Anti-Muslim Dutch politicians in hiding after death threats

What they are really admitting is that they really haven't got a clue what Mohammed said because, if he said anything at all, it was compiled from stories about him many decades after he died.

Yet Muslims insist that the Koran is the unchanged word of God as given to Mohammed.

It clearly isnt, as it has changed, and the Hadith is changing now, and therefore the conservative religious authorities are dishonest.

I'm glad that all Jesus' phone was bugged and all his speeches taped. (Better than relying on the notes by the shorthand secretaries!)

Well said, Walter. This brings us directly to what Christopher Hitchens said in his recent excellent book.

I didnt know that

What happened to the shorthand notes btw? The scribes wrote down everything Mohammed did and said, on bits of bone, vellum pottery etc whatever came to hand. There must have been thousands if not tens of thousands of them. Yet not one single artefact from Mohammed's time has survived. Did they destroy the original words of God? Or is the whole thing just myth?

Or as Hitchens said (paraphrasing) "The whole thing is a plagiarism of a plagiarism of a story about a myth based on rumour about events that never happened"

Overheard in a pub earlier today... two white working class blokes discussing Muslims and the imminent danger they pose

"******* Muslim ******* settin off ******** bombs everywhere

But if you put a sign up in this pub sayin NO MUSLIMS you'd get ******** done for it. ******** disgrace


.............................................


(earlier a woman assured anyone who would listen that Princess Diana was "done in" by MFI.)

Flat pack?

thats what did for the poor old girl

Re Wildersa, quite a good summary in spiegel-online:

Wilders released the movie today on the website of the PVV party.

See the BBC report: Dutch MP posts Islam film on web

However, the Partij voor de Vrijheid website is down.

I watched some of Fitna, without sound card. Probably just as well as I didnt want to hear the pleas of poor Ken Bigley before they cut his head off.

Well, as some of the Dutch commentators said (wrote): the Nazis did their anti-Jewish propaganda films better.

And quite interesting are the steps, the Danish cartoonist Westergaard is going to take against Wilders: 'The Cartoon Must Not Be Used Against Muslims as a Whole'

Any other creed cult or philosophy which advocated violence would be instantly condemned, and rightly so. Why should Islam be exempt just because its a religion? Wilder's film might be fairly crude propaganda but he makes the serious point that Muslims must re-write their "holy texts" to make their religion acceptable in the 21st century.

According to most commentators this video will be mostly seen by ... fanatic Islamists.

And as it's said (and how it looks like): it's made for them = in their style.

Geert Wilders releases film; loses a third of his support

In the weekly opinion poll the Political Barometer, the party of Geert Wilders, the Freedom Party, has lost 1/3 of its support within two weeks. Two weeks ago it was polling at 15 seats (out of 150 in the national parliament); this week it has 10 left.

Looks like Geert Wilders' anti-Islam film is not winning him any popularity among the Dutch.

The other populist anti-immigrant party, Rita Verdonk's Proud of the Netherlands, also lost a seat.

Dutch flock to the centre-right, government parties

Instead, the prospect of the film apparently made the Dutch yearn for calm, stability and centrist leadership. Prime Minister Balkenende's Christian-Democrats have won 7 seats, going from 32 to 39.

The parliamentary leader of the Christian democrats, Pieter van Geel, has called Wilders' film "villainous and unnecessarily hurtful." The government had asked Wilders to refrain from making it public.

The rightwing liberal VVD, from which Wilders was expelled back in the day, also won 2 seats. VVD leader Mark Rutte has commented that Wilders "now has an audience of millions that he could have made use of to present solutions to problems with radical Islam and integration. Instead of doing something constructive he's shown old footage of terrorist and criminal acts."

The small Christian Union, a deeply religious Protestant party which is the smallest of the three parties in the government coalition, also won 2 seats. The party has been cautious in its comments about the film, rejecting van Geel's comment above for example. But it has been a long-standing critic of Wilders, and strongly condemned his appeal to ban the Quran.

The above parties have benefited from what looks like a lurch to the middle. Wilders and Verdonk lost to them, but so did the leftwing parties. The Socialist Party lost three seats. The only leftwing party that picked up a seat is the Labour Party, the third party in the government.

The numbers

This is how the political landscape shifted in anticipation of the screening:

thanks nimh interesting

After Wilders film accused Muslims of violence, LiveLeak have pulled it from their servers because of threats of violence by Muslims. They would like to uphold the principle of free speech but the risk is too high.

More about Dutch public opinion and Wilders' film Fitna

The following data are from an opinion poll conducted by Maurice de Hond.

