BERLIN – Despite their apparent affinity for 11th Century social policies and militant religiosity, it turns out members of ISIS (aka ISIL, aka the Islamic State, aka “a bunch of swollen assholes who like posing for pictures while wearing keffiyehs and carrying AK-47s”) are actually pretty typical internet users in many ways.
For example, it has been widely reported computers seized from ISIS members have been up to 80% filled with pornography — which is only slightly lower in proportion than the average for laptops owned by U.S. Marines, according to Grenn Gleenwald, a freelance investigative journalist and vice president of the Official Edward Snowden Fan Club.
“As hard as it is to imagine concerning guys whose hobbies including chopping off heads, shooting innocent people execution style and dumping dead bodies in rivers by the dozen, these ISIS dudes are not so different from you and me when it comes to how they use the internet,” Gleenwald said. “You wouldn’t believe how many of them take pictures of the food they make and post it to Instagram, for example, or the sheer volume of cute cat videos they share, like and up-vote.”
While most coverage of ISIS’s porn consumption has focused on the role of porn in desensitizing the group’s new recruits to violence and cruelty, Gleenwald said much of the pornography he personally observed on ISIS laptops was “pretty run of the mill, vanilla stuff.”
“Did I see a few sodomized goats and the occasional shrink-wrapped sex slave being pissed on or slapped around with a rolled up copy of an anti-U.S. fatwah? Yes, naturally,” Gleenwald said. “But the vast majority was just mainstream porn. I observed lots of porn parodies, MILF videos, and tons of that bullshit ‘ex-girlfriend’ stuff some porn studios made to try to cash in on the revenge-porn phenomenon, but they used recognizable porn performers so it didn’t fool anyone except brain-dead jihadist types, some of whom are so thick, they still think MILF Hunter is real.”
Whatever the nature and niche of the porn found on the ISIS laptops and mobile devices, Lt. Gen. Enlyke Flynn, former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, said the presence of such materials on jihadist’s computers is “cause for grave concern, but also great merriment among our brave, noble and extremely sarcastic troops.”
“We couldn’t decide whether all this sick hardcore porn on the computer of some guy who officially thinks women shouldn’t even be allowed to take their clothes off to a take a freakin’ shower should worry us, or make us laugh until we pissed ourselves,” Flynn said. “So I compromised by telling German newspapers how shocking and concerning this all is, while allowing a few drops of bemused urine to trickle into my military issue BVDs as I spoke.”
Of course, when it comes to the use of porn as a tool to inure newly-minted jihadists against the kind of violence they would soon be asked to perpetrate, Flynn said it’s no laughing matter.
“Sure, by the time they’ve signed up with ISIS, most of these guys already know it’s a group that kills indiscriminately and often, but most of them aren’t really ready to pull a trigger or swing a machete until they’ve at least watched a blowjob or two,” Flynn said. “Of course, if they’re training a suicide bomber, then they really pull out the big guns — like bukkake or double anal or anything for which Ira Isaacs has previously been indicted.”
Former CIA officer Roberto Oso said he’s skeptical of Flynn’s claims, mostly due to a recent history of American intelligence reports being “somewhat less than accurate.”
“Keep in mind the folks saying ISIS computers are chock-full of porn are the same people who said Iraq was teeming with weapons of mass destruction and once advised the military to bomb a suspected Yugoslav military supply building in Belgrade which turned out to be the goddamn Chinese Embassy for fuck’s sake,” Oso said. “Based on that precedent, I’d say if the intelligence community were to offer total transparency on this issue, we’d come to find half the ‘porn’ on these laptops is actually pirated episodes of Game of Thrones.”
