Jeff Jacoby on Fitna

Jacoby writes for the Boston Globe and he's terrific...

The violence "Fitna" portrays is horribly real, and the fanatics who commit it are explicit in saying they do so as Muslims.

Where is the Islamic world's outrage against that? When has Iran's foreign ministry ever excoriated the beheading of a hostage, or the poisonous sermon of a jihadist imam, as "heinous, blasphemous, and anti-Islamic?" How often has the Organization of the Islamic Conference thundered its disapproval of "honor killings" or Islamist anti-semitism? When Theo van Gogh was murdered in public, when the Taliban turned Afghanistan into a repressive terror state, when fatwas were issued for the murder of Danish cartoonists - where was the chorus of Muslim anguish then?

Nor is "Fitna," whatever its flaws, as dangerously misguided as the eagerness with which Western governments rushed to denounce it. Panicked at the prospect of Islamist violence, desperate to appease extremists who respond to "insults" with mobs and mayhem, they ostentatiously deplored Wilders's exercise of free speech instead of defending it. They would never have reacted that way to a film that criticized Christianity or the United States or European tradition - and the Islamists know it.

Cringing before bullies is not the way to defend Western civilization. There is room for "Fitna" in the marketplace of ideas. Heaven help us if we are too timorous to say so.