Geert Wilders, Fitna and Beauty

Fitna: By Geert Wilders

Almost a year ago, I wrote an article about Fitna entitled: License for Asthetics in Wilders' "Fitna". It was published in ChronWatch, which you can read here. (It is also available in my articles archive, here.)

Now, a year later, Wilders is making his rounds - in the U.S. at the moment - showing the film and making presentations. He was denied entry into England. I wonder what happened with Canada - just across the border? Could no-one book him, or was it too much of a risk (or potential humiliation, a la the British?)

Here is my blog entry for Fitna from last year. I've copied the whole (short) piece below:

In an era when gratuitous violence, extreme, incredible violence, is coated malignantly with the pill of aesthetics, Geert Wilders’ Fitna has struck the right chord.

Wilders decides to go for the aesthetic effect. He places the translations of the Koranic verses on sepia toned pages of the Koran itself with its beautiful script and gilded borders. His images of newspaper, film and photographic footage are placed within diffused frames in soft-focus, once again on the sepia-colored background. Even the harsh scenes of the soldier’s beheading, whose final horror Wilders spares us by substituting the images with the muffled, still bone-chilling, sounds of the gagged soldier’s last screams, are presented within blurred frames on a softened background. The music is two classical pieces by Tchaikovsky and Grieg.

I still feel very strongly about this. Islam has given us horrible imagery. Decapitations, bludgeonings of young girls by their brothers and fathers, exploding buildings, young children with bombs attached to them blowing themselves up.

The ever-intelligent Wilders must have realized the horror, the pitiful sordidness of this, and made his film with a "license for asthetics".

In my article, I write about traditional artists (not modern artists, who seem to relish in ugliness) who made aesthetics a high priority. Even the crucified Jesus, with blood coming out of his body, is painted to encourage our contemplation rather than our repulsion.

Perhaps that is the fundamental problem of Islam. It has no beauty to contemplate - at least not for long. Mohamed's Koran, for those who are beguiled by it, does contain seductive and beautiful parts, but for the astute readers, horror and ugliness soon start taking precedence, dominating everything else.