Don't Let the Chador Hit You In the Ass

New at Reason: Charles Paul Freund reports on the war over sexy Arab music videos.

Comments

[Douglas Fletcher]

Let 'em eat tit.

[R. C. Dean]

Like Levis and rock bands in Moscow were the harbinger of doom to the Soviets, music videos in the Middle East are a sure sign that the mullocracies are on their way to the dustbin of history.

[josh]

Which in my opinion begs the question, why bother with the military?

[SickOfItAll]

Well, there is that problem of the current persons in charge seeing their culture changing in ways they don't like (no more covered women, censored books/music, etc...) so they get all pissed and wacko and blame the US. Then blamo, some dumbass blows himself up near a bunch of civilians.

So I can understand the desire to go and try to do something to stop that from happening until the time comes when those mideast countries fighting tooth and nail to keep things the status-quo finally get a makeover in the name of freedom and equality. And this won't happen very soon for many of them, as their citizens haven't even begun to stick up for themselves.

Not that I really belive our mideast ventures won't piss of plenty of people and make them want to blow us up. Its just that those people were probably going to get pissed at the west sooner or later anyhow for "defiling" their culture, so it's not too much of a loss.

[nm156]

I say we start beaming BET over to the Middle East. Figure it would take about a week tops before every Mullahs head would explode from all the pulchritude on display. God, Ive always loved that word - PULCHRITUDE. Mmmmmmm.

[Tom from Texas]

Way off topic here, but inspired by rst's 11:22 post:

My favorite Britney Spears' bit (well, one of them, actually) was how early in her career, while she was on a PR tour, she was actually puzzled as to why so many of her "fans" were 50-year-old overweight white guys with camcorders.

[rst]

I love reading stories like this, where a culture is poisoned and the pus runs freely into the street, agitating and terrifying the moral leadership the whole way. A U.S. military conquest won't bring anything substantial in the long run; secularizing their culture, however, will go a long way towards ostracizing the fundamentalists. A Muslim teenager on the phone to get Nancy Ajram tickets is probably not going to blow up a building, or ever be interested in blowing up a building.

Not BET...porn, porn, and more porn.

[Mr. Nice Guy]

RST:

You make some excellent points. If only our commander-in-chimp decided to wage an "information/entertainment" war instead of this current 600 billion fiasco. Think of the progress free internet, pirate radio, and porn flooding could do for those oppressed people.

[dhex]

who was it that suggested carpet-bombing afghanistan with porn back in the days following 9/11?

porn destroys all sorts of stupid desert gods - the u.s. even has laws forbidding strip clubs from being too close to churches!

craaaaayzee.

[Larry]

D?j? vu!

The Beatles imported from Britain on Ed Sullivan!

The home-grown version, Elvis!

Rock-n-Roll is the work of the Devil!

Wierd haircuts! Beads! Funny clothes!

A whole generation of youth running amok!

The country (U.S.) will never be the same!

To be fair, we were never actually stoned for listening to ?that countercultural trash.? At least not in the?uh?Biblical sense.

[Concerned Citizen]

I've peeped those Arab MTVish videos on the int'l channel...those women are hot. What will be even more distracting for the minds of young Arab men is not getting tickets for Nancy's show, but chasing the girls who will be cultivating her look.

That being said...the Beatles are overrated, early Beatles ripped off The Everly Brothers, and Sgt. Pepper's was a reactive effort to the groundbreaking "Pet Sounds" by the Beach Boys.

[Citizen]

"decided to wage an "information/entertainment" war instead of this current 600 billion fiasco."

If I'm not mistaken the US HAS run a pretty steep media campaign, including radio and print in the Mid-East. It hasn't been very successful and I think I remember the Reason editors writing a hatchet job on it.

[rst]

Iraq will make a great testbed for the idea. Lay down a solid internet and television infrastructure, then get highly controversial Arab entertainment to play, broadcasting it across Iraq, but with enough power so that the airwaves make it deep into Iran and S.A.

Yeah, yeah, I know, harder than it sounds.

[rst]

the Beatles are overrated

What matters is not their "quality," but their impact. Britney can't sing for shit, but what she has done to 13-year old girls (liberated, corrupted, whatever, it depends on your particular point of view. Not having a 13-year old daughter I'm not really sure what Spears does) continues to make modest waves. We shake our heads over it for the most part (the question remains as to whether the behavior is healthy psychologically and emotionally for a 13-year old), but we don't do anything about it, because by the time we've seen it, we're already well on our way to being desensitized to it.

There was "Hi" magazine, which was met with critical ambivalence and didn't seem to make much difference. The problem was that it was made by the West. Rather than that, their own "counterculturalism" should be supported, by putting their own entertainment on the television and the stages. Cultural mujahadeen, if you will.

[Neb Okla]

Every time I've tuned in to Radio Sawa, I've heard that damn Ketchup Song!

[jdog]

I get a bit of rise out of those brown-skinned Indian lovelies that are commonplace on billboards and on TV in neighboring Pakistan and Bangladesh. But the Bindu ( that forehead dot ) makes me limp.

[Edward Said]

jdog wrote,

"But the Bindu ( that forehead dot ) makes me limp."

That would be "bindi".

[Keating Erin]

EMAIL: [e-mail]
IP: 62.213.67.122
URL: http://digital-photo-software.online-photo-print.com
DATE: 01/20/2004 11:12:17
Suits and religions rupture if you force them on.