Friday, March 28, 2008

Not Denmark

As the Internets will be full of people looking for the Geert Wilders film "Fitna", which is easy to find, here instead is the reaction of the Prime Minister of the Netherlands, Jan Peter Balkenende. With an eye to reaching the largest possible audience for his condemnation of the film, he speaks in English for a couple of minutes after the 2 minute mark.

The thinking appears to be that Denmark was too late in offering an official reaction to the cartoons, which seems to rely on finer distinctions between country and state than the loons might be willing to make. As the BBC religious correspondent Frances Harrison pointed out, other than showing images of the Danish cartoons, Wilders makes no new potentially "blasphemous" images in Fitna. So maybe this controversy won't have legs.

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