Make Love Not War

Back in March of 2007 I wrote about the Google Trends tool and soon after Brother Amad at Muslim Matters picked up on it and also it was reported that Zaid Shaker or it might have been Hamza Yusuf who spoke at length about it- but it seems that Muslims are just as addicted to sex as their non-Muslim counterparts even when its their avowed enemies- the Israeli's.

Here is an interesting Israeli-Arab twist to the idea of sex and the internet in the Middle East. Ratuz.il is a website that caters to Israeli porn addicts. They installed a tool to allow them to track the web locations of their visitors and low and behold the majority of visitors were coming from Iran, Jordan, Syria, Egypt and Suadi Arabia. They immediately converted their website into an ARABIC version after which the charts when out of this world with hits. Get this, .il addresses are blocked in these countries.

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 . . . read on at the LA Times

What gets me is that these are the people most likely out in the streets yelling and screaming for the downfall of Isreal or even if they are not doing that they most likely are buying into the world conspiricy propaganda that is rife through out the Arab streets. Globalization at its best (or worst) and yet the Palestinians continue to suffer.