Pakistanis decry Dutch anti-Islam film

AMSTERDAM - Hundreds of angry Muslims marched yesterday in Pakistan and denounced a Dutch legislator's film that portrays Islam as a ticking time bomb aimed at the West. Dutch Muslims were more restrained, saying they had expected worse.

The 15-minute film - titled

Fitna,

or Strife in Arabic - was made by anti-immigrant lawmaker Geert Wilders and was posted Thursday on a Web site.

The host site, LiveLeak.com, removed the film last night, citing threats to its staff "of a very serious nature." But the film already had been widely dispersed across the Internet.

Employing elements and symbols calculated to offend Muslims, it draws on recycled footage of terrorist attacks and anti-Western, anti-Jewish rhetoric meant to alarm the native Dutch. The film begins with the Danish cartoon image of Muhammad with a fuse in his turban - an image that provoked violent protests in Islamic countries when it was published two years ago by European newspapers. The same image appears at the end of the film, although the fuse is lighted.

The Pakistani Foreign Ministry summoned the Dutch ambassador yesterday to deliver an official complaint against what it called a "defamatory film which deeply offended the sentiments of Muslims all over the world."

Small groups of demonstrators, mostly followers of hard-line religious groups, rallied in Pakistan's major cities, demanding that Pakistan cut diplomatic ties with the Netherlands.

Condemnations also came from the government of Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim nation, and Iran and Jordan.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon also condemned the movie. "There is no justification for hate speech or incitement to violence," he said in a statement. "The real fault line is not between Muslim and Western societies, as some would have us believe, but between small minorities of extremists, on different sides, with a vested interest in stirring hostility and conflict."