ISIS' Computers Are Mostly Porn — And Michael Flynn Is Correlating It With Sexual Violence
U.S. officers found a hell of a lot of porn on the laptops taken from the Islamic State group — "up to 80%" of the overall material on the computers was pornography, according to former chief of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Lieutenant General Michael Flynn.
Flynn pointed out this statistic in his book The Field of Fight: How We Can Win the Global War Against Radical Islam and Its Allies. German site Bild obtained an excerpt.
"We looked a ruthless enemy in the eye, the one that raped and exploited women and children, boys and girls, who beheaded people because it pleased him and who watched pornography on his laptop," Flynn wrote, according to RT.
"At one point we actually had determined that the material on the laptops was up to 80% pornography. These sick, psychopathic enemies were not only unimaginably hideous, but also treacherous and torn."
Flynn, who was forced to retire in 2014, is outspoken in his support for the war on terror and his concerns on the threat of "radical Islam."
Extremists' consumption of explicit content isn't a revelation — an "extensive" porn library was found in Osama bin Laden's compound, the Daily Beast reported.
"The USG has recovered terabytes of the stuff from terrorist computers," Georgetown University terrorism expert Christine Fair said, referring to smutty content discovered by the U.S. government, according to the Daily Beast.
So while evidence supports Flynn's statement that ISIS laptops are heavy on the smut, it doesn't support his assertions that porn consumption and sexual violence are correlated.
"There's absolutely no evidence that pornography does anything negative," Milton Diamond, director of the Pacific Center for Sex and Society at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, told Scientific American. "It's a moral issue, not a factual issue."
As Mic's EJ Dickson pointed out, porn has been the scapegoat for cheating on a spouse, the national divorce rate and even the 2014 University of California, Santa Barbara shootings, and now Flynn is correlating porn consumption with rape — these accusations are unsound.
Despite what anti-porn advocates argue, some experts say that watching violent pornography might actually help people fight their violent sexual urges. The trends in pornography consumption and frequency of rape "just don't fit with the theory that rape and sexual assault are in part influenced by pornography," Christopher J. Ferguson, a professor of psychology and criminal justice at Texas A&M International University told Scientific American. "At this point I think we can say the evidence just isn't there, and it is time to retire this belief."
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