According to an article in Daily Variety, Ratuv website manager Nir Shahar said that after installing monitoring software, the company noticed users logging in from Syria, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Iraq, despite the fact that Israeli websites with the “.il” domain are blocked in several of those Arabic countries.
“We were amazed to find a huge amount of our users from these countries,” Shahar said. “We cannot accept money from many of these countries, so they can't download the films. They can only look at the pictures.”
Israeli law disallows Shahar from accepting credit card payments from certain Arab countries, so he is planning to register a site in either Europe or the U.S.
So, while popular perception in the U.S. may be that pornography is strictly forbidden in the Muslim World because of fundamentalist religious restrictions, in fact, Ratuv.com has been receiving up to 100,000 hits a week from Arab web surfers.
The surge in interest from Arab viewers came after Shahar decided to translate the entire site into Arabic.
The titles offered on Ratuv.com are often parodies of Israeli politics and scandals; that combined with hardcore explicit content may be irresistible to Arab audiences.
So far, the most popular title is “Code Name: Deep Investigation,” a parody of a 1986 incident involving Israeli nuclear technician Mordechai Vanunu, who was arrested after divulging top secret information to the British press. Vanunu was eventually apprehended in Rome by a beautiful female Mossad agent, returned to Israel and convicted of treason.
“We don’t make regular porn films,” Shahar said. “Our films parody the situation in Israel, so we look at issues like the elections here and Mossad. There is a lot of relevance to the Arab-Israeli situation.”
There has been some tongue-in-cheek speculation by the press about improved Middle East relations through Ratuv.com, but Shahar is serious about furthering the peace process, if possible.
“We are also interested in making films with Arabs and Israelis in them,” Shahar says. “It's something we can do to speak about the connection between the two people, but its not going to be easy.”
