Osama Bin Laden 'extensive' porn collection?

Gene Expression
By Razib Khan
May 13, 2011 11:40 PMNov 20, 2019 2:31 AM

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This is happening. Pornography found in bin Laden hideout:

The pornography recovered in bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, consists of modern, electronically recorded video and is fairly extensive, according to the officials, who discussed the discovery with Reuters on condition of anonymity. The officials said they were not yet sure precisely where in the compound the pornography was discovered or who had been viewing it. Specifically, the officials said they did not know if bin Laden himself had acquired or viewed the materials. ... Three other U.S. officials familiar with evidence gathered during investigations of other Islamic militants said the discovery of pornography is not uncommon in such cases.

One issue I've noticed personally with some conservative Muslims is that their threshold for what is 'pornographic' is different from those of typical Westerners. I have an uncle who is a member of Tablighi Jamaat who considers the outfits worn by ballerinas to be pornographic and instances of crass nudity. I do wonder if outbreaks of extreme sexual deviance and psychopathy, such as the notorious Saudi gang rape, might be as much due to the peculiar collapse of what seem clear and distinct categories to us, as much as garden-variety repression. A woman can dress in a sexy and alluring manner in public without being assumed to be a prostitute, but in some societies that's really not an accepted category. So the occasional porn caches found in the possession of Islamic militants might be part of the constellation of 'perversion' which they make little distinctions across. My thinking here is informed by friends in secondary school from religious conservative Christian backgrounds, who also seemed to have an antinomian tendency once they crossed their strict "lines" (this is like my conservative Christian friends who sometimes talked joyfully about murdering people for fun and having same sex relations if there wasn't a god; it's all talk, but I think this mindset is illustrative of a "brittle" moral-ethical framework). Of course there is a high likelihood that the porn had some sort of encrypted message. But that begs the question: couldn't they find something else besides porn? I wonder if there was double motive.... Finally, I thought of this SNL sketch about Bin Laden:

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