[b]Yesterday, the film Fitna has been released on the internet. Have you seen the film?[/b] 22% Yes, seen it in full on the net 8% Yes, seen it in part on the net 24% Yes, seen fragments on television 25% No

The category who's seen the film in full or in part on the net (total: 30%) ranges from 55% of the voters of Wilders' Freedom Party and 40% of VVD voters to 23-28% of the voters of the other five main parties.

[b]Qualifications of this film (among those who have seen it):[/b] 76% Cut and paste job 65% Publicity stunt 52% Exaggerated 49% Truthful 47% Anticlimax 42% Hateful 39% Careful 33% Insulting 30% "Wanstaltig" (roughly translated: horrible, monstrous, a miscreation) 26% Intelligent

Freedom Party voters who saw the film considered it truthful (93%) and careful (76%), but even among them only 49% qualified it as "intelligent", and 64% labelled it a cut-and-paste job.

Voters of the rightwing liberal VVD were ambivalent (truthful, 69%; cut/paste work, 63%; publicity stunt, 49%; careful, 47%), and voters of the Christian Democrats were more critical but still ambivalent as well (publicity stunt, 75%; cut/paste work, 72%; truthful, 55%; exaggerated, 53%; careful, 51%).

Voters of the small, more stringently religious Christian Union were unabashedly critical, on the other hand (publicity stunt, 90%; exaggerated, 90%; cut/paste work, 85%; anti-climax, 77%; hateful, 77%). They were in fact more critical than voters of the Labour Party and the Socialist Party, though those too, of course, picked only negative qualifications (cut/paste job, publicity stunt, exaggerated, anticlimax). Socialist voters were slightly less willing to brand the film "hateful" than Labour voters though (48% vs 59%).

By far the most resolutely critical were Green Left voters (copy/paste job, 100%; exaggerated, 97%; publicity stunt, 88%; hateful, 83%; "wanstaltig", 78%).

Respondents who had seen the film were also asked to grade it, between 1 and 10 (10 = top grade). Grouping the grades together, the results are as follows:

8% / 9-10. 22% / 7-8. 22% / 5-6. 17% / 3-4. 31% / 1-2. Average: 4.6

Some other questions - noteworthy is the overwhelmingly positive evaluation of the way Muslims and Islamic organisations in the Netherlands have responded to the film (see bottom).

[i]Would you consider it justified if there were negative reactions about the Netherlands in Islamic countries?[/i] Yes 14%; No 81% [i]Should Wilders be prosecuted for this film?[/i] Yes 18%; No 75% [i]Does the film give a good impression of Islam?[/i] 12% Yes, it does 72% It gives an impression of the extremism of a specific group [i]Do you think Islam over time will constitute a serious threat for the Netherlands?[/i] Yes 43%; No 53% [i]There are people who say that every religion has a group of fundamentalists, and that there is little difference on this count between Christianity and Islam? Do you agree with this?[/i] Yes 54%; No 44% [i]What is your judgement of the way in which Muslims and Islamic organisations in the Netherland have reacted to the film?[/i] 15% Very positive 40% Positive 29% Neutral 4% Negative 1% Very negative

and what is the conclusion of this impressive array of statistics?

You mean mine? Cause I'm sure that 10 different people would come to 10 different conclusions... Thats why I think people's interpretations are often a lot less interesting than the actual data themselves. I mean, everyone can come up with some opinion.

But OK, sure - for whatever it's worth, my conclusion is that the Dutch are apparently a lot more sobre and level-headed than I'd given them credit for.

They're not buying the kind of hysteria Wilders is peddling. But they also dont want to prosecute him or ban his film or anything like that - let him say what he wants to say. But to be honest, they dont think much of it.

The findings just seem very middle or the road, commonsensical. The film isnt a fair portrayal of Islam, but it does portray an extremist minority. It's not particularly "truthful" and far from "intelligent", but it's also not outright "hateful," let alone "monstrous". Mostly it's just criticized in pragmatic terms, as a publicity stunt and copy/pastejob. They dont agree with it, but dont have a major problem with it having been produced either. On the wider subject, a narrow majority does think Islam is a threat to world peace, but few people think it poses a threat to them, personally - and a similar majority thinks Christianity has the same kind of fundamentalists. They dont think Muslims should make a big deal out of it, but also appreciatively noticed that Dutch Muslims didnt, in fact, make that big a deal out of it. All very moderate and reasonable.

Considering the huge centrifugal forces that have marked Dutch politics this last decade, ever strengthening the extremes and weakening the centre, that's all pretty reassuring.