Feared, condemned sight-unseen and praised as a celebration of free speech, Fitna, a seventeen-minute film by Dutch politician Geert Wilders, appeared on the Internet in late March. Fitna is a bombastic, bloody montage linking terrorist violence to Koranic texts. It resembles the videos Iraqi insurgents use to fete and cultivate suicide bombers. This convergence of visual vocabularies is no accident. Like insurgent propaganda, Fitna aims to embolden the extremes to the detriment of the moderate middle. It seeks to affirm Samuel Huntington's pernicious vision of clashing civilizations by inviting violent responses from radicals, by forcing moderate Muslims into unpleasant choices between national loyalties and religious beliefs, and by reinforcing prejudicial views of Islam as unfit for civilized living.

At first it was hailed as a victory for civil liberties. But last week's announcement that warrantless domestic surveillance by the National Security Agency has come to an end means less than it first appears.