JERUSALEM: A controversial Dutch film linking Islam to terrorism received a rare public airing in the Middle East on Wednesday when a right-wing Israeli MP showed clips of it at a press conference in Jerusalem.
The conflict that Israel and the Arabs are involved in during the last hundred years is not a local disease, but it s a kind of symptom of a global disease, right-wing MP Arieh Eldad told a small group of reporters.
The issue here is not a territorial conflict between us and the Palestinians, but Israel is only the front fortress of Western civilization in the Middle East.
He then played a short clip of the 17-minute-long film Fitna by right-wing Dutch MP Geert Wilders, which pairs graphic footage of major terror attacks with verses from the Quran and has sparked outrage in some Muslim countries.
UN chief Ban Ki-moon has called the film offensively anti-Islamic, and European foreign ministers supported the Netherlands in rejecting it.
Eldad plans to host a conference called Facing Jihad in Israel s Knesset in December with 20 to 30 European parliamentarians, including Wilders and Baroness Caroline Cox, an independent member of Britain s House of Lords.
He declined to mention the names of any other participants but said the gathering would not include members of extreme right-wing racist parties. Arab Israeli MP Ahmed Tibi slammed the showing of the film, calling it an illegal, immoral, and outrageous reflection of Jewish racism against Islam.
He added however that there would be no public demonstrations against the December conference because the leaders of Israel s mostly Muslim Arab minority of some 1.2 million people did not want to attract more attention to it.
Eldad insisted his intention was not to offend Muslims.
I don t want to offend the Muslims, I just want to expose the true nature of Islam and to educate Europeans and Israelis to understand what is the true nature of the battle we are involved in, Eldad said. If a patient denies his disease he is doomed. -AFP
