What was all the threatened violence about? Except for the multiple use of the infamous Muhammad cartoon—now with an animated fuse—and the off-screen sound of a torn page of what the filmmakers make explicit is not the Quran being torn, there is little newly controversial—or even wrong—here. In fact, the juxtaposed images and text, even when graphic, are tame when compared to the extremists’ own cutting-edge use of the same words and worse images to detail their barbarity and its excuse. In contrast to their highly emotive recruitment videos, Wilders’ film seems sophomoric, even boring, in comparison. His rather prosaic though reasonable point, made at the end of the film, is that it is up to moderate Muslims to excise the violent and intolerant from their midst. Hardly the product of a well-known agent of intolerance the Dutch government (and to a lesser extent our own) was preparing for.

For whatever reasons, Wilders clearly pulled his punches, and yet the whole of official Europe is bending over backwards to distance itself from this mildly provocative film. Foreign ministries (and our own State Department) are urging calm in Arab capitals across the region. And yet on the same day Fitna was released, a puppet show aimed at kids aired on Hamas TV in which a small boy kills President Bush with a knife and turns the White House into a mosque. As far as I can tell no outrage has been expressed to our Arab allies and they certainly have not publicly condemned the puppet show.

All of this serves to reinforce the essential thrust of my original post: all of the hand-wringing over the impact of a short, rather inconsequential film in Europe and the West cannot eclipse the need for “moderate” Arab governments to be compelled to do more to reverse decades of misusing Islam to prop up their own faltering regimes. That they will not does not mean that Western governments, including our own, shouldn’t call them on it.

J. Scott Carpenter is a member of MESH.

Throughout, the “moderate” Muslims in Europe have been either quiet or, more often, in denial, giving the impression that solidarity with fellow Muslims, criminal as they may be, trumps any serious self-examination, and that alleged victimhood is a more important topic than common security and active defense of a version of Islam which is compatible with the 21st century. As for the Europeans, their attempts to muzzle Wilders suggest that they have learned the wrong lessons from the Rushdie and Danish cartoons affairs—and that, perhaps, Wilders has a point.

Michael Radu is a Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia and Co-Chairman of FPRI’s Center on Terrorism, Counter-Terrorism, and Homeland Security.

First, I have always thought it interesting that while Islamic societies have historically been reasonably tolerant (because they have been irremediably heterogeneous from the get-go for the most part), mainstream Islamic theology (i.e., not Sufi, not Ahmadi) has not. As the “seal” of the Abrahamic faiths, it has been downright chauvinist. On the other hand, Christian societies have historically been more intolerant, but Christian theology arguably has been more disposed to toleration. One sees this in the “turn the other cheek” and “render under Caesar” tropes, but also in the more recent kind of structural theological humility characteristic of much of Protestantism, especially Anglo-American Protestantism.

If the Arab public sphere is becoming less tolerant, this suggests that what we are seeing, very broadly drawn, is a theologicalization of Islamic societies, defined as the process whereby the status of religion as a legitimate carrier of the public weal grows and the status of politics of a legitimate carrier of the public weal declines. (Just the opposite has been going on in Europe for about two or three centuries.) The reason for this, I think, is clear: The pressures of modernization, greatly increased over the past few decades, are accentuating the internal divisions within most Muslim societies between secularists and nativists/fundamentalists, with traditionalists and the neo-orthodox (Gellner’s definition meant here) squeezed in between, and the vocabulary of dispute becoming increasingly moralist, in this case Islamic.

Which leads to a second reflection. One understands Wilders’ motive to put a charge into his “I’m-OK, you’re OK” oblivious, supine European neighbors. But this kind of provocation plays right into these Islamic societal divisions, and does so in a negative way. It helps the nativist radicals to mobilize fence-sitters in their direction. In my view, the West is mainly a prop for the playing out of these internal divisions and the violence characteristic of them, not the main target. That goes for the Danish cartoons episode and for 9/11 itself. The problem for sentient Europeans is how to rouse the spirit of the Continent from its wildly asymmetrical tolerance for the intolerant without aiding precisely those Muslims who are most dangerous to it. I wish I knew the solution.

