No "fun" in "fundamentalist", but plenty of "mental"

I watched the controversial film Fitna tonight on the Internet, and it was an interesting 16 minutes to be sure. Over-18s with strong stomach only, please.

The first section is a stunning montage of the worst excesses of Islamic fundamentalism. You've probably seem most of the pictures before, but having them all in one place in such a short space of time is overwhelming. Twin Towers, Madrid bomb, London bomb. Mad-eyed mullahs preaching death and damnation. A young girl, practically a baby, parroting the hateful description of Jews that her parents have drubbed into her.

It's an unbalanced hack-job on a whole religion, showing the lunatic fringe and all their works, and implying that that's pretty typical Muslim behaviour.

Then a middle section to the film is all tabloid headlines screaming about the Muslim Menace including an comical picture-postcard "Welcome to Holland" which had views of five different mosques dominating the skyline.

Again, well within the normal range of right-wing paranoia. I've seen worse in any given copy of the "Daily Telegraph".

But then in the last minute, just as I was thinking "What's all the fuss about?", he puts the boot in.

A brief image of an old-style round cartoon bomb with fuse and what you just hoped wasn't a picture of the prophet Mohammed on it (but probably was).

Then a picture of someone about to tear a page out of the Koran, then darkness and the sound of a page being torn. The caption claims that the sound was in fact that of a page out of a telephone directory being torn, but invited Muslims themselves to tear out the offensive passages from the Koran that gave the killers their motivation.

There is a case to be made against extreme Islamic terrorists, but this film wasn't it. And as the film went on he increasingly couldn't resist the temptation to tar hundreds of millions of people with the same brush and then finally to grievously insult them all.

In short, it became a Party Political Broadcast for the Fascist Party.

I'm somewhat reminded of the film "Doctor Strangelove" where the not-so-ex ex-Nazi scientist tries so hard to physically stop himself from doing the Nazi salute, but after some time he just can't resist.

UPDATE 28th March 2008 - As pointed out by Her Maggis in the comments, the people at LiveLeak have pulled the film from their servers after receiving entirely predictable threats. Google have a copy if you still care. Personally I wouldn't bother. The way I look at it, I, as a service to my readers, wasted 16 minutes of my life watching it so that you wouldn't have to.