Submission - a film about Muslim women [Archive]

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eclectica

2004-10-01, 21:49

There is a ten-minute film called "Submission - part 1" that was made and shown on Dutch television August 29. Parts 2 and 3 are to be released later. The theme of it is about Muslim women and how they are abused and treated as secondary in the Muslim society. It tells a brief story of different women who are abused and how they feel abandoned by Allah, and the Muslim religion is used to justify the abuse. It was written by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somalian member of the Dutch parliament and ex-Muslim, and directed by Theo van Gogh.

Here are some articles about the film:
http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/edit/archives/2004/09/29/2003204858
http://www.dnd.nl/showarticle.php3?newsID=15018

This is one thing overlooked about Islam, how half of the Muslims are women and are treated poorly. If one wants to battle the oppressive versions of Islam in an attempt to make the World a better place, then the only way to succeed would be through a campaign that encourages the liberation of Muslim women and the reform of Islam. The military campaigns of the Zionists (Ariel Sharon) and Crusaders (George Bush) will all fail because they are not really liberators but are instead trying to promote an alternative form of oppression.

I downloaded the film using eMule and uploaded it to a website. You can download the 89.3 MB file here:
Submission (Part I) - Theo van Gogh & Ayaan Hirshi Ali.DivX.avi (http://www.p2pjihad.org/eclectica/Submission (Part I) - Theo van Gogh & Ayaan Hirshi Ali.DivX.avi) <--right-click on the link and select to "save link target as"
Here is its ED2K hash link:
ed2k://|file|Submission%20(Part%20I)%20-%20Theo%20van%20Gogh%20&%20Ayaan%20Hirshi%20Ali.DivX.avi|93646656|F82E5D52345AD434F50B6D5B6F1CD5E1|h=X5V4JNC5LUPPBNI4LD2F4O7DO7IW2VDE|/

nicobie

2004-10-02, 01:52

nicobie

2004-10-02, 01:54

U like bitckes to suck up lurkie....

foolish dillweed...

Maze

2004-10-02, 18:22

Hey man ...I say live and let live ...but geeze ...can't they find a better way to live? ...As long as they don't learn how to fly a passenger jetliner into tall buildings or worse (learn nucular weaponry) or biological weaponry (god that would be horrible). Each country must show how we can be best buddies right now ...and those that are so far psycologically gone and consider themselves terriorists killing small children ...will have to be dealt with.

nicobie

2004-10-03, 00:04

<.>

Soulgirl

2004-10-05, 15:14

I'm downloading this... I feel very passionately in respect of the poor treatment these women get - unyet the Men say they respect and adore their wives... I am looking forward to viewing this short film. Thanks :)

eclectica

2004-10-05, 23:50

It gives me mixed feelings when I see heavily veiled women. On one hand I feel angered to see them be of inferior status as I perceive it. On the other I feel they are getting what they deserve by willingly participating in their own enslavement. It's amazing when you think about the fact that half of a population is enslaved. Yet most people are slaves in some fashion or other within their societies. It's not unique just to the Muslim world. Either that or one faces the loneliness that comes with being an individual and defying one's peers.

I would like to see the Muslim women unionize and rise up and turn against all the men and show them who's boss. All they have to do is cross their legs and boycott sex if the men don't do what they say. That would be more powerful than the holy word of Allah.

Dollar_Girl

2004-10-06, 01:15

that was very well made. powerful in its simplicity.

it's interesting to show individual personal evidence of the contradictions of a god. most times people try to contradict the existance of god via more large scale points, or physical factors.

This story shows a personal and deep story, twisted with evidence that contradicts allah and his will. It is the type of evidence that is masked in the individual soul, contradictions and betrayals by a negligent god who claims to be fair and impose good will upon you if you give yourself to him.

The Indian chef at work says he never feels embarassed... and i asked him 'why?'. He replied that whatever happens to him in life, is gods will, and thus he has no reason to feel shame or embarassment, because it is never his doing.

I thought that was an easy way to avoid responsibility and avoid reality of facing life.

I feel deeply saddened to see women live their lives like that... she mentioned how she fantacises about the wind blowing through her hair... calling that a sin...

to me, the things she is banned from doing... the things she views as sins, are one of the most finest things in my life... sun on my skin, wind in my hair...

I think about the purpose of a god... i think it is like a regime handed out, to simplify life for people, resulting in a state of happiness and dedication.

If the women are unhappy under the will of allah, then surely the men must be miserable too? to come home and to beat your wife, to fuck her, isntead of love her, to command your children... to abuse and to hate? how can a man be happy with a family life like that? so if men are unhappy and women and unhappy, then what purpose does a god serve in that society? if a god brings no happiness and no control, no hope (like whem the woman believed allah was on her side when she was in love with the young man), then the only real reason is enslavement of a population, that is carried out through a system of fear.

you go to some of those black churches in america, and they are all singing and clapping with smiles on their faces.. happy clappy church... maybe their strand of belief in god, brings some joy? maybe?

you go to a mosque and you have a group of people kissing the ground in a form of submission to allah, worshipping in a monotone state of zombiness.

I don't mind anybody's god... but i don't believe the purpose of a god is to install fear, or to dictate and take away ones freedom. covering up from head to toe is extreme religion. not being allowed to use contraception is extreme religion. not being allowed to let your hair down is extreme religion. having to grow a beard is extreme religion.

excusing pain and death because of 'gods will' - which ever god - is extreme, and reasoning joys and happiness to a god is extreme.

Dollar_Girl

2004-10-06, 01:23

enslavement is a hard cycle to break out of, especially if your not fully convinced you are enslaved. At the end of the day the girl still prayed and left her life to allah, despite his betrayals to her.

lots of women want to leave their partners over there... there are many american etc women who marry muslim men, and make the mistake of going home with them to their country and they find themselves trapped... because if they have children, and they divorce, the men keep the kids. how many women would be willing to walk away from their children to save their own life? i know i wouldn't.

in the world there is so much cause to escape... everyone is escaping from something, from some disgusting cruelty... every decade a new plan is devised to capture and take away peoples freedom in an attempt to inflict and build some warped utopia or ideal system of living... wether economic based, politically based, religiously based... it all twists together in the end...

like communism had no face or religion... people were escaping...
wars.... everyday a war... people are trying to escape...
extreme religion... people are trying to escape...
cults and even crazy highschool 'popular groups'... people try to escape from it all, from massive systems and even small influentual social groups...

the more we try to escape and 'create our own' system, the more divided we come and the mroe we create to escape from.

there probably is no right way to live, where everyone would be happy and satisfied... a hippy might want to snooze by the river smoking dope, but then a corporate junkie might like to spend his afternoons with 3 hookers, snorting coke on gucci sheets or something?

our perspective of personal satisfaction changes more than the lines on our face throughout a life time.

eclectica

2004-10-06, 02:09

When divorce rates increase it is not always bad. I think sometimes it is good and sometimes it is bad. If it is because people used bad judgement or got married for the wrong reasons, then it is bad because they degrade marriage by making it a temporary dating contract. In the event that it is because people gave up too soon or got tired of their spouse then I would say that it is tragic that they get divorced.

