Pornography is not a necessary cause of terrorism. The abolition of pornography would not lead to the cessation of terrorism in the world. Terrorism existed well before graphic pornography and its mass spread via the internet.
Likewise, pornography is not a sufficient cause for terrorism. There are pornography users, even addicts, who do not become terrorists. Given how widespread the viewing of pornography is today, if the direct result of each individual’s pornography use were terrorist violence, one could conceivably argue that pornography proliferation would pose a more widespread threat to human existence than nuclear proliferation.
But let’s make that case anyway, shall we, just because it’s so darned titillating:
Yet pornography now appears frequently in the possession of violent terrorists and their supporters, including Osama bin Laden. Regarding “smut” found on captured media, in 2010, a Department of Defense al-Qaeda analyst was quoted in The Atlantic: “We have terabytes of this stuff.”Terabytes. That’s a lot of “smut.”I wonder whether the pornography of today—now ubiquitous and increasingly grotesque—is one of the influences warping the mentality of those who aspire to or who actually go on to engage in ever more grotesque public violence.Would those terabytes of pornography and such more aptly be dubbed “terrorbytes”? Why, after all, would an al-Qaeda affiliate, as reported in 2009 from interrogations in Mauritania, select pornography to target new recruits? We need to know.As terrorism researchers Daniel Bynum and Christine Fair point out in an article about the modern terrorists we have been pursuing, especially since 9/11, the fact of the matter is that “they get intimate with cows and donkeys. Our terrorist enemies trade on the perception that they’re well trained and religiously devout, but in fact, many are fools and perverts who are far less organized and sophisticated than we imagine. Can being more realistic about who our foes actually are help us stop the truly dangerous ones?”
They “get intimate” with cows and donkeys? What, they share their most secret thoughts? That is shocking.
With the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks staring us in the face, we already know that our failure to have an approach to security that is robust and accurate has dire consequences. Pornography has long circulated nearly unbounded due to calls for “freedom,” but what if we are actually making ourselves less free by allowing pornography itself to be more freely accessible?
Are there security costs to the free-flow of pornography? If so, what are they? Are we as a society putting ourselves at risk by turning a blind eye to pornography proliferation?
Obviously we should stop turning a blind eye to the “proliferation” of such other obvious causal factors as the fact that terrorists use toothpaste and wear socks too. Indeed, I’m thinking the whole interest in eating food and drinking water thing should be looked into as well. Are we making ourselves less free by allowing groceries to be more freely accessible to terrorists?
h/t to @JoshuaHolland