fugitive peace

Addition (March 25th): A friend points out that in the 2005 Barbican production of Christopher Marlowe’s “Tamburlaine” the Qur’an-burning scene was replaced with a general book-burning and various references to the prophet Muhammad were dropped — this for a play that was written over 400 years ago.

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I’m fascinated by the debate over whether Geert Wilders’s film “Fitna” about the “fascist ideology” of Islam should be banned in Holland. The Dutch foreign minister says that the potential risks to Dutch people, especially abroad, make it “irresponsible to broadcast this film.” The Dutch protestant church evidently agrees and the film’s website has been suspended by its ISP.It certainly proves the point Wilders is trying to make: that Islam and free speech are incompatible. But so what? Anyone who’s followed the Danish cartoon scandal knew that already.

Like Theo van Gogh, who was killed in 2004 for his film Submission about violence against women in the Islamic world, and like Pim Fortuyn, who was also killed for his anti-Muslim views, Wilders is a provocateur. Wilders and Fortuyn in particular built their careers by stirring up popular fears about Islam and immigrants. Nobody deserves to be killed for it, of course. But exploiting public feeling on this to make a name for yourself makes you no different from the imams who wilfully whip up Muslim sentiment over cartoons.

Nor can Wilders reasonably claim that he’s defending the principle of free speech. Every Western country curtails free speech and other liberties if they clash with what politicians decide is the national interest. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-Dutch politician who made Submission with van Gogh and then had to flee the country because of death threats, certainly isn’t concerned about the principle of free speech: she believes in closing Muslim schools in the West to stop them teaching children anti-Western values. Her argument is that the only way to maintain a society broadly based on those values is to infringe them when it comes to Muslims.

So it’s a matter of pragmatics, not principle, and the pragmatics are based on whether you believe, as Hirsi Ali does, that Islam is such a threat to the West that it has to be kept at bay. She at least has an excuse, given her own experience of Islam. Wilders is a pure rabble-rouser.

None of which is to say that there isn’t a real dilemma here. Showing the film could set off social unrest and attacks on Europeans abroad. Does that justify banning it? Not showing the film could send a message of capitulation to extremism. Does that outweigh the risks of showing it? There isn’t a simple answer. You have take it case by case. In this case I would ban it, but I can’t say what I would do about Submission, for instance.

This takes me back to a conversation I had a few weeks ago with a European diplomat in Tel Aviv, just after the Danish cartoon scandal had re-erupted and set off a new wave of anti-European protests across the Middle East. His colleagues in Arab countries were pleading for their foreign ministry to give them some mollifying messages to transmit. The ministry didn’t seem to care.

The disconnect isn’t surprising. From where the diplomats are, it’s in the country’s best interest to maintain good relations with the rest of the world. For the politicians, the country’s own national values and the views of domestic voters are paramount. Which way you lean between defending Western values and soothing the friction with Islamic ones depends on where you’re standing. And these kinds of dilemmas are going to be more and more frequent in the years to come.