You could call it Porn Wars. The U.S. conflict with the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) is being fought not on the battlefield – to the extent there even is a battlefield with the guerilla-focused organization – but also psychologically, using pornography.
For example, the activist hacker group Anonymous reportedly hacked ISIS Twitter feeds, replacing terrorist-oriented content with rainbows and links to gay porn. “Messages posted to the compromised accounts include ‘I’m gay and proud’ and ‘Out and proud,’” writes Anthony Cuthbertson for Newsweek. “A link to a gay porn site is included in some of the hacked accounts, although no explicit images have been posted in respect to Islam.”
Kids! Animals!
In addition, American military leadership is claiming that – far from having encrypted data – seized ISIS laptops are not only unencrypted, but 80 percent full of porn, according to Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, an ex-chief of the Defense Intelligence Agency. ‘We looked a ruthless enemy in the eye — women and children, girls and boys, raped and exploited, the beheadings stored on a laptop next to pornography,” he reportedly writes in his book, The Field of Fight: How We Can Win the Global War Against Radical Islam and Its Allies, excerpted in the German newspaper Bild. ‘These sick, psychopathic enemies were not only unimaginably hideous, but also treacherous and torn.”
“Some of it was really bad, and it was all over the map. Some of it was kids, animals,” a former intelligence analyst told ABC News, confirming the general’s claim. “I think it’s indicative of their hypocrisy of what they’ve said they believe in — their perverted version of their religion.”
This claim is particularly egregious in the case of ISIS, a religiously-oriented organization, which is ostensibly against porn, particularly the pedophiliac- and bestiality-oriented sort the laptops reportedly contained. Assuming it’s true that the laptops are “full of porn,” this could either be an attempt to make ISIS look bad to Americans, to other Muslims, or to both.
“The Islamic extremist group preaches a strict moral code and its caliphate operates under Shira[sic] Law,” writes Meg Wagner for the New York Daily News. “Drinking alcohol is a crime, women are forced to stay inside their homes unless they’re chaperoned by a male relative and anyone considered a heretic can be sold as a slave.” Osama bin Laden’s hideout was also said to be stocked with porn videos.
That said, some experts disagree with Flynn’s contention that pornography could be used to incite violence. “Porn has been the scapegoat for cheating on a spouse, the national divorce rate and even the 2014 University of California, Santa Barbara shootings, and now Flynn is correlating porn consumption with rape — these accusations are unsound,” writes Melanie Ehrenkranz in Tech.Mic. “Despite what anti-porn advocates argue, some experts say that watching violent pornography might actually help people fight their violent sexual urges.”
The timing of these revelations could also be related to the rumor that Flynn, who was reportedly forced out of his position in 2014 due to clashes with leadership, was being considered as a possible Vice Presidential nominee by Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump, which was bruited scant days after the publication of his anti-Islam book.
Is it Propaganda?
Moreover, the oodles of porn claim also fits in with the classic “dehumanizing the enemy” propaganda efforts of previous wars. “Tales of atrocities also can dehumanize, as readers of William Randolph Hearst’s newspapers learned when they got whipped up for the Spanish-American war with fake stories and sketches of Spanish atrocities that probably never happened,” wrote Michael James for ABC News in 2003. “Arguably, it set a pattern for phony or embellished American wartime propaganda that would last at least through the Gulf War.”
In what seems prescient now, James Forsher — a film historian and documentary filmmaker who has studied propaganda films, and an assistant professor of mass communications at California State University — predicted, “If things turn nasty [with Iraq], God knows what’s going to happen to them,” James writes. “It worries me. It worries me for the country and for Americans who have Middle Eastern ancestry.”
“I think the demonization of Islam and the Arab world is identical to what happened 100 years ago,” Yale University history professor Jay Winter told James. “The Arab is now a stock figure, a caricature, a symbol of fanaticism, of infinite cruelty and no regard for human rights.”
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