But high divorce rates are also good news when it means a woman or a man can walk away now from an abusive relationship. If in the past only a man could end marriage, then the enactment of divorce for both parties would represent a liberation for the women. Some countries have a more strict set of laws based on Islamic Sharia (http://www.guardian.co.uk/theissues/article/0,6512,777972,00.html) law in which adultery is outlawed.

American foreign policy is confused because it is based on the idea of helping people who can help America. But they tend to support dictators or abusive societies, which may in the short run work but in the long run does not work in the interests of America. Instead what happens is more oppression is supported throughout the World. Look at how the United States supported Saudi Arabia and went to war with Iraq, when it should have been the opposite. All this talk I hear from lame leaders say "the world is better off without Saddam". Yet I hear no one applauding Qaddafi in Libya for attempting to assassinate "Crown Prince Abdullah" of Saudi Arabia. Qaddafi was the only one who got it right.

Soulgirl

2004-10-06, 02:10

The film emphasised, on a between the lines delivery, just how this particular woman was treated... it did not confirm this was the 'norm' for all women of the same predicament.

Her story was one that I could relate to as I also suffered the same consequences as a wife albeit as a white wife in white marriage. The only differential was that she kept quoting Allah! So what? Nothing there to suggest that every Allah bowing man was tarred with the same brush. I need more evidence.

Dollar_Girl

2004-10-06, 03:42

there is more evidence, for hers is not an isolated story. nobody said every allah loving man is a prick, but the tradition does run within the opressive extremist strand of the religion. even less extreme variations of islam are still very opressive.

quotting allah shows how her god betrayed her. god and domestic life is so merged together, that there is no way to seperate it. despite the betrayals, she still bowed down to pray at the end of the short film.

Criminal_Sniper

2004-10-06, 09:00

god is only a name given to something they could not explain
nirvana is another name but a name with meaning
it is the supreme being
now its taken as being which is supreme
now we are human beings so they figure it much be something or someone
then it is rationalised with intelligence so that we get the religions

im sure u have all heard about some people saying they are all paths to the same thing
or the same god
the being (simple to be) is supreme
is encompasses the superconciousness
it is the supreme state of emlightnement and joy compassionate unconditional love and sympathetic joy
mandane love turns to hate
they say biblegod is love but it is only a mandane love
which as we have seen turns to hate

i wish that all could join hands and strip down the religions so that they were interworking and no something to take position from and to kill for

why do people sin so much trying to back up their religions
they throw all morals out the window

now the corruption man is very well known for has not been limited to anything but religion or anything but ones own personal choice of religion
the only one that had stayed pure in its original form is buddhism and it is one of the only ones one that claims not to have any monopoly of truth
it is to be worked out
not taken with blind faith
and there are no detours or stories needed to make people believe it
(which many of in most religions have been disproved by the sciences)

the only thing holding the world in captivity is their own reluctance to let go of something they hold so dear
most people do not give anything else a go
they usually know only one thing or cannot acccept is from their subjective objective viewpoint

any agree with me here?
i don't mind if u dont its just ive read a lot and that is MY conclusion
we all have a long way to go
some just more or less than others

eclectica

2004-10-11, 06:23

The concept of a god as being male gender is one way that women are oppressed in religions. Women can fight this oppression within their religions by proclaiming their gods as genderless. It only makes sense to me that a god would be genderless in a system that believes in one sole god. For if god had a specific gender then that implies that such a god of the other gender also exists.

Besides, women with the power to create life in their wombs, are more godlike than men.

slx

2004-10-11, 06:49

you ever see a photo of allah....may be a she

eclectica

2004-11-02, 19:31

Interesting how your uploads on a p2p network will be affected by the latest news, as they are a gauge of the popularity of files and information in demand.

I noticed today that on eMule all my slots are taken up by the uploading of this movie, which is unusual. And there were about 200 people in queue waiting for it as well.

So I did a search in the news and it turns out that Theo van Gogh, the director of the film, has been murdered today in Amsterdam.
news story (http://news.scotsman.com/latest.cfm?id=3705691)

Dollar_Girl

2004-11-03, 11:08

man that is shocking.

I guess alot of people hadn't heard of the film before the news of his death was circulated.

In a way, its morbid advertising.

do u know if they will release the second part?

eclectica

2004-11-03, 11:48

do u know if they will release the second part?

I don't think it's been made yet, but it probably will be in the future.

slx

2004-11-03, 16:31

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - The man suspected of killing a Dutch filmmaker accused of insulting Islam was probably driven by extremist Islamist motives and was already known to the national security service, the government said Wednesday.http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=638&e=10&u=/nm/20041103/en_nm/dutch_killing_dc

assorted

2004-11-14, 10:49

From today's NY Times

Tolerant Dutch Wrestle With Tolerating Intolerance
By BRUCE BAWER

Published: November 14, 2004

MSTERDAM — Dropping into one of Amsterdam's trademark brown cafes, I found myself lulled for a moment by the illusion that things were as they always had been. Outside, the days were growing short and cold, but inside the warmly lighted cafe there was tub-thumping music, easy laughter, even a rousing chorus of "Lang Zal Je Leven" to mark a patron's birthday. In short, that feeling of communal coziness and camaraderie, known as gezelligheid, that the Dutch treasure.

But underneath the show of gezelligheid, Dutch life these days is far from cozy and communal. The vicious killing on Nov. 2 of Theo van Gogh, the director of a recent film that criticized the treatment of women under Islam, shocked a nation where only two years earlier the politician Pim Fortuyn was assassinated by a Dutchman reacting to Mr. Fortuyn's criticism of Islam.

Three days after Mr. van Gogh's murder, I traveled to Amsterdam to see for myself how things were going. It seemed a long time since 1999, when I lived in a largely Muslim neighborhood of Amsterdam only a block from the mosque attended by the man accused in Mr. van Gogh's murder. During my time there, I quickly came to see that the city (and, I later recognized, Western Europe generally) was a house divided against itself.

The division was stark: The Dutch had the world's most tolerant, open-minded society, with full sexual equality and same-sex marriage, as well as liberal policies on soft drugs and prostitution; but a large segment of the fast-growing Muslim population kept that society at arm's length, despising its freedoms.

Instead of addressing this issue, Dutch officials (like their counterparts across the continent) churned out rhetoric about multicultural diversity and mutual respect. By tolerating Muslim intolerance of Western society, was the Netherlands setting itself on a path toward cataclysmic social confrontation? When I tried to broach the topic, Dutch acquaintances made clear it was off limits.

