Muslim Nations Condemn Dutch Koran Film

Iran, Pakistan and Indonesia on Friday condemned a film by a Dutch lawmaker that accuses the Koran of inciting violence, as Dutch Muslim leaders urged restraint.

Islam critic Geert Wilders launched his short video on the Internet on Thursday evening. Titled "Fitna," an Arabic term sometimes translated as "strife," it intersperses images of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States and Islamist bombings with quotations from the Koran, Islam's holy book. [...]

Iran called the film heinous, blasphemous and anti-Islamic and called on European governments to block any further showing. Pakistan's Foreign Office summoned the Dutch ambassador to lodge a protest.

Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim nation and a former Dutch colony, also condemned the film.

Dozens staged an angry protest in Pakistan on Friday in response to a Dutch lawmaker's anti-Quran film, but Dutch Muslims appealed for calm and said it was less inflammatory than they had feared.

The 15-minute film by Geert Wilders, posted on a Web site late Thursday, sets verses of the Quran against a montage of images from terrorist attacks and rhetoric from Muslim clergymen urging "jihad," or holy war. Shortly afterward Dutch television channels rebroadcast segments of it.

The leader of a group representing members of the Netherlands' large Moroccan immigrant community said the film was "less bad" than expected, and another prominent Muslim dismissed it as an attempt by Wilders to gain votes by trying to make people fearful of Islam.

The film recycled film clips from terrorist attacks in the U.S., Spain and the Netherlands, and began and ended with one of the cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad published by European newspapers that provoked violent protests in Islamic countries two years ago.

The Danish Union of Journalists said it will sue Wilders for copyright infringement for using the cartoon. It said the cartoonist, Kurt Westergaard, did not give Wilders permission to use the image in his film, which it called "political propaganda."

In Pakistan, dozens staged an angry protest outside a mosque in the port city of Karachi, organized by the largest Muslim party, Jamaat-e-Islami. Some demonstrators demanded Pakistan sever diplomatic ties with the Netherlands.