this truth are committing an act of "hatred," "bigotry," "Islamophobia," and the like. Curiously, these supposed voices of reason have not a word to say about the actual acts of violence and hatred committed by the jihadists -- or about the sources that engender them. Rather, the daring voice that reports on these actions is vilified.

Wilders' film speaks for itself. Quoting Qur'anic verses and Muslims themselves, Fitna clearly demonstrates that Muslims who engage in violence and hatred do so with reference to the Qur'an. In making this clear, Wilder's film also points the way to a solution to the crisis within the Islamic faith: Only when peaceful Muslims begin to turn their indignation upon the extremists among them, rather than upon Wilders and others critics who speak out against the dangers of Islamic fanaticism and its sources, will there be progress against the spread of jihad ideology and Islamic supremacism within the Muslim world and beyond. Unfortunately, the intolerant reaction to Wilders' film shows yet again that this is, at best, a dim hope.

Further, peaceful Muslims will also have to renounce those sections of the Koran that advocate conquering non-Muslim peoples.

I'm convinced Islam is a "religion of victory," as Malise Ruthven pointed out in a recent essay.

But watch the movie for yourself, via YouTube:

The FrontPage piece mentions the apologists for Islam, and suggests how any discussion of the threat of Islamist universalism to Western civilization is ridiculed ruthlessly as racist.

Academic research, however, provides systematic treatments of Islam's threat to democratic regimes. Note, for example, Ladan Boroumand and Roya Boroumand, in "Terror, Islam, and Democracy":

What are the attitudes, beliefs, and motives of the terrorists and the movement from which they sprang? What makes young men from Muslim countries willing, even eager, to turn themselves into suicide bombers? How did these men come to harbor such violent hatred of the West, and especially of the United States? What are the roots—moral, intellectual, political, and spiritual—of the murderous fanaticism we witnessed that day...?

As Western experts and commentators have wrestled with these questions, their intellectual disarray and bafflement in the face of radical Islamist (notice we do not say “Islamic”) terrorism have become painfully clear. This is worrisome, for however necessary an armed response might seem in the near term, it is undeniable that a successful long-term strategy for battling Islamism and its terrorists will require a clearer understanding of who these foes are, what they think, and how they understand their own motives. For terrorism is first and foremost an ideological and moral challenge to liberal democracy. The sooner the defenders of democracy realize this and grasp its implications, the sooner democracy can prepare itself to win the long-simmering war of ideas and values that exploded into full fury last September 11.

The key, really, is how willing are Americans and citizens of the industrialized West willing to defend democratic freedom?

That's the message of "Fitna," and it's none too soon and never more timely.