And third, finally, of course we all wish that authoritarian Arab regimes would stop feeding intolerance as a way to protect themselves from their own societies. They won’t stop, however, because religious and social tolerance bear far too much of a resemblance to the toleration of political dissent. Someone might get some “ideas.” Arab state elites will only relax and allow, if not promote, tolerance if and when their states become stronger, by which I do not mean more efficient mukhabarat states but precisely the reverse. I mean states that, as noted above, are socially authentic carriers of the values of the public weal, states whose legitimacy will then rise as the need to exercise random coercion will fall. Arab states will only achieve that blessed ideal when they can do two things: contain radical nativist violence without apologizing for it, and at the same time genuinely reflect social mores. That’s a delicate operation, and untutored Westerners viewing it are liable to misread what is going on. It is possible for Arab state elites to venerate Islam without giving in to radicals pretending to speak for tradition. The Jordanians seem to have the balance about right, for example.

Conclusion? If Fitna produces riots, it’ll be bad news if state authorities are complicit in fomenting them; it’ll be good news if state authorities bust some heads in the name of protecting genuine Islamic values. But open appeals to social toleration? We’ll not hear them. Scott, that’s the best we can hope for right now.

Adam Garfinkle is a member of MESH.

It’s true, as Carpenter writes, that there was nothing in Egypt’s 1923 constitution about Sharia, and that it only started to creep into the document during Sadat’s presidency. But it’s worth remembering that constitutions are a relatively recent development in the Muslim Middle East, while Islam is not. Egypt has been Muslim since the 7th century, and the country’s “liberal” era—roughly 1923-52—is but a sigh in Middle Eastern time.

Islam really is an authentic source of political legitimacy and the regimes are right to try to outflank the Islamists on this count because it almost always works, especially in tandem with a ruthless application of force. Sure, the Muslim Brotherhood only dates back to 1928, but Muslim rulers have been fighting off pretenders since the earliest days of the umma, and both the incumbent and the challenger (e.g., Sunni, Shia, among others) invariably ground their claims to legitimacy in Islam.

Many of us may wish it were otherwise, including the Bush administration, whose democratization program sought to import a form of political legitimacy derived not from Islam (or violence) but popular sovereignty. It seems that Carpenter locates the problems with Arab governance in the same place the White House did: with the regimes, for it is they, in this reading, who are responsible for radicalizing their own populations.

In fact, this is a fairly common conceit in U.S. policy circles, that even our Arab allies incite anti-American, and anti-Israeli, feeling through the media, mosques and educational system. And thus the thesis posits an Arabic-speaking Muslim citizenry that would be moderate—and naturally predisposed toward the United States and Israel—if only it weren’t for cynical Arab leaders who rile them up for their own political ends, largely to scare the United States into thinking that only the regime stands between Washington and chaos.

I also used to believe that the regimes were the issue, but three events changed my mind.

First there was the Iraq war. As Hazem Saghieh has been saying since 2003, the Arabs believed the problem with the region was the Americans, and the Americans believed the problem was the regimes. As the decapitation of Saddam Hussein’s regime and the subsequent bloodshed showed, the fundamental problem was not the Americans or the regime. It was the pathologies of Arab society.

Next was the July 2006 war between Hezbollah and Israel. I was in Damascus during the second week of fighting. Yes, there was martial music blaring on the radio all day long, but the regime had to push very few buttons to convince Syrians across the sectarian spectrum to fly the yellow Hezbollah flag from radio antennae and store fronts. What the Syrians really want is Arab reform, we are told by those who are trying gloss over the obvious fact that what the Syrians really love is Arab resistance. And no one is shoving it down their throats.

Finally there was this, a brief discussion I had with the head of a small Arab state with excellent and longstanding ties to the United States. We were talking about the pace of reform in the region. “It’s a process,” he said. “Every country’s got to set its own pace. You know you can’t say, alright everybody by such and such a date has to have free media—I wish we had a free media.”

That last comment caught me off guard. What did he mean that he “wished” his country could have a free press? Why, if the ruler wishes it, can’t he make it so? Because even in a relatively moderate Arab state, large sectors of the populace hold radical views—views that are not encouraged by the regime, but, as the ruler intimated, censored by it.

The regimes may be overselling their case a bit when they claim they are a bulwark against radical Islam—sometimes they merely ignore the issue or even deflect it—but they’re not the problem. Arab regimes are merely a part of the Arab societies from which they issue.

Lee Smith is a visiting fellow at the Hudson Institute.

The director, however, has every right to produce this film and to push the limits in Europe as to what being European means and what values undergird its societies. It is in Europe, not in the Islamic world, that I would be watching for meaningful political discussion and change. This will no doubt center on the place and role of Muslims in Europe.

Bernard Heykal is a member of MESH.