Dutch Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende must be breathing a sigh of relief this week following the surprisingly muted response to the release of controversial Dutch far-right politician Geert Wilder’s anti-Muslim mini-movie, Fitna.

The film features snapshots of horror from New York and Madrid juxtaposed with verses from the Koran. During the film, a non-believer is beheaded and another is shot, and it concludes with the famously confrontational cartoons of the prophet Mohammed with a bomb under his turban. The 12 cartoons, published by the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten back in 2005, sparked riots from Nigeria to the Gaza Strip. Furious Muslims burned Dutch flags (and embassies) in retaliation to what they saw as a serious attack on their culture and religion. Given the violence provoked by these illustrations, the question begging to be answered is: why wasn’t the response to Wilder’s 17-minute feature more incendiary?

Fitna means “strife” or “ordeal” in Arabic, and has been worrying Dutch authorities for weeks. No local television, Internet or theatre outlets would screen it, and Wilder’s Internet server was even shut down to try to prevent him from posting it online. Despite these measures, the cartoon was picked up by a British video-sharing website specialising in current affairs and politics, www.liveleak.com. They defended the decision to post Fitna by claiming that “there was no legal reason to refuse Geert Wilders ... and it is not our place to censor people based on emotive response.” On Friday, a Dutch judge is expected to rule on a petition produced by the Netherlands Islamic Federation, which argues that the film violates Dutch hate speech laws.  Although riots were expected, and perhaps they still are, things have thus far remained relatively quiet.

"Everything that can be said about the film has already been said," commented Dick Houtzager, a lawyer with the Dutch NGO Art.1, who specializes in hate speech. "People aren't as angry or upset as they could have been." Meanwhile Yusuf Altuntas, deputy chairman of a Hague-based Muslim umbrella group, declared Fitna “unoriginal”. He said in a telephone interview to the Los Angeles Times: “We have seen many of these images before. There was no shock so we don't think there will be problems in Holland. I can't speak for in the Middle East.”

So has the world become desensitised to ‘hate speech’?  On the contrary, it appears that people are simply becoming more aware of how they can express their distaste of inflammatory productions such as Fitna. Hundreds of Dutch citizens have uploaded YouTube videos of themselves apologizing for the film. There is even a website called Sorry for the Film. Technology is being used to speak up, and speak loudly.

It is difficult for authorities to draw a line between free speech, which must be protected (or at least tolerated), and hate speech, which must be outlawed and sanctioned because of its harmful effects. And, thanks to the Internet, it is especially hard for those same authorities to police hate speech. There is an argument that the Internet might help mitigate the effects of hate speech. Perhaps it is actually modern technology that we have to thank for the failure of Wilder’s Fitna to draw a violent response.

Some commentators contend that the best response to hate speech is not criminalisation, but more speech. The Media Awareness Network maintains that the Internet provides the perfect forum for this. They rightly recall that in the Net’s early days, Holocaust deniers were frustrated by the nature of Usenet newsgroups that ensured false claims were rigorously debated and challenged. Hate-mongers eventually retreated into less interactive areas of cyberspace and are now much less prominent.

Perhaps the answer to the hate-speech riddle has been right here in front of our eyes the entire time. Instead of trying to babysit internet users through heavy policing of online content, maybe authorities should simply allow everybody to have their say, trusting that the vast majority of people have the good common sense to recognize when something is ridiculous or ill-informed. Fitna seems to have proven that those who tune in to view online movies, or who click through to read foreign press, are becoming (in the most part) sensible enough to take it all with a grain of salt. The world might be shrinking quickly, but it seems our minds are expanding just as fast.