This reticence still applied in February 2002, when Mr. Fortuyn argued that radical Islam was capable of destroying and depleting his country.

His comments got him expelled from his party. Though many in the country shared his views, those views remained anathema to the political and media establishment. No more.

After the murder of Mr. van Gogh, whose accused killer belonged to a radical Muslim network, Dutch newspapers were filled with long articles that sounded like Mr. Fortuyn. Jihad has reached the Netherlands, one commentator wrote. Another asked: Has the Netherlands become a country in which you can no longer say what you want, or does the taboo apply only to Islam? (This is a nation, after all, to which people fled centuries ago to speak and write freely.)

Not since 9/11 have I seen any country's news media outlets so preoccupied with a single topic. The Netherlands is undergoing a sea change. By the time I arrived, much had already happened. There had been several arrests; legislators had been placed under round-the-clock protection; government buildings in The Hague looked like an armed camp.

The deputy prime minister, Gerrit Zalm, who once called Mr. Fortuyn dangerous because of his blunt words about Islam, declared war on radical Islamism though some officials rushed to question the word "war," while others accused the government of being too resigned in its reaction.

Four days after Mr. van Gogh's murder, I found my way to the scene of the crime. I foolishly assumed I would have trouble locating the exact spot. In fact, an area of about 75 feet by 10 feet along one side of Lijnbaanstraat had been cordoned off.

The street was piled high with floral tributes, and about 50 people crowded around them, most apparently deep in thought. I circled the site slowly, reading notes that had been left there. "This far and no further," read one. Another read: "Long live the Netherlands; long live the free word!"

In my old, mostly Muslim neighborhood, a police officer told me flat out not to venture into such areas. The mood in all of the Netherlands is very tense right now, she explained. Earlier that day, she said, a journalist's car had been smashed, presumably by Muslims displeased with something he had written.

Later, I learned that the Rotterdam police had destroyed a street mural featuring the words, "Thou shalt not kill," a picture of an angel, and the date of Mr. van Gogh's murder because the leader of a nearby mosque reportedly considered it racist.

Wim Nottroth, a news cameraman who tried to protect it, was arrested, and a camerawoman who filmed its destruction was forced to erase part of her videotape, according to Dutch news reports. The incident, according to De Telegraaf, resulted from orders given to the police nationwide to be alert especially for any signs of disorder or provocation.

A furious Mr. Nottroth opined afterward that the shock to the Dutch system is so extreme that a lot of people have no idea how to deal with the situation.

I left my old neighborhood in a cab. Talking with the driver, I mentioned Theo van Gogh. Like many Dutchmen, he seemed reluctant at first to speak about such things to a foreigner. But then he said simply he was leaving the country. He said he was not alone.

On Wednesday, police officers and marines carried out a daylong siege on an apartment in an immigrant neighborhood in The Hague. During the week, there were attacks on mosques and Muslim schools. (The concern has long existed that if liberals didn't address the problem of Muslim intolerance responsibly, it would be answered with the intolerance of the far right.)

In the 1930's, Europe faced a struggle and, many thought, a need to choose between two competing totalitarianisms. Many analysts are wondering if this is Europe's future, as well. They also wonder whether the Dutch people's anger will blow over or whether they will act decisively to protect their democracy from the undemocratic enemy within.

At present, most appear to agree strongly with one commentator, Paul Scheffer, who wrote in the daily NRC Handelsblad last weekend: "We cannot hand over our country.... Words such as diversity, respect and dialogue fade against the dark context of this ritual assassination."

Bruce Bawer, who lives in Oslo, is the author of "Stealing Jesus," a book about Christian fundamentalism

assorted

2004-11-14, 10:52

This is an area where I think I might not be very politically correct. I've been thinking about this for a while and it's both interesting and horrifying to see the Dutch culture go through it.

I'm someone that pretty much supports the rights of anyone to do or say anything within a free society. I've always felt the Dutch society was a model for the rest of the world.

But what happens when people begin moving into your country that despise your permissiveness, but use that precise permissiveness to grow and become more powerful? A few years ago, I read that you would be considered a near fascist for suggesting the growing Muslim population there was a problem by most liberals. Even still now, many liberals in America want to preach multi-culturalism in the wake of events like this. Bullshit.

Obviously, I'm torn on this because I'm against laws that prohibit religious freedom. America, after all, was founded on religious freedom. But this is a culture war, and much more so then the term "culture war" that's thrown around by leftists and Christians in America. This is a real culture war. And I don't know about you, but I'm siding with the people a lot of liberals might call "fascists."

eclectica

2004-11-14, 15:11

A lot of people who think of themselves as Liberal really are not. Political correctness is the display of the hyocrisy of self-proclaimed Liberals. Hang a Nazi flag outside of your house and see how the "Liberals" react to it. You will see them break down like babies having tantrums. The problem with the self-proclaimed Liberals is that they are cowards.

The same thing is going on in the Netherlands. The burning of the mosques shows just how Liberal they really are. You see it doesn't take much for cowards to change their mind. It reminds me of how Senator Barbara Boxer, the so-called Liberal who normally was opposed to guns, became a supporter (http://www.gunowners.org/op0245.htm) of allowing pilots to carry guns on airplanes after 9/11.

I see what is happening in the Netherlands not as a showdown between Liberalism and intolerance, but in fact self-proclaimed Liberals who are cowards being put to the test and failing due to their own cowardice.

The point is, that in order to be a real Liberal, one must be courageous. There are many self-proclaimed Liberals in the World, but there are not so many real ones.

assorted

2004-11-14, 22:35

The point is, that in order to be a real Liberal, one must be courageous. There are many self-proclaimed Liberals in the World, but there are not so many real ones.

Allowing a group of people who completely hate you to shoot members of your society for speaking their mind... if you do nothing about it and spout off about multiculturalism and being a "true liberal." I mean... you just sound like a giant pussy.

eclectica

2004-11-14, 23:00

Allowing a group of people who completely hate you to shoot members of your society for speaking their mind... if you do nothing about it and spout off about multiculturalism and being a "true liberal." I mean... you just sound like a giant pussy.

Not a whole lot of people actually shot Theo. There was one guy who did the shooting, and some accomplices who plotted with him. But to extend the guilt to all Muslims, is cowardice.

nicobie

2004-11-14, 23:47

Allowing a group of people who completely hate you to shoot members of your society for speaking their mind... if you do nothing about it and spout off about multiculturalism and being a "true liberal." I mean... you just sound like a giant pussy.

So true....

quote from our fearless leader,

"But to extend the guilt to all Muslims, is cowardice."

Why? Can't they control themselves? I was for giving them the benefit of the doubt a couple years ago, Now it's time to shoot first and worry later. After all, that is what they do.

