Nude celebrities or Islamic State horrors - which images do we care more about?

Islamic State might be onto something in the online marketing world. Sex might sell but violence delivers

The peoples of Earth have always looked to the sky for relief and signs of salvation, since the beginning of time was clocked on sundials. This week my personal prayers were answered, when the iClouds burst out with naked pictures of Hollywood starlets. "It's raining Women, Hallelujah. Amen. I'm gunna go out to run and let myself get soaking wet. It's raining Women. Tall, blonde, dark and lean". In Iraq it was raining emergency food supplies. In Gaza and Syria, it was raining bombs. In Sydney, it was simply raining, relentless September soaking rain.

In light of the flaws in Apple and Android software, the security software of my youth demands renewed discussion. Keep the photos of your loved ones under your mattress, well within your hands' grasp. Decades past, the photos in my mobile phone were immediately printed out and kept safely in my chambers in case of hacking, or phone loss. I confess there was a time I secretly snapped a sleeping girl, or girls, next to me as a token of my esteem and a bridge against fading memory. However my recent lack of such partners, a creeping conscience and the law forbids these practices now. Way too many protests when I posted them on Facebook. It's amazing how many people recognise another's tattoos.

Disappointment attended inspection of the starlets' images. A brief scan reveals little that we didn't know before. Illegally obtained nude stills of Rihanna were mild compared to her relentless publicly released videos. Photos of Rihanna dressed might stir the imagination more. Jennifer Lawrence has appeared nude in films and has been available on Mr Skin (a celebrity nude website for those who don't know) for years. The golden bronze naked Kirsten Dunst in Melancholia brought many smiles from fellow perverts in the dark cinema, where the end of the world was just around the next corner of the film. Kate Upton was Sports Illustrated's special last year. Jenny McCarthy was a consistent image in Playboy. Winona Ryder's breasts were the wonder of my middle age, when she was known as 'Light Fingers'.

Privacy is important, but security of information and person is crucial. The Nude Hacker of Hollywood is just fooling around. Hacking into financial institutions, government agencies and high political officials' personal email and banking accounts is so widespread and common that banks take a pragmatic view on its investigation and enforcement. Many banks just top up the relevant account and mend the fault in the security vault. When a country like China has teams of hackers in squadron formation zeroing in on Western interests, military, political, financial and geographical, then the real issues arise that threaten us, and not just prurient interest aroused.

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Cloying for the world's attention are Islamic State's bi-weekly instalments of cut-throat videos. It is not without irony that we can see stills and edited videos of these gruesome pictures in our popular press, but not a single iCloud nude of a celebrity or proto-celebrity from Hollywood. Islamic State might be onto something in the online marketing world. Sex might sell but violence delivers. The digital world has become a giant shopping mall with countless multiplexes. Plain collected images made by amateurs for next to nothing but available at your fingertips.

The most chilling images are made in the desert by ruthless zealots, high on blood, lusting for mass murder and willing to die a martyr's death and its promised eternity with 72 virgins. The counterpoint of thousands of naked images of the pick of the Western World's female beauties, none of them virgins, is repulsive to them, and indicative of the demise of non-Islamic virgins. It is the IS images that put the fear of God into you and disturb the soul. In Hollywood, the status of the star is positively swayed by leaked sex tapes that convert to currency in the star and her agent's hands. The real world exists in the Middle East where cults have become crazed armies, where fanatical Sunnis are prepared to self destruct in order to rid their world of Shiite, infidels and ignorant non-believers. No matter what the cost, in a frenzy that like a tornado attracts and gathers into its maelstrom everything around it until it destroys everything.

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