Porn as a form of Warfare

From National Review Online:

AL-ZARQAWI [Andrew Stuttaford]

With remarkable timing, the Atlantic has a lengthy piece on the late, unlamented Al-ZarQawi. The whole thing is well worth reading, but, as the good folks at Reason noticed, this is too good not too highlight:

“Despite their enthusiasm, al-Zarqawi, al-Maqdisi, and Abu Muntassir did not appear to be natural revolutionaries. Their first operation was in Zarqa, in 1993, a former Jordanian intelligence official told me, when al-Zarqawi dispatched one of their men to a local cinema with orders to blow it up because it was showing pornographic films. But the hapless would-be bomber apparently got so distracted by what was happening on the screen that he forgot about his bomb. It exploded and blew off his legs.”

I shouldn’t laugh, but well…

More seriously, it’s a reminder that the sheer seductiveness (sometimes literally so) of Western culture is an important part of the arsenal of democracy (remember the role that it played in the internal demoralization of the Soviet Union), so, let’s praise the Lord, pass the ammunition, and lob over the porn …