The controversial anti-Islam short film Fitna, by Dutch politician and cineaste Geert Wilders, was finally released last night to wide abhorrence and applause on the Internet. After having his own site shut down and finding no other takers, Wilders posted it on his political party’s Web site.

Roughly 16 minutes in length, the film (available here, though not for the faint of heart), set to Tchaikovsky’s somber “Arab Dance” from The Nutcracker, quotes suras from an open Koran. Its pages flip, moving from past Muslim terrorist acts to a hypothetical dystopian future ruled by those behind such attacks. It episodically highlights news clips, Muslim-man-on-the-street interviews, montages of mangled bodies, honor killings, terrorist beheadings, vitriolic speeches made by imams and shots of planes careering into the World Trade Center and of the London Tube bombings.

But with its low-grade picture quality and its video clips and news headlines cherry-picked for their anti-West treachery, Fitna (which in Arabic is sometimes translated as “disagreement” or “strife”) is likely to strike many Americans as anti-Islam agitprop from an amateurish right-wing Michael Moore. Indeed, Wilders’ critics fume that he’s little more than a Muslim hater, paradoxically calling for the banning of the Koran while holding out his right to liken it to Mein Kampf.

Early reports speculated that the film might even feature a burning Koran, just for the shock value. It didn’t. It opens with a shot of the now-famous Jyllands-Posten cartoon where Muhammad’s turban is a fused bomb, but the closest Wilders comes to a desecration of his own is the final scene: A disembodied hand grabs a page of the Koran, and the camera fades to black. Paper is heard ripping. Subtitles explain: “The sound you just heard was a page being removed from the phonebook. For it is not up to me, but to Muslims themselves, to tear out the hateful verses from the Quran.” (Americans still wince at the revenge bloodshed following Newsweek’s ultimately retracted story about a Koran that was flushed down the toilet at Guantánamo Bay.)

The film’s purpose, Wilders has said, is to be a siren call to the Netherlands, where the film notes the number of Muslims has risen from 1,399 in 1960 to almost 1 million. It ends with the message: “Stop Islamisation.” Since an Islamist brutally murdered filmmaker Theo van Gogh in 2004, Muslim violence has become a major issue for the Dutch.

Wilders has drummed up months-long publicity and amassed no shortage of defenders. Republican Rep. Peter Hoekstra, who was born in the Netherlands, defended Wilders’ right to free speech—no matter how offensive—in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal, arguing the West can’t “appease the radical jihadist movement . . . by granting them special protection from criticism.”

Because of death threats, though, Wilders lives under armed guard. In the lead-up to the film’s release last week, Network Solutions, which hosted the domain for Fitna’s original site, fitnathemovie.com, shut the site down to review a potential “violation of the Network Solutions Acceptable Use Policy.” Yet it turns out that, up until Wednesday, the company had no qualms about hosting sites for terrorist groups Hezbollah and Hamas.

The Netherlands Islamic Federation, meanwhile, says it plans to petition a district court in The Hague today to ban Fitna for blasphemy. “No preventative ban on any product whatsoever has ever been imposed in the Netherlands,” reports the Dutch new service NIS News.