Remember, they started it by killing thousands in NY.

assorted

2004-11-18, 12:41

Village Voice Review of Submission

by Dennis Lim
---start quoted review---

The movie that led to the death of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh lasts 11 minutes and is unlikely to influence anyone's views on its subject—the treatment of women in traditional Islamic society. As fatwa triggers go, Submission: Part 1 (available at ifilm.com) is no Satanic Verses, and its laziness as both art and protest is precisely what gives this short its unsettling, unwitting power. It's depressing to think that this morsel of glib effrontery could pass as a serious critique of conservative Islam—and horrifying to realize that it provoked someone to murder.

Van Gogh, who was shot and mutilated on an Amsterdam street November 2, made occasional appearances on the festival circuit, where most knew him simply as the great-great-grand-nephew of Vincent van Gogh. (His only U.S. release remains 1994's quirky phone-sex drama 1-900.) At home, he was most famous for being a radical-libertarian loudmouth. A political columnist who got fired from almost every newspaper in the country, he delighted in blurring the line between free speech and hatemongering—he insisted on calling conservative Muslims "goatfuckers."

For what became his best-known work, van Gogh teamed with another polarizing figure, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a glamorous Somali-born refugee who was elected to the Dutch parliament last year. A self-proclaimed "ex-Muslim," Ali has had round-the-clock protection since denouncing the prophet Muhammad as a "pervert." Given its makers' pedigree, it's no surprise that Submission is hardly subtle: As a burka-clad woman begins to pray, a shock cut reveals that the fabric draping her body is see-through; Koranic verses are inked on her skin, Pillow Book–style. It's chilling to absorb these images with the knowledge that van Gogh's killer, a Dutch Moroccan man, devised his own grisly version of bodily calligraphy, impaling his victim's corpse with death threats.

Submission's narrator fleetingly assumes the roles of a woman punished for adultery, a woman forced into arranged marriage, a woman beaten by her husband, a woman raped by an uncle. Ali's writing is alternately abstract and florid, even lapsing into dear-diary swoon: "On a sunny day, while at the souk, my eyes were caught by those of Rahman." There's a taunting late-night-Cinemax flash to the filmmaking—kinetic camerawork, emphatic cutting, and on the soundtrack, muezzin crescendos and a lashing whip (matched with close-ups of bruises and scars).

Artists from Abbas Kiarostami to Shirin Neshat to Ousmane Sembene have confronted the misogyny of conservative Islam in ways that are at once more damning and less willfully profane. Van Gogh's film, which aired on Dutch TV in August, plainly hopes to inspire not argument but anger. Submission and its dire aftermath are symptomatic of a contradictory culture where the official myth of multiculturalism has finally collapsed under the weight of street-level racism and long-simmering hatreds on the part of both the white and non-white populations. As a cycle of retaliatory attacks on mosques and churches rages on in the Netherlands, American neocons, smugly gleeful at the so-called war on terror's decisive entrenchment on European soil, are clamoring to install van Gogh as a martyr. (Weirdly enough, his last completed work was a biopic of his fellow anti-immigration advocate, the assassinated libertarian leader Pim Fortuyn.) In death, van Gogh is a painful symbol for what he so stridently called for in life: the end of tolerance.

---end quoted review----

This is how the left is going to rewrite this. Van Gogh was obviously a provocateur, like um... you or me jackass. But instead of painting him that way, the left will now paint him as a racist. Why? Because instead of offending and attacking crazy, evil Christians he offended and attacked crazy, evil Muslims. This is a bullshit double standard.

assorted

2004-11-24, 18:58

salon article on van gogh. a lot better then the voice

The silencing of Theo van Gogh
The Dutch filmmaker believed that insulting people was his right as a free citizen. The Muslim fanatic who slaughtered him didn't agree.

- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Ronald Rovers

Nov. 24, 2004 | AMSTERDAM, Netherlands -- On the morning of Nov. 2 in a busy street in east Amsterdam, a 26-year-old Dutch Moroccan named Mohammed Bouyeri pulled out a gun and shot controversial filmmaker Theo van Gogh, who was riding a bike to his office. Van Gogh hit the ground and stumbled across the street to a nearby building. He didn't make it. As the Moroccan strode toward him, van Gogh shouted, "We can still talk about it! Don't do it! Don't do it." But the Moroccan didn't stop. He shot him again, slit van Gogh's throat and stuck a letter to his chest with a knife. He was slaughtered like an animal, witnesses said. "Cut like a tire," said one. Van Gogh, the Dutch master's great-grand-nephew, was 47 years old.

After shooting van Gogh, Bouyeri fled to a nearby park, where he was arrested after a gunfight with the police. One police officer was wounded and Bouyeri himself was shot in the leg and taken to a police hospital.

The letter pinned to van Gogh's chest contained accusations aimed not at him but at Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali refugee and liberal parliamentarian, who for years has been fighting for women's rights in the Netherlands' widespread Islamic community. Earlier this year, Hirsi Ali and van Gogh had made "Submission," a short fiction film that was shown on Dutch public television. In the film, a Muslim woman is forced into an arranged marriage, abused by her husband, raped by her uncle and then brutally punished for adultery. Her body, visible through transparent garments, shows painted verses from the Koran. The film, van Gogh said in a TV interview, was "intended to provoke discussion on the position of enslaved Muslim women. It's directed at the fanatics, the fundamentalists.”

Written in Dutch, the bloody letter called Hirsi Ali an "infidel fundamentalist" who "terrorizes Islam" and "marches with the soldiers of evil." With her "hostilities," she "unleashed a boomerang and it's just a matter of time before this boomerang will seal your destiny." In capital letters it said: "AYAAN HIRSI ALI, YOU WILL SMASH YOURSELF ON ISLAM!" The letter ended with a kind of chant: "I know for sure that you, O America, are going to meet with disaster. I know for sure that you, O Europe, are going to meet with disaster. I know for sure that you, O Holland, are going to meet with disaster."

Hirsi Ali fled into hiding the day of van Gogh's murder and the next day published a reaction in the Rotterdam daily, NRC Handelsblad. "I am sad because Holland has lost its innocence," she wrote. "Theo's naiveté wasn't that it [murder] couldn't happen here, but that it couldn't happen to him. He said: 'I am the village idiot, they won't hurt me.'"

But they did. As part of his fearless bravado, van Gogh underestimated the wrath of his enemies -- and perhaps the cultural storm at the core of Dutch society. The rage directed at van Gogh stems from the uneasy coexistence between the liberal Netherlands and Islamic fundamentalism. For decades, the country has had an open-door policy; it is now home to more than 1 million immigrants, mainly from Islamic countries. In the process of ensuring that Muslim immigrants are treated as equal citizens, the Dutch government has allowed mosques to flourish, some of which preach a radical brand of Islam that runs counter to the Netherlands' liberal values. It's this climate of "politically correct" tolerance that incited van Gogh and spurred him to strike back in his writings and films.

