US Virgin Islands

Sex, as we all know, sells. It sells clothes and it sells movies, and of course it sells nine year old girls in Thailand and eleven year old boys in Damascus, though it does not sell adult women in any civilised country, because that would be prostitution, and that is illegal, because educated women are not capable of determining what use should be made of their own bodies and so they have to have their bodies controlled on their behalf by men. 

Sex sells religion too, and those who now regard porn movies as an entirely legitimate business, whose female stars receive the same adulation as those who perform Shakespeare or Tarantino, should be aware of the extent to which the epidemic of rape in India, for example, of sexual harassment in Egypt, of child abuse throughout the western world, is fuelled by the fantasies available for free at over a million websites (37% of total internet material is porn; 42,000 of the million most visited sites in the world are porn)

Sex sells religion too, as I distracted myself from saying. Not in Judaism - God Forbid! - where the Book of Leviticus catalogues more prohibited sex acts than the Marquis de Sade or the San Fernando Valley ever imagined, leaving only procreation within marriage for the purpose of making babies available without the risk of being stoned to death. Christianity takes its cue from Judaism, though the gospels do appear to give license to the erotic use of alabaster oil in sensual massage.

Islam, within this life, follows the same path, albeit polygamously, for men; but Islam in the afterlife is rather different, and quite probably this, and no other reason yet postulated by the pundits on the TV, is why so many lusty and testosterone-driven young men are signing up to die in the cause of the Caliphate. It is not actually stated in the Qur'an, but comes from the Hadith (the traditions of Muhammad outside the Qur'an) known as al-Tirmidhi, and which can be found in the Book of Sunah (volume IV, chapter 21, "the Messenger of Allah"). It is also quoted by Ismail ibn Kathir (1301–1373), in his Tafsir (Qur'anic commentary) of the Qur'anic surah Al-Rahman (chapter 55):

"The Prophet Muhammad was heard saying: 'The smallest reward for the people of Paradise is an abode where there are 80,000 servants and 72 wives [the term used is houris, which means virgins; they become wives by becoming deflowered; the English word "whore" is derived from the Arabic "houri"], over which stands a dome decorated with pearls, aquamarine, and ruby, as wide as the distance from Al-Jabiyah to Sana'a."

Al-Jabiyah was once a suburb of Damascus, though today it may be completely annihilated, or the capital of the Islamic State in Syria, or a Palestinian refugee camp; we have no way of knowing. Sana'a is the Yemen.

Candidates for the army of the Caliphate may wish to note that the age and physical appearance of these virgins is not specified, and Roman Catholicism also tells its elderly nuns that their sexual self-sacrifice will be rewarded when they reach Paradise, so these may not be the chikan-chicks that you are hoping for, but eighty year old abbesses whose inbred love of Jesus still makes them reluctant bed-companions. You might also care to read the texts thoroughly, where you will discover that – and I have missed it out above deliberately, to echo the way you do it – there will also be 28 young, which is to say pre-pubescent boys, whom you will also be invited to enjoy, or not, depending on whether you incline that way; unlike Judaism and Christianity, which still retain in principle the Mosaic punishment for homosexuality (which is stoning), the Qur'an is far more tolerant and permissive. Surah 52:24, for example, tells Moslems that, in Paradise, "There will go round boy-servants of theirs, to serve them as if they were preserved pearls", which is echoed in 56:17: "They will be served by immortal boys", and 76:19: "And round about them will (serve) boys of everlasting youth. If you see them, you would think them scattered pearls." It is not clear whether these pre-pubescent boys will also be virgins, or whether they have arrived this young in Paradise as a consequence of being used as human shields or suicide bombers.

And speaking of scattered pearls, the forty Caribbean islands and islets and coral reefs that provide yet one more tax haven and one more "offshore finance industry" to the wealthy tax-avoiders of the world, and which are shared more or less equally between US and British hegemony, are also rich with houris waiting to service the multitudes of tourists who simply booked online and did not need to become shahid (the word Hamas uses for their suicide bombers and human shields; the word technically means "martyr") in order to obtain this luxury. On the other hand, pre-pubescent boys are a protected species, so those who would like to think of the Virgin islands as Paradise have been misled.

See also British Virgin Islands.



Marks For: that depends on how much tax you wish to avoid

Marks Against: ditto

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