A Western misconception about Islam

I just saw Muslim Imam explaining the technique in wife beating linked to, from AboveTopSecret.com. Everyone in the thread predictably crowded around and said how depraved and horrific it was. That's one of the favourite pastimes that occurs on ATS; someone will post some particularly horrific crime or piece of apocalyptic doom porn, and then a crowd will gather to condemn the depravity of the article in question, and gasp about how scandalised they are.

Of course, yes, a Muslim imam giving a tutorial on how to batter your wife is disgusting; but at the same time, I feel that there is an element of Islamic morality, which Western audiences apparently fail to understand.

Said element is the fact that the West places emphasis on the wellbeing of the individual, whereas Islam, conversely, places emphasis on the wellbeing of the collective.

To explain what this means, an American or European person observing Islamic behaviour, will think that it is horrific if Muslims flog or honour kill an individual, because of the suffering that said individual will go through. Muslims, on the other hand, consider the integrity of the collective society to be more important; and if the individual in question is guilty of a crime, will feel that the entire reason why the individual needs to be punished not only with barbaric severity, but also publically, is in order to ensure that the entire society is not overrun with individuals engaging in the same crime.

I'm actually getting fairly tired of seeing Americans in particular, condemn Islamic behaviour, recently. The reason why, isn't because I don't consider Muslims degenerate; they very often are. It's because I believe that humanity is very possibly currently headed towards extinction, and that if human extinction occurs, America will very largely be responsible for it. As a result, Americans claiming moral superiority over anyone else on the planet, is basically a sick joke, at this point. Capitalism is most likely going to kill us all, and my money says it will do so long before the Muslims get around to it.

I've been using the Internet long enough to have seen first hand, what Capitalism did to it, Americans. If I had no other reason to view Capitalism as a bad thing, its' rape of the Internet would be enough. I remember when the Internet was a self-organising, meritocratic technocracy; protocol specifications were adopted and used on the basis of whether or not they worked, and when the Internet Engineering Task Force and W3C consisted of the only group who, as far as I'm concerned, have any right to political power whatsoever; non-psychopathic engineers and scientists.

Capitalism destroyed that. The W3C in particular became corporate whores. I saw what a comparitively obfuscated, convoluted mess HTML 4+ has been, compared to the HTML specifications released prior to that. The reason why, of course, is because when said prior specs were released, the W3C had not yet had their souls contaminated by Microsoft.

One last point, related to this post's original topic. I'm really not afraid of an Islamic takeover of the entire planet any more. I'm not sure why, exactly; but for me, the fear of it finally, truly ended earlier today.

Again, I don't know why I'm not afraid of the Islamic tidal wave. Everything I've read about the subject tells me that logically, I should be. That there genuinely are large numbers of Muslims out there who are committed to the wholesale assimilation and murder of non-Islamic human society, including me.

Yet when I think about it now, the only thing I feel is pure calm. I think maybe it's because, although I'm not a Muslim, I'm also not an atheist; and I truthfully have come to feel that Muslims and I believe in the same God, or close. There's a lot of evil in Islam, yes, and I'm not going to try and deny that; but there is some real beauty in the Qu'ran and the Hadiths as well.

On Above Top Secret, I also met two Islamic women, who really assisted me in looking at both sides.