Islam Earns Its Scorn.

Islam Earns Its Scorn.(AT).By Trevor Thomas.As Muslims rage against the U.S. abroad, it is rather telling to examine "the loss of cultural primacy" within Islam, along with the overall effect Islam is having on nations and individuals the world over. Of the 57 members of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), as rated by the Economists Intelligence Unit's Index of Democracy, none are full democracies, while 36 are authoritarian regimes (dictatorships). Of the Index's 10 most authoritarian regimes, six of them are members of the OIC.
Muslims are over 23 percent of the world population and produce barely eight percent of global GDP. The average GDP rank for the members of the OIC is 102 (out of 211 nations). The total GDP of the 57-member OIC is approximately $4.9 trillion. That is about one-third of the GDP of the U.S. alone ($14.4 trillion).
According to the United Nations' 2009 Arab Human Development Report, "[f]or nearly two and half decades after 1980, the [Arab] region witnessed hardly any economic growth. World Bank data show that real GDP per capita in the Arab countries grew by a mere 6.4 per cent over the entire 24 year period from 1980 to 2004 (i.e. by less than 0.5 per cent annually)." One in five Arabs lives on less than $2 per day.
Illiteracy plagues the Arab world. About a third of those living in Arab countries cannot read. This includes about half of all women. There are fewer than 18 computers per 1,000 persons in the Arab world, compared to the global average of 78.3; and only 1.6 percent of Arabs use the internet.
In the 57 nations in the OIC, there are a total of about 500 universities. There are over 5,700 in the U.S. In just over 100 years, the Muslim world has produced nine Nobel laureates, while a mere 14 million Jews have produced 166. There are about 400 scientists and engineers per 1 million people in research and development in Arab countries, compared to about 4,000 per million people in North America.
Particularly disturbing, and most telling, as one examines Islam, is the role of women in Islamic society. Islamic law (sharia) prohibits women from looking men in the eye, forbids them from wearing shoes that make noise, and forbids them from becoming educated. As Ergun and Emir Caner note in Unveiling Islam, "women are considered possessions in any orthodox Islamic regime[.] ... The wife is considered the husband's sex object." Also, one of the most alarming admonitions in the Koran allows the husband to punish his wife physically.Read the full story here.