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Dutch politician’s diatribe about Islamic extremism is troubling, BRIDGET JOHNSON
SYNDICATED COLUMNIST

Geert Wilders won’t win an Academy Award for Best Documentary Short anytime soon.

The far-right Dutch politician with the trademark blond mane has delighted in being the shock-jock of Parliament, and spends his days in police protection for a litany of anti-Islam comments. But while Wilders’ short film “Fitna,” released online last week with equal parts fanfare and trepidation, makes some salient points about the impact of Islamic radicalism, the message falls flat because of, well, the messenger.

Wilders, after all, prefers no Islam instead of championing moderate Muslims in Europe. He compares the Quran to Hitler’s “Mein Kampf.” And his film bounces back to the same premise: The Netherlands has too many Muslims.

The terror that killed filmmaker Theo van Gogh in 2004, though, goes a lot deeper than demographic figures.

With a script credited to “Geert Wilders & Scarlet Pimpernel,” “Fitna” begins with the cartoon of Mohammed with the bomb in his turban that sparked deadly riots in 2006. The bomb is lit, sizzling across a blank page of a book that later stands in for the Quran.

Kurt Westergaard, who drew that cartoon for Danish publication Jyllands-Posten and was recently the target of a murder plot, said Wilders’ usage was “theft” and “an abuse of my cartoon.” Nowhere does “Fitna” touch on the real story behind that cartoon, either, which is one of the most troubling parts about the vicious reaction to the Jyllands-Posten spread: Westergaard drew the cartoon to show how terrorists misuse Islam.

“It was a cartoon aiming at fanatic Islamist terrorists — a small part of Islam,” Westergaard, in hiding himself and now suing Wilders, told Der Spiegel. “The cartoon must not be used against Muslim society as a whole.”

The film continues by showing images from the 9/11 attacks, then the gory 3/11 train bombings in Madrid and the London bus and train bombings, interspersed with Quran passages and quotes from firebrand clerics. It shows van Gogh, who created the short film “Submission” decrying the treatment of women in Islam, dismissing the notion that he’s a target.

The first two-thirds of the movie — save for Mohammed with the lit fuse — looks like a number of other documentaries made about militant Islam, and one wonders when Geert is going to, well, be himself. Then the film moves into a segment titled “The Netherlands Under the Spell of Islam.” Up go charts showing the spiking population of Muslims in the Netherlands over the years, superimposed over footage of women in the niqab or hijab pushing strollers.

With the title “The Netherlands in the future?!” the film shows images of gays being hanged in Iran, women being executed, female genital mutilation, etc.

We see a hand on a page of the Quran, then the screen goes black with a ripping sound and the words, “The sound you heard was a page being removed from the phonebook. For it is not up to me, but for Muslims themselves to tear out the hateful verses from the Quran. … Islam wants to rule, submit and seeks to destroy our Western civilization.”

You can guess what then happens to the Mohammed cartoon’s turban bomb.

No violence in response to “Fitna” would be justified. Free speech is a cornerstone of our democratic societies, and is also a basic human right. Wilders’ festival of copyright infringement pushes this principle for all it’s worth.

A headline Friday in the Daily Mail read, “Dutch MP Geert Wilders claims to be all about freedom of expression — but is he about to engulf Britain in a holy war?” But Britain has problems with Islamic extremism with or without a U.K. video-hosting service showing Wilders’ film.

The truth is, a true picture of the dangers of militant Islam can be gleaned without a drop of commentary from attention-hungry politicians. Start with the Hamas children’s shows that advocate martyrdom, such as “Tomorrow’s Pioneers” where big bunny Assud, the latest stuffed-animal terrorist, tells kids he’ll “eat” Jews.

Allow unfettered access and English translations to the militant Web sites on which so many nefarious intentions are openly discussed. Watch al-Qaida and the Taliban fight for a foothold in Pakistan, killing Westerners and fellow Muslims alike. Listen to van Gogh’s killer, Mohammed Bouyeri, say to van Gogh’s mother, “I can’t feel for you because I think you’re a nonbeliever.”

As it stands, getting the solution to these crises from Wilders is like asking Vladimir Zhirinovsky and Pat Buchanan to draft comprehensive immigration reform.

Bridget Johnson is a columnist at the Los Angeles Daily News. Write her at bridget.Johnson@dailynews.com.