Iraq’s Porn Dealers Risk Wrath of Religious Right
“Selling pornography has become an especially high-risk profession in Iraq, where a religious Shi’ite-led government swept to power in January, raising fears in some quarters of an Islamic state modeled after Iran. As Iraqi leaders drafting a constitution this month debate the role of Islam in the state, alarming liberals and women’s groups, Abu Mustafa and others complain they live in fear. He accused the Badr Brigades, the Iranian-trained militia associated with the leading Shi’ite party, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, of targeting colleagues in the pornography business and threatening many others. ‘They shot my friend Haider and then they burned him,’ said Abu Mustafa, who identified himself by a nickname for fear of being identified. ‘They have issued me written death threats in notes telling me to stop selling sex movies…’ After Saddam Hussein’s fall, pornography salesmen openly set up shops in Baghdad’s Bab al-Sharjee (East Gate) market, a once bustling marketplace Iraqis say is now dominated by criminal gangs, thieves, pimps and guerrilla informants. Pornography salesmen don’t dare show their faces, secretly arranging by telephone the sale of American, European and Arab porn films hidden in music video or cartoon cases from the back seats of cars… On Tuesday, porn video dealers attended the 40-day mourning ceremony for their slain 21-year-old colleague Amir. Gunmen killed him in broad daylight as he headed home, they said.” —Yahoo (US)
One of the many wonderful things about living in a democracy is that it provides you with all sorts of liberties. And while usually such things as religious tolerance and the right to a free press are extolled, there is also another sort of freedom: call it pornographic tolerance, or perhaps the right to a depraved press.
Seriously, there is some small amount of censorship even here in the “corrupt” United States. Child pornography is illegal. Snuff films — real ones, anyway — are illegal. Bestiality has a somewhat ambiguous legal status, depending on where you live. But aside from those three things, a cornucopia of pornography offers itself to a citizen of the free world. You can watch people fuck, suck, beat on each other with sticks or shit in each other’s mouths. It’s marvellous, and other people in the world want this sort of freedom too. For this young American men are dying in Iraq — for the liberation of pornography.
You know good and god damn well that this is the least of what they’re dying for. They are dying for YOU TO HAVE THE RIGHT TO BELITTLE THEIR SACRIFICE.
As a comrade in arms, I’ll say for them:
“You’re fucking welcome, you piece of shit.”
The point is not to belittle anyone’s sacrifice. Young men are giving their lives in order to establish a free society. Pornography is, for better or worse, one expression of a free society. Thus to die for democracy is also to die for the many ways in which people will make use of it — to die so that citizens can vote, to die so that women can educate themselves, to die so that men can enjoy pornography, if that’s what they want to do.
For the record, PervScan took the military’s side during the Abu Ghraib prison scandal; defended the use of sexualized interrogation techniques at Gitmo; stood up for Jessica Lynch and her nude photos; and has written glowingly of prostitutes and “regular” women who volunteer to reward returning soldiers for their sacrifices with a little nooky. Enter “Iraq” in the search box and you’ll see.
Besides which, somehow it’s difficult not to suspect that, given the randiness of most military personnel, they wouldn’t mind thinking of pornography as part of their reason for making the sacrifices that they do. After all, many soldiers end up disillusioned with the big abstract ideals like freedom, sovereignty, democracy. But do they ever get so disillusioned with pussy?
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