In fact, the big-bellied, chain-smoking director had just completed another bomb-throwing film, "06-05." It concerns the murder of right-wing politician Pim Fortuyn, a writer, professor and outspoken opinion leader who opposed the Dutch government's investment in a new fighter jet, the Joint Strike Fighter. Like van Gogh, who called Fortuyn "the divine bald one," Fortuyn detested the politically correct atmosphere that he said pervaded the country. In the spring of 2002, the flamboyant gay libertarian won Rotterdam local elections by an overwhelming majority, and it looked like he'd do the same in national parliament a few months later. But just before election day, Fortuyn was murdered.

On his Web site, the Healthy Smoker, van Gogh had predicted the assassination: "I suspect Fortuyn will be the first in a line of politically incorrect heretics to be eliminated," he wrote. "This is what our multicultural society has brought us: a climate of intimidation in which all sorts of goatfuckers can issue their threats freely." Fortuyn, however, was not shot by a Muslim extremist but by an animal-rights activist for "using Muslims as scapegoats," as the murderer, a quiet, earnest-looking man, later explained in court.

Notably, van Gogh was murdered exactly 911 days after Fortuyn. Anger toward him had certainly been rising to a boiling point all year. In May, he was slated to act as chairman of a public debate called "Happy Chaos" at the Amsterdam City Theatre. Dyab Abou Jahjah, the leader of a relatively small but provocative Belgian Islamic organization, refused to sit at the table with van Gogh. One of the organizers claimed Jahjah said, "We're not taking any more of that pig." When Jahjah left the stage, van Gogh took the microphone and said: "So this is what some Muslims think of democracy!" After Jahjah left, he said to the crowd: "Why would he be afraid to talk to me? After all, he's the prophet's pimp and he has bodyguards." The debate was canceled.

Needless to say, this didn't enhance van Gogh's standing with Dutch Muslims. Nor is the filmmaker's posthumous reputation likely to improve with the Dutch government and military when "06-05" is released next month. As van Gogh said when he was making the film, "I'll do my best to seriously insult quite a few people."

As a writer, van Gogh lived to insult people. There was "something pathological" about it, said Dutch author Leon de Winter. But it wasn't all pathology. Van Gogh also had a warm and compassionate side. I recently talked to him on the phone when he was on the set of one of his new projects. In his high-pitched and hurried speech, he was friendly enough to answer my questions despite being busy, yet he also managed to throw in a couple of obligatory insults about one of his colleagues. "His sole function as a member of these financing committees is to block my movies," he said. "All that mediocrity that sits on these boards."

Van Gogh made his first movie, "Lüger," in 1980, at the age of 23. In the previous year, the law school dropout tried to get in to the Amsterdam Film Academy but was turned down. He claims the approval committee told him to see a psychiatrist. No problem, he thought, I'll teach myself how to direct and raise money for films.

He collected $30,000 from friends and family and started filming. "Lüger," a thriller about a mentally disabled millionaire's daughter who's kidnapped by a greasy psychopath, was screened at the Dutch Film Festival in 1981 and caused an instant riot. The cause of all this commotion was two scenes, one in which the protagonist shoves a pistol into a woman's vagina and a second that shows two kittens spinning in a washing machine. The latter scene was faked, but editing techniques didn't stop van Gogh's opponents from criticizing him. Some of his colleagues called the film "adolescent shit" and one person spit in van Gogh's face at the festival. "Every penny spent on this film is a penny for the devil," wrote the country's largest newspaper. All the same, the festival jury gave the film a special mention.

Van Gogh had only just started. His next few films were book adaptations that were well received by critics but were hardly noticed by moviegoers. The exception was "06," about a sensual anonymous phone sex relationship spinning totally out of control after one lover discovers the identity of his partner, that was also shown in New York as "1-900." It attracted the largest audience for a Dutch film in 1994.

Van Gogh increasingly took control over his own films and refused to work with traditional Dutch film funds. He loathed the bureaucratic obstacles that slowed him down. The downside was that he had to somehow collect his own money, just as he did with "Lüger." To make "06," he took a second mortgage on his house.

But raising money wasn't always easy, a fact van Gogh owed to his habit of insulting people. In 1989, Dutch broadcasting network Veronica canceled the contract for the production of the satirical "Loos," about a washed-up lawyer who is forced to defend a shady nightclub owner after the latter has kidnapped the lawyer's sadomasochistic lover. Van Gogh offended one of the network's chiefs by calling him "a coke head who specialized in throwing secretaries over the balcony."

On the other hand, most actors loved van Gogh. His friend, author Thomas Ross, said that as a director, van Gogh couldn't care less about plot, he was only interested in acting and dialogue. Actors who were mediocre at best in other films peaked when directed by him. Although if actors didn't manage total devotion to a project, they earned van Gogh's wrath. "He was usually too drunk to learn his lines," van Gogh wrote when one of his former actors died. He also couldn't stand people exploiting their sorrow. About an actress van Gogh felt was exploiting the death of her son, he sarcastically remarked, "Now mummy can go on tour for years with his remembrance."

Some of van Gogh's colleagues insisted that the filmmaker's insults were a pose and that it was a "test of intelligence to be able to see through them," as the critic Hans Beerekamp put it. But it wasn't always that straightforward. Many people were offended when van Gogh made Holocaust-tinged jokes about Jewish writers and filmmakers: "Hey, it smells like caramel today -- well then, they must be burning the diabetic Jews," Leon de Winter, in the Wall Street Journal, recently quoted van Gogh as saying. Van Gogh's friend, writer Theodor Holman, had once called "every Christian a criminal" and van Gogh couldn't resist rushing to his friend's defense after Christians raised a public outcry. Van Gogh declared that Holman's enemies were only "the fan club of that rotting fish in Nazareth."

"Theo didn't understand much about people; he couldn't see things from their perspective," Holman said recently. "That made him blunt but curious at the same time."

But that doesn't explain it all. He also passionately believed in free speech and he took on everything and everyone that posed a threat to it. Two years ago, he told the Dutch newspaper Trouw: "I believe Islam threatens our freedoms. Let me state this clearly: I don't mean every Muslim is dangerous and it would be stupid to think so. But it would be even more stupid to deny that our freedoms must be protected."

