The FITNA video: Why Wilder is RIGHT and ALL Muslims are WRONG

Mr Wilder's DEFAMATORY (Fitna, that's the correct meaning of the word, borrowed from the Arabic into Malay) video, above, is a collection of still pictures and movies which can be found publicly available elsewhere, combined with real, actual, factually correct snippets of text from the Quran.

Like all truly polemical works, the worst possible selections from Muslim scripture have been made and taken out of context to "prove" Mr Wilder's point: that Islam is a religion to be viewed with great suspicion if not fear and outright hostility as its core values are the opposite of any modern Western-style (not necessarily just Western) liberal (and often not-so-liberal) democracy. In fact, it could be argued that the video is not defamatory at all, as it is a fair opinion to arrive at, based on facts which have been disclosed together with the allegedly defamatory opinion. "Fair comment on matter of public importance" and its variations are of course valid defences to allegations of defamation. But I am going off on a real tangent here; there is of course no real "defamation" as the term is understood in law, since no particular individual person still alive has been targeted, just Muslims as a community, and we all know that defamation of an entire community is not legally actionable in "defamation" as such, as opposed to defamation against known individuals. The proper course of action could be sedition, or violation of other specific statutory prohibitions on hate speech, but not defamation as such.

Back to Mr Wilder: My worry here is that the video has been met with calls like that of Mahathir, who haven't even bothered to reply to Mr Wilder point for point and more importantly, have not really stepped forward to denounce the abuses showcased in Mr Wilder's video. As Douglas Farah has pointed out, those abuses pictured really happened - nothing was doctored - and the Quranic verses, they DO exist, Mr Wilder didn't actually lie, he simply took those aspects of the truth that best fitted in with his views of Islam. Mahathir hasn't even bothered to step right out and take concrete action to call for the active, actual, legal and physical suppression of those who perpetrate the abuses shown in the video in the name of Islam, he's simply called for a boycott as if Mr Wilders has fabricated a complete lie, which of course he has not.

The furthest Mahathir has gone is to say that “They will continue to do this until we show to them Islam is a good religion, that we are not violent people, that we don’t tell lies to people...but this must be shown in practice by the Muslim community,” - but of course, talk is cheap. He's been moving for the Prime Minister to resign, will he put the same kind of energy towards punishing people such as the "Muslims" pictured in Wilder's video?