Fitna – how to offend a religion

“The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.” – Richard Dawkins.

Well, I have yet to see any righteous religious apologetic in this country boycotting UK’s product. Or to see the book taken off the shelf of Malaysian bookstores. Or to see Malaysian students boycotting the Oxford University. And perhaps we should. That must have been the most evil accusation of the century against a religion. Why didn’t we see UK flag burning or protest on the street? I’m sure there must be somebody on this earth being offended by that statement in his book? May be we don’t read that much. But then he repeated again in his BBC documentary “the root of all evil” on tv. And of course we don’t get to see that in Malaysia. Our minds are too fragile for such controversial issues.

So what’s with the Fitna film and the cartoon? How is that compare to Richard Dawkin’s statement? A columnist in NST used “bigot and zealot” to describe Geert Wilders. And added that his film is all “lies and half-truths”. Whose truth are we talking about? I definitely have no right to validate this. For one thing, I’m not a muslim. How am I to know what is true and not true in the film. I would hope that somebody can give me a good answer. Rather than spending time burning flags and boycotting Dutch products, Muslim should spend more time explaining to non-muslims what is wrong with the film. And then again, does it really matter what non-muslim really think? I don’t have an answer. There are no one truth that can speak for all, just like how we know that we are not supposed to stereotype Muslim nor the people of Netherlands as a whole. Today, I read that Indonesian internet service providers are blocking youtube for this issue. It is a sad news indeed. We’re really going back to the stone age.