Van Gogh didn't feel threatened personally, he said repeatedly. But he did feel the freedom to speak out was being curtailed. Earlier this year, a play in Amsterdam about the prophet Mohammed was considered "blasphemous" by a local Muslim politician. Van Gogh sardonically placed an ad in a local Amsterdam newspaper, saying, "Why shouldn't a play get prohibited? Vote for her!" This declining tolerance for criticism was what van Gogh perceived as a growing climate of intimidation. He toyed with people but was serious at the same time.

assorted

2004-11-24, 19:01

part 2

Van Gogh's former friend, actor Thom Hoffman, thinks differently: "His quarrels were meaningless. He just took the most radical stance. In the 1980s, he promoted cruise missiles when the whole country literally opposed them. In the 1990s, he took on men with beards," when the politically correct majority still denied any signs of religious or ethnic conflict in the peaceful kingdom of the Netherlands. Van Gogh ended his friendship with Hoffman in the 1980s after the latter appeared in movies that van Gogh hated. "He called me an S.S. officer with Vaseline up my ass," Hoffman said. "He sort of got stuck on Second World War idioms."

Offensive as he could be in person and as a writer -- numerous magazines and newspapers fired him after insults or fights over the contents of his writing -- as a filmmaker, van Gogh was a close reader of human behavior. His films show protagonists who passionately try to connect to each other but end up meeting somewhere in the middle. Van Gogh presented a sinister, failing romanticism, his characters always blinded by their own agendas.

Van Gogh made a total of 25 films and TV programs, and film critic Dana Linssen believed they were only getting better. In van Gogh's 1998 film, "De Pijnbank," Linssen wrote, van Gogh "showed me he was focusing more and more on the power struggle between people. Between men and women and on a more fundamental level between predator and prey, especially when these roles shift between people. He showed us victims can be as opportunist as the ones in power. Heroes become villains and the other way around." In van Gogh's last production, "06-05," Linssen saw his "different personae: the political commentator, the artiste provocateur on a mission and the humanist with a frank and unsettling view on human nature, all come together."

Ten hours after the news of van Gogh's murder, 20,000 people came together on Amsterdam's main square. They stood in shock, hoping this was not the beginning of chaos and the end of free speech. But incidents in the following weeks seemed to prove the opposite.

The Dutch finance minister, Gerrit Zalm, spoke of a "war on extremist Islam," although he renounced that a few days later after the prime minister responded that stirring up public opinion might not be the wisest thing to do right now. Zalm subsequently said he meant "the fight against extremism" and not "war." An Islamic school in the south of the country was damaged by a bomb attack, but no one was hurt. After that, two churches in another town were hit by fire bombs.

A message from the Islamic group Tawhid Brigades was then posted on a fundamentalist Web site, stating that the Dutch government and the general public would become targets of terrorist attacks if the assaults on Islamic institutions didn't stop. The group is little known and security services are having a hard time judging the actual threat. At the same time, though, the Moroccan consulate in Rotterdam was covered in feces. A few hours earlier, a party for the premiere of "Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason" was evacuated because the manager noticed some suspicious uninvited guests at the party.

Today, a somewhat uneasy calm has settled over the country. The day after van Gogh's brutal murder, the secret service arrested eight people, all suspected of being part of a radical Islamic network. Police and intelligence services have increased their efforts to find terrorist cells and uncover international networks financing terrorist activities. Moroccan groups organize gatherings and even bike rides to show that they are of good will and that the murder suspect was a loner or at best belonged to a small group of religious zealots.

Police have revealed that Bouyeri, van Gogh's killer, the son of Moroccan immigrants, was raised and educated in Amsterdam. A quiet man living in a poor residential area on the outskirts of town -- even his Moroccan neighbors didn't know him -- he did volunteer work for a local community service. He turned to the radical right in front of his friends and teachers, and in 2001 started going to a mosque run by a controversial Egyptian, who had praised suicide attackers as martyrs. The Wall Street Journal reported that Dick Glastra van Loon, the community center coordinator, recalled that Bouyeri, "who had never seemed particularly religious, banned alcohol and then tried to bar mixed-sex meetings" at the center. There has been speculation about the seed of Bouyeri's radical fundamentalism, including suggestions that the death of his mother triggered him to develop a fixation on a society based solely on Islamic Law.

In her letter to a Rotterdam newspaper after van Gogh's murder, politician and "Submission" screenwriter Hirsi Ali, who is rumored to be soon returning to public life, wrote: "Theo and I amply discussed the possible consequences of Submission. He said: 'The moment these considerations stop you from speaking out, that's the moment freedom of speech stops and that is exactly what the fundamentalists want us to do.'"

In a society that tries to offer equality and fundamental rights to all its citizens, van Gogh always called himself "a fundamentalist when it comes to free speech." On a public radio show in May, he said: "People always tells me I cross the line. But free debate is a war of ideas. It's a place where we should be able to hurt each other."

eclectica

2004-11-24, 20:45

It sounds like Theo liked to be controversial and stir up shit.

One incident can change the perception of a person. While the minority of people are victims of a crime, when one becomes a victim it seems like a big thing and suddenly crime is much more of a problem. A public crime such as what happened to Theo changes the way people feel about their security, when little did change from November 1st to November 3rd in that country.

Keep in mind that even amongst the violent Islamic jihadists there is dissent over what course to follow and who to snuff out. For example, in Iraq, Sunni Muslim Zarqawi was at first killing Shiite Muslims in an attempt to create chaos and sectarian fighting, until he was rebuffed by Osama, who is opposed to sectarian violence of Muslims fighting Muslims.

When a crime occurs people tend to politicize it or draw general conclusions such as: the neighborhood is unsafe, or the Muslims are violent. But a crime is committed by individuals rather than by groups, so one's sense of security ought not to be affected by particular incidents.

Hopefully people will continue to speak their minds about what they feel and not be intimidated by assassinations and fatwas that are issued.

Most importantly, people have to learn not to get offended to the point of violence or outrage if someone else disagrees with them. Although what happened to Theo has been framed as a Liberal versus Muslim conflict, the so-called Liberals have in the past been no different from the violent Muslims by being outraged at that which they disagree with in their political correctness. The killing of Theo was an act of political correctness and the silencing of those who one disagrees with.

assorted

2004-11-24, 23:03

Hopefully people will continue to speak their minds about what they feel and not be intimidated by assassinations and fatwas that are issued.

Man, we should start doing fatwahs on cops involved in very questionable nyc shootings.

Although what happened to Theo has been framed as a Liberal versus Muslim conflict, the so-called Liberals have in the past been no different from the violent Muslims by being outraged at that which they disagree with in their political correctness. The killing of Theo was an act of political correctness and the silencing of those who one disagrees with.

Agreed that liberals have a bad habit of trying to stifle free speech in the name of political correctness. Many liberals, unfortunately, think things like "hate speech" should be banned and are willing to throw out freedom of speech just as quickly as the sheepfuckers (thanks Theo!) or the Jesus freaks.

However, I don't remember any liberals finding some guy that used the word nigger in his fraternity and shooting him twice, then slitting his throat and stabbing a note to his chest saying "DEATH TO EVIL RACIST HATE SPEECH!". I mean, if I missed that please link me cuz that's funny as hell.

