Nobody Wanted to Host It

Geert Wilders’ Fitna is fifteen minutes of Quran verses cut against footage of suicide bombings, beheadings, and radical preachers calling for murder. LiveLeak pulled it after receiving threats, then put it back up. Wikipedia’s article handled it like unexploded ordnance. The film itself doesn’t argue—it accumulates: this verse, then this footage, then this verse again. Wilders isn’t interested in nuance. He wants you to feel dread, and the footage he has available makes dread easy.

There’s a problem with the obvious counter-argument, though. Saying "this is a far-right provocation" doesn’t make the beheadings disappear. The preachers calling for the deaths of Jews and gay people were filmed somewhere, by someone. The news has been full of this for years and we’ve collectively learned to look at it sideways—to process it as tragedy-at-a-distance rather than active threat. That’s not necessarily wrong. But flinching from a document that compiles it isn’t the same as engaging with it.

Where Wilders loses me is the leap from "some people who invoke this text want to kill us" to "the text itself makes all of them want to kill us." That’s a move I’d reject in any other context. And the politicians predicting bloodshed over the film’s release were half-right: the violence directed at Wilders and at the platforms hosting the film was real enough to briefly take it offline. Nobody seems to want to sit with what that confirms.