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Comment by fwip | Hacker News Reader

Calling Muhammad a terrorist is really a special amount of Islamophobia.

Freedom of religion is also freedom from religion and a right to be disgusted by particular religious figures. No one owes even an ounce of respect to any bearded prophet out there, this is literally the essence of a liberal society: the very absence of blasphemy (that you recast as "Islamophobia", same thing under a different name, only sounds more modern) as a concept.

Muhammad had between 400 and 900 POWs of the Banu Quraish tribe beheaded. Not calling this terrorism means twisting the very meaning of terrorism into pretzels.

Executing captured combatants was not atypical for the time period.

I doubt you'll find many historians calling the Massacre at Verden terrorism, for instance, despite executing 4500 prisoners.

The fact that it used to be somewhat more typical (though not everyday occurrence) does not make it less of terrorism. That definition does not depend on frequency of an event. It depends on the use of terror to achieve political means, and a mass beheading definitely tells the vanquished people that from now they'd rather obey their new overlords.

It is a matter of linguistic taste if we use such word in medieval context, but the principle is the same as in modern terrorism, and jihadists of the 21st century explicitly say that they are motivated and inspired by Muhammad's acts like this one.

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