Trying to compare liberals who are against hate speech to Muslim fundamentalists that try to stifle speech through assasinations... no, I don't think that's a valid comparison.

assorted

2004-11-28, 20:14

My obsession continues. Here is a Newsweek article that has been banned in Pakastan. It is being called racist by the censors who are banning it. They say it proves anti-Muslim bias by the west. Please read this and see where you this racism. Once again, Muslim leaders are using charges of racism and stomping on free speech to try to stop people who write anything critical about them. Which, I guess, is better then killing and threatening to kill people who disagree with them - their other tactic.

Anyway, here's the Newsweek article. See if you can find the "racism" and "anti-Muslim Western bias" in this article. I had some trouble.

Clash of Civilizations
Europeans talk of ethnic tolerance. But events in the Netherlands show how dangerously they are dividedBy Stryker McGuire
Newsweek InternationalNov. 22 issue - What's wrong with this picture? The airspace over the city is declared off-limits to all unauthorized aircraft. Some 200 police, including rooftop snipers and antiterror forces in balaclavas and bulletproof armor, descend on a neighborhood near the main train station. At one house, three officers are wounded by a hurled grenade. After a 14-hour siege, assault teams arrest two suspects and charge them under antiterrorism laws. "We cannot let ourselves be blinded by people who seek to drag us into a spiral of violence," the prime minister tells a shaken nation.

So what's wrong? The city is The Hague, and the country is the Netherlands—famed for tidy bicycle lanes, a well-mannered citizenry and the court where Slobodan Milosevic is on trial for war crimes. "The International City of Peace," as The Hague styles itself, is a bastion of global law and order, literally—home to the Peace Palace, the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court. As for Holland, the land of Erasmus and Spinoza, it was once hard to imagine a more tolerant society, or one that, after its occupation by Nazi Germany and the annihilation of 130,000 Dutch Jews at Auschwitz and Sobibor, was more committed to consigning political violence to history.

Over the past two weeks, though, all established notions of Dutch life have been turned on their head. The tumult began on Nov. 2 with the gory killing of filmmaker Theo van Gogh, whose documentary "Submission" was an attack on Islamic treatment of Muslim women. His alleged assailant, a Muslim who considered van Gogh's film blasphemy, fired half a dozen bullets into his body, slit his throat and, with a knife, pinned to van Gogh's chest a note proclaiming jihad against Holland, Europe and the United States.

The police quickly arrested a suspect—a 26-year-old Dutch-Moroccan named Mohammed Bouyeri—and scooped up seven other young Muslims, charging them under antiterror laws. Within days an escalating spiral of violence engulfed the country. A Moroccan immigrant was killed in the town of Breda. Attacks on mosques and Muslim schools brought retaliatory attacks on Protestant churches. Meanwhile, antiterror police launched a series of raids, including the one in The Hague, which police said they traced to a separate plot to kill the woman who wrote the script for "Submission," Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

The drama is in some ways peculiarly Dutch, but it has sent shock waves through the rest of Europe. The violence is clear evidence that immigration, if badly managed, can be a destabilizing force even in the most seemingly settled of European societies. It underscores the fact that the clashes of civilization taking place at the global level—between Muslims and Christians, between religious fundamentalism and secularism—are also unfolding inside individual communities and countries on a smaller but still dangerous scale. And it shows that the war on terror is sometimes just down the street: police last week claimed to find a number of links between Bouyeri and international terror groups.

With 16 million inhabitants, including 1 million Muslims, the Netherlands is Europe's most densely populated country. Because much of the nation lies below sea level on land reclaimed from the sea (the polder) and protected by fragile dikes, Dutch society has long depended for its survival and well-being on the ability of its people to get along and live side by side in mutual respect. Holland's weakness is not immigration, per se; it is the special 21st-century mix of badly managed immigration, religious fundamentalism and international terror networks.

French political scientist Catherine de Wenden believes the Netherlands erred first and foremost by failing to integrate its immigrant population, which is predominantly Muslim from Turkey and Morocco. By funding religious schools that isolated many migrant children from mainstream Dutch life and by not doing enough to encourage immigrants to learn Dutch, even as job prospects were diminishing, the government created ghettoes of discontent, especially among those who came from outside Europe. University of Amsterdam anthropologist Thijl Sunier says immigrants to Holland—and even their second- and third-generation descendants—are treated like "foreign guests." They are "visiting an island," Sunier says, and, unlike immigrants in, say, Britain, most of them live outside the greater society.

Tensions over what to do about immigration have risen sharply in recent years. By the 2002 national elections, immigration had taken center stage—the heart of a Dutch identity crisis. Populist politician Pim Fortuyn called for Holland to rethink its policies. His simple slogan—"Holland is full"—resonated enough with ordinary Dutch that his party quickly became the most popular in the country. Then a radical environmentalist assassinated him. Ever since, unease over immigration has defined the nation.

Enter Van Gogh's accused killer. Bouyeri was a member of what's called the "one point five" generation: born in the Netherlands, but of Moroccan-born parents. A man like Bouyeri would never feel at home in Holland, supposes Mohamed Bibi of the Rotterdam immigrant-support organization PBR. Abandoning his studies, unable to find a job, craving identity, he would "seek calm in Islam," says Bibi. For all but an almost infinitesimal number of adherents, the religion would be a comfort and a guide, not a springboard to murder and terror. But Bibi believes Bouyeri's alienation from mainstream society may have been so profound as to render him choice fodder for recruiters who encouraged his radicalization.

The same may be true of other Muslim "lost boys" who have been linked to Bouyeri since his arrest. According to reports in the Netherlands, some of the other young suspects arrested have links to the terror group Takfir wal Hijra. The group's alleged leader, Mohammed Achraf, who has been held in a Swiss prison since August, telephoned Bouyeri in September at his home in Amsterdam, according to Dutch intelligence. Spanish police believe Achraf is linked to a plot to bomb a Madrid court building.

Watching events unfold in the Netherlands, the rest of the region knows it's looking into a mirror. The once admired Dutch "polder model" has grown increasingly ill suited to today's Europe, much less tomorrow's. Already the Netherlands has the second largest Muslim population in Europe in percentage terms (6 percent, compared with 7 percent in France). Britain, Denmark and Sweden all have just over 3 percent. Norway, Finland and Ireland have among the smallest Muslim populations in Western Europe, under 1 percent. But even in such countries, tensions often run high because of the speed at which the Muslim community has grown. In Ireland, for instance, the number of Muslims quadrupled (to 19,000) between 1991 and 2002, spawning headlines like this one in the Irish Daily Mirror last April: ALLAH BE RAISED. Declining native populations mean most of these countries will continue to suck in immigrants from North Africa and the Middle East. If Turkey's bid for membership in the European Union survives political opposition, that country's 68 million Muslims will in 15 to 20 years be part of the EU.

