That was a quote, famous in its day, from one of the old Tom Swift boys novels, which were all about advances in technology.

The technology in Tom Swifts day was crude and simplistic by todays standards, and many of the stories were about fanciful, almost magical advances in communication. Back then, communication was the miracle of the age, with telegraphy and the telephone and the bare bones beginnings of Wireless Telegraphy, which we know today as Radio.

A big part of the great divide between muslims and the rest of humanity is the availability of global communication. Many nations block out as much of Western television and the ideas that come with it as they can, to keep their subjects ignorant and under submission. The word Islam itself means Submission.

Arabs are just as greedy as anyone else, though, and when the opportunity to make money presents itself, someone will always take it. Thus in Afghanistan, the Taliban and other Islamists are being treated to scenes like this on their new satellite TVs:

Porn for the Taliban
“In a dark tea room amid the dusty Kandahar, 23-year-old Latif stares with mouth agape. A young boy smiles and giggles nervously as he stares at a pair of nude breasts; he has never seen anything like this as far as he can remember.

Satellite receivers arrived to the conservative town Kandahar in northern Afghanistan with the allied troops and, along with them, documentary films from Lithuania, Polish educational program and Catalan soap operas. All this is utterly new to the residents, as is pornography.

After the fall of the Taliban regime, satellite dishes have begun to spring from roof tops, adorning private homes, restaurants, coffee shops… everyone wants a peek into the unknown. One hundred and seventy programs broadcast from the entire world, including four that only air pornography!
Abdul Wasi said: “I started the business a month ago and by now I have sold almost four hundred receivers. My store is always crowded with TV watchers.” ”

To give you an idea of just how far behind the times Afghanistan is, the scene described above, of people crowding a store to see a television, is an exact repeat of America and Europe in 1948 when Western stores started selling television sets. 59 years ago!

Exposing the Afghan men to pornography can’t help but soften their attitude toward women and bring them out of their dark-ages attitude toward sex. It’s a recognized fact that sexual repression is a major factor in Islam in getting men to die for the sake of 72 virgins to rape in “Paradise”. Take away the sexual repression and you take away a lot of that willingness to die. Television is addictive. It calms people.

This doesn’t mean that TV will win the war in Afghanistan/Pakistan but it’s already having a positive effect. Knowledge is liberating.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 8th, 2007 at 9:22 am and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.