HEY, GEERT, THIS TOOK YOU SEVEN MONTHS?

Right-wingers are thrilled to report that bleached-blond Dutch provocateur Geert Wilders's Muslim-bashing film "Fitna" is now online. I won't waste bandwidth by embedding it, but you can watch the English-language version here, at LiveLeak -- if you want to waste sixteen minutes of your life.

"Fitna" begins with the words "Warning: This film contains shocking images." The hell it does -- it contains exactly the images (9/11, beheadings, charred corpses) you would have expected a right-winger to cherry-pick in order to make the case that Islam is intrinsically evil, interspersed with exactly the Quran quotes and Islamicists' bloviations you'd have expected as an accompaniment. If you're shocked by "Fitna," it's because you've never gone online to watch a right-wing Muslim-bashing video before.

According to a timeline on the film's Web site (which isn't loading right now, but the cached version is here), Wilders revealed that he was going to make this movie last August. It's March now, and if you can figure out why this took seven months, please explain it to me. "Fitna" the kind of video that wingnuts have been banging out over long weekends on a regular basis since before YouTube was launched -- hell, I was watching crude Flash-animation versions of the first minutes of "Fitna" years ago, except they were scored to Enya or Darryl Worley rather than Tchaikovsky and Grieg (whom Wilders picked, I assume, because the cliche high-class "elegiac" warhorse usually used for such purposes, Barber's "Adagio for Strings," is probably still under copyright in the EU).

Take the above-linked 9/11 montage videos, add a few bellicose Quran quotes from this home-brewed video, toss in some angry-jihadist shots like the ones in this one, upgrade the production values somewhat, and, voila, you've got "Fitna." Or just strip the headbanger music from this one.

Even Oceania's Two Minutes' Hates in 1984 were more imaginative:

...The voice of Goldstein had become an actual sheep's bleat, and for an instant the face changed into that of a sheep. Then the sheep-face melted into the figure of a Eurasian soldier who seemed to be advancing, huge and terrible, his sub-machine gun roaring, and seeming to spring out of the surface of the screen. But in the same moment, drawing a deep sigh of relief from everybody, the hostile figure melted into the face of Big Brother....

I would have appreciated something trippy like that, but "Fitna" is just: Quran quote, carnage, carnage, Islamicist's bombast, carnage, carnage, Islamicist's bombast, Quran quote, carnage. Repeat ad nauseam.

Yes, I'm sure you could do a film like this out of the Bible -- I'd start here (especially here) or here for some juicy quotes. In fact, one atheist actually did a Bible video last year that's a bit like "Fitna" -- and he even scored it to Tchaikovsky (albeit a different piece). But I would very much like to see a dead-on Bible-based parody.

Oh, and I'm amused to learn that in all those months Wilder couldn't even manage to get all his propaganda points straight -- the guy who shows up as Theo van Gogh's murderer is actually someone else entirely -- a Dutch-Moroccan rapper. Oops.

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*UPDATE: Well, LiveLeak has pulled the video (a statement from LiveLeak has replaced the clip at the link). I lived through the era of Madonna's cross-burning Pepsi ad and "Erotica" and "Justify My Love" videos, and I'm sure Wilders, like Madonna back then, is quite pleased to be banned.

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UPDATE: Kids? Just Google it. It's there if you really need to see it.

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UPDATE: It's back at the original link. Go -- bore yourself silly.