Accommodating Muslims who take their faith seriously will thus increasingly become the issue for Europe. Religion, especially religious fundamentalism of any stripe, does not fit easily into highly secularized, modern European society. Witness the French government's ban on Muslim headscarves (and any other "conspicuous" religious symbols) in state schools. Witness, too, Bavaria, which last week became the latest of four German states to ban Muslim schoolteachers from wearing headscarves. (Bavaria does not ban Christian or Jewish symbols.) Van Gogh's case, says Fuad Nahdi, the founding editor of Britain's QNews, "brings us back to Salman Rushdie and the question of what is the status of religion in a modern secular state."

In Holland, the short-term response to van Gogh's murder and its aftermath will be tougher immigration policies, coupled with measures to encourage integration and assimilation. Already the Dutch Parliament has voted to shut down Muslim radio stations and Web sites. But it's an open question whether such steps will contain the damage or spread it.

The problem for the Netherlands, and Europe, is that issues of religion and immigration have become explosively conflated with terrorism. Three days after the van Gogh killing, Dutch Deputy Prime Minister Gerrit Zalm said, "We are declaring war" to "make radical Islamic movements disappear from the Netherlands." The fanatical blow of an assassin against a filmmaker on a busy Amsterdam street thus, rightly or wrongly, becomes part of a chain stretching from the World Trade Center and Bali through the Madrid train bombings to Abu Ghraib and Fallujah. "Of course we have to take measures against violent and aggressive behavior," says Amsterdam city official Ahmed Aboutaleb. "But let's not let these measures get out of hand."

Dutch police, however, are no longer erring on the side of caution. Last week's 14-hour siege in The Hague yielded a personal phone book containing the name of Abdeladim Akouad, who is being held in Spain in connection with the 2003 Casablanca suicide bombings that killed 45 people. With police combing the country and dozens of suspects of all sorts being paraded into Dutch jails, the Netherlands is re-examining much more than its ethnic mix. "We must ask ourselves if we have not been naive over the past few years—ask ourselves if we have not for so long agreed to take in anybody [as immigrants]," said Dutch Justice Minister Rita Verdonk last week. "We Dutch are easy prey," says Jon Wolter Wabeke, a senior judge in Amsterdam. "We're vulnerable because we're a soft, tolerant society."

Now, suggests anthropologist Sunier, the Dutch are anxiously redefining the limits of tolerance. Early casualties are sure to be the country's immigrants, especially Muslims. As the ghosts of Erasmus and Spinoza look on, Holland's challenge will be not to bury the culture of tolerance entirely.

With Friso Endt in The Hague, Eric Pape in Amsterdam and Rotterdam and Emily Flynn and Marie Valla in London

eclectica

2004-11-29, 12:15

Once again, Muslim leaders are using charges of racism and stomping on free speech to try to stop people who write anything critical about them. Which, I guess, is better then killing and threatening to kill people who disagree with them - their other tactic.

Censorship is going on in lots of places. The puppet government of Iraq has banned Al Jazeera from operating there because they find their content to be anti-American. And from the article I read that the Dutch are now in the process of shutting down dissent as well:
"Already the Dutch Parliament has voted to shut down Muslim radio stations and Web sites."

Americans are fortunate to have a Constitutional amendment protecting their free speech rights, as it appears many of the government officials would like to disregard it because they consider it to be "quaint", like the Geneva Convention rules.

assorted

2004-11-30, 01:08

Censorship is going on in lots of places. The puppet government of Iraq has banned Al Jazeera from operating there because they find their content to be anti-American. And from the article I read that the Dutch are now in the process of shutting down dissent as well:
"Already the Dutch Parliament has voted to shut down Muslim radio stations and Web sites."

Americans are fortunate to have a Constitutional amendment protecting their free speech rights, as it appears many of the government officials would like to disregard it because they consider it to be "quaint", like the Geneva Convention rules.

It's interesting you bring up the Geneva Convention rules. If your enemy abandons it, do you feel it is ok for your side to abandon them? What if the enemy is getting an unfair advantage, even winning, partially due to abandoning Geneva Convention rules?

I mean, what's the point of rules if only the losing side follows them?

As for the Dutch, I agree it's not ok for them to try to shut down radio and television stations. But I'm not very shaken from my belief that when it comes to Muslims, whose religion is just as fucking evil as Christianity, liberals kinda sound like giant pussies when discussing them. But oh well.

eclectica

2004-11-30, 18:56

It's interesting you bring up the Geneva Convention rules. If your enemy abandons it, do you feel it is ok for your side to abandon them? What if the enemy is getting an unfair advantage, even winning, partially due to abandoning Geneva Convention rules?

Governments which create rules and laws are required to follow those same rules and laws themselves. Right now the people fighting the United States, labeled as insurgents, enemy combatants, and terrorists; are all individuals rather than governments. They don't follow the same rules as the governments, but that does not diminish the responsibility of a government to be law-abiding.

And in regards to what you refer to as unfair advantages, considering that the terrorists don't have such a wide aresenal of planes, tanks, and military power, then isn't it fair for them to use their own unfair advantages?
:confused:

eclectica

2005-02-01, 21:35

It stable countries freedoms are taken for granted. They think they don't have to risk death in order to vote or to create art. But that changed for the Dutch when Theo was murdered. Now a lot of them are scared and last weekend they canceled a planned screening of his film (news story) (http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,1402854,00.html).

When I see how many Iraqis voted despite the threats of violence it makes me realize that some people are more susceptible to being terrorized than other people. In the stable Western countries the people have grown complacent so that it only takes a little violence to terrorize a large group of people.

The problem is that people take their freedoms for granted. They believe that it is not necessary to fight for freedom. Yet one must always be prepared to fight for freedom or it will mean nothing.

The failure of Liberalism has occurred when it has shunned violence and embraced a totally passive outlook towards life. Liberals know how important the First Amendment is, but they find the Second Amendment to be quaint and they are uncomfortable with the implied violence behind it. The framers understood that having rights means nothing unless you are prepared to defend them, and having a well armed populace would provide a check against government tyranny.

By being totally passive and always seeking a peaceful solution to things, or trying to avoid offending someone due to cultural differences, Liberals allow themselves to be silenced and intimidated by censors who disagree with their views. Perhaps it could be said as a general principle, that any artist who allows fear to stop him from producing his work, didn't have much worthwhile to produce anyways. Or that anyone who isn't willing to fight for his freedom or take risks for his freedom, doesn't deserve it.

Theo is the ideal type of artist because he refused to live in fear or alter his work even though he had been threatened or might have offended someone. We need more artists like Theo. And we need more Liberals who are willing to fight for their Liberal beliefs rather than wilting under adversity.