Porn site fosters Mideast relations: Skin succeeds where diplomacy has failed

Can porn succeed where politics has failed?
An Israeli porn site is proving surprisingly popular with Web surfers in a number of Arab countries, some of which don't have diplomatic relations with Israel.
Ratuv, Hebrew for "wet," specializes in producing skinflicks with topical political themes, typically featuring scenes involving female soldiers, Mossad agents and members of the military.
After installing software that could detect where users are logging on, managers of the site found they were receiving thousands of hits a week from folks in Syria, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Iraq, even though the Israeli net domain .il is blocked from some of these countries.
"We were amazed to find a huge amount of our users from these countries," says Nir Shahar, who manages the site. "We cannot accept money from many of these countries, so they can't download the films. They can only look at the pictures."
To make up for the lack of local download access in those countries, Shahar decided to translate the entire site into Arabic, with detailed descriptions of each scene and plenty more pics. Traffic went up tenfold, with the site receiving up to 100,000 hits a week from Arab auds.

Read more at Variety.com