War In Iraq
Apparently, an X-rated parody website that features zaftig Mossad agents stripping off their kit in a classic honey trap is getting hit on by Israel's more sexually repressed neighbors in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Syria and the like. (This startlingly blue news comes to us courtesy of the Hornet, who flits in and out of Jerusalem.)
The Israeli webmaster for Ratuv.com--the name is Hebrew for "wet"--says the next step will be

to make movies with Israelis and Arabs performing together, in order to foster more intimate relations between the two peoples.

Yeah right. Just one more way to get screwed, I can hear both sides muttering already. The site features plenty of skin shots and is not particularly subtle. Six-pointed porn stars are not truly essential for peace in the Middle East. But nothing else seems to be working at the moment. (See one of the comparatively restrained photos from the site, above.)
Well, the renegade author Salman Rushdie takes a rather longer view of all this. He contemplated porn and Middle Eastern society in an essay called "The East is Blue"
"Pornography exists everywhere, of course, but when it comes into societies in which it's difficult for young men and women to get together and do what young men and women often like doing, it satisfies a more general need; and, while doing so, it sometimes becomes a kind of standard-bearer for freedom, even for civilization," Rushdie wrote.

Because the enterprising webmaster, Nir Shahar, has posted an all-Arabic version, he has significantly increased the size ..of his web-traffic. Even though they cannot download porn flicks because of restrictions, some 100,000 Arab-speakers have clicked in on the pictures. He told the Hollywood trade paper Variety

The most popular movie on the site is "Code Name: Deep Investigation," an X-rated parody of the arrest of dissident Israeli nuclear scientist Mordechai Vanunu, who spilled the beans on Israel's secret nuclear weapons program in the 1980s. He was eventually caught by Mossad agents, who sent a beautiful female agent to trap him.

"Arab people usually see female Israeli soldiers in a bad situation, so there's a lot of curiosity to see what Israeli girls look like without any uniforms," says Shahar. "We don’t make regular porn films. Our films parody the situation in Israel, so we look at issues like the elections here and Mossad. There is a lot of relevance to the Arab-Israeli situation."

Given that Israeli law precludes Shahar from accepting credit card payment from some Arab countries, he plans to set up a site registered in either Europe or the U.S.

Posted by Izzy Bee at Monday, September 03, 2007

Labels: 'Code Name:Deep Investigation', Arabs and cyberporn, Kosher pornography, Mossad

http://israelitybites.blogspot.com/2007/09/100000-arab-hits-daily-on-x-rated.html

Mideast peace through porn

An Israeli website aims to reach Arab hearts and minds by targeting a different part of the anatomy.
September 1, 2007

The Vietnam War-era slogan "Make love, not war" has been taken to its logical extreme by an Israeli pornographic website, which is engaged in a sort of cultural exchange of bodily fluids with the Arab world.

According to a recent report in Daily Variety, when executives at Ratuv installed software that could track where their users were logging in, they found that the site was getting thousands of hits a week from such countries as Syria, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Iraq, even though some of these governments block the ".il" domain address on Israeli websites. So Ratuv responded by translating the entire site into Arabic, and traffic quickly skyrocketed.

What makes this more than a tale of clever entrepreneurs making a buck off Middle Eastern sexual repression is that Ratuv isn't an ordinary porn site. It's a clearinghouse of political parody porn, making fun of Israeli affairs such as sex scandals and often featuring Mossad agents or army soldiers getting out of uniform, thus providing a view of the Israeli military seldom seen in the Arab world. The next step, says Ratuv's manager, is to make movies with Israelis and Arabs performing together, in order to foster more intimate relations between the two peoples.

This may not be as wacky as it sounds. Author Salman Rushdie, in his 2004 essay "The East is Blue," pointed out that even though pornography is ruthlessly suppressed in many Muslim countries, it is still ubiquitous. What's more, it can have political ramifications. "Pornography exists everywhere, of course, but when it comes into societies in which it's difficult for young men and women to get together and do what young men and women often like doing, it satisfies a more general need; and, while doing so, it sometimes becomes a kind of standard-bearer for freedom, even for civilization," Rushdie wrote.

Expecting Arab men to be swayed by Ratuv's political content might be a little like expecting American men to read the articles in Playboy, but the site can't be any less effective in changing public opinion than U.S. media efforts to date. After pouring millions into the Al Iraqiya TV station to create an unbiased news outlet in Iraq, the U.S. handed the channel to the Iraqi government, and it soon became a Shiite propaganda arm for blasting Sunnis and coalition forces. Our Arabic-language satellite TV network, Al Hurra, is thought to attract only a fraction of the viewers of Al Jazeera.

A U.S. porn invasion might not do as much to change hearts and minds in the Middle East as, say, toning down President Bush's bullying rhetoric toward the region or putting more pressure on Israelis and Palestinians to settle their differences. But it's a lot more likely to happen.

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-ed-porn01sep01,1,3231110.story?coll=la-news-comment&ctrack=5&cset=true