Fear in Holland

From the LEDE: After Danish Cartoons, Dutch Film Sparks More Worries:

.....The aftermath has flowed predictably enough since Feb. 13, when Danish newspapers reprinted cartoons that sparked fury among Muslims around the world in 2006: There was more fury.
.....Street protests started in the streets of Copenhagen and spread to Sudan, Pakistan, Turkey and other parts of the Islamic world. Now, after more than a month, comes what might be the direst reaction in Osama bin Laden’s latest message.
.....“Publishing these insulting drawings,” he said, “is the greatest misfortune and the most dangerous.”
.....An analyst interviewed by The Associated Press interpreted the message as a “clear threat against E.U. member countries and an indicator of a possible upcoming significant attack.”
.....In The New York Times today, Michael Kimmelman writes that “many Europeans seem fed up,” including some of the cartoonists. One has been moving from safe house to safe house to elude any assassins, while another is struggling to find meaning in the second printing….
.....Meanwhile, a politician two countries away is planning to release a movie that has “triggered a panic in the Netherlands that could only be likened to the dread leading up to a massive storm,” according to Der Spiegel, a German magazine.
.....Geert Wilders’s 15-minute film reportedly juxtaposes excerpts from the Koran with beheadings and stonings on a split screen, a warning of “the threat of the growing Islamization of Western society,” he said in an interview with a Danish TV station, Reuters reported.
.....Even before the film’s release, Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende of the Netherlands insisted that his country did not share the views of Mr. Wilders, who is the subject of death threats — threats made all the more unsettling by the 2004 murder of another Dutch filmmaker, Theo van Gogh, who was killed for being “an enemy of Islam,” the killer said.
.....“I strongly condemn Geert Wilders’s condescending statements about Muslims,” Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen of Denmark said on Wednesday, according to Reuters. “I find these expressions extremely offensive.”….