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"Fitna" filmmaker Wilders to speak in Jerusalem
By STEVE WEIZMAN (Associated Press Writer)
Associated Press

JERUSALEM - Dutch legislator and filmmaker Geert Wilders will screen a film that has outraged Muslims around the world at an upcoming Jerusalem conference of European legislators seeking to combat radical Islam, an Israeli lawmaker said Wednesday.

Wilders' film "Fitna," which appeared on the Internet on March 27, linked attacks by Islamic militants to texts from the Quran, Islam's holy book. It sparked angry street protests in Muslim countries.

Arieh Eldad of the ultranationalist National Union Party, told a news conference that lawmakers from the Netherlands and Denmark would attend the two-day December gathering, along with colleagues from Britain, Belgium, Italy and Switzerland.

Eldad said "Fitna" would be screened and the visiting politicians, acting as a "defensive coalition" in the European Parliament, would discuss common action to counter militant Islam and its culture of Jihad, or holy war.

Other participants will include Baroness Caroline Cox of Queensbury, an independent member of the House of Lords, the British parliament's unelected second chamber, he said.

Eldad said Israel's conflict with the Palestinians was part of a broader clash of cultures, rather than a territorial dispute.

Eldad showed journalists a brief clip from "Fitna" which juxtaposes quotations from the Quran with images from the 2004 bombing attacks that killed 191 people on four trains in Madrid and the 2005 London blasts which killed 52 commuters.

Islamic militants claimed responsibility for the Madrid bombings, and the four London suicide bombers were all British Muslims.

"Not all Muslims are terrorists, but most terrorists are Muslims,' Eldad said. "I don't want to offend Muslims, I just want to expose the true nature of Islam."

Israeli parliamentarian Ahmed Tibi, a Muslim Arab, said Eldad's initiative and his comments were incendiary and "Islamophobic," but Muslims should not allow themselves to be goaded into violent protest.

"We should not cooperate with this provocation, that's to say we will not demonstrate, we will not destroy, we will not burn. Our protest should be only vocal," he told Associated Press Television News.

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