Comment on About the historical relationship of Islam to the United States by resolutionaryman

Parent Post: About the historical relationship of Islam to the United States

resolutionaryman · 5/9/2026, 11:37:02 PM · permalink

There are several historical and textual issues in that claim that need correction.

First, the Barbary conflicts were not a simple case of “Islam attacking America.” They were maritime and geopolitical conflicts in the Mediterranean involving trade, naval power, and shifting alliances among multiple states — including European ones that also engaged in privateering and tribute systems at the time.

Second, the claim that “the Qur’an allows Muslims to enslave non-Muslims unless tribute is paid” is not supported by the Qur’an itself. The Qur’an does not authorize indiscriminate enslavement of people based on belief, nor does it command piracy or aggression against civilians or merchant vessels.

The Qur’an repeatedly emphasizes:

justice even toward those you disagree with,

prohibition of transgression,

and honoring covenants and treaties.

For example:

“Do not let hatred of a people lead you to injustice. Be just; that is nearer to righteousness.” (5:8)

“There is no compulsion in religion.” (2:256)

“Fulfill covenants, for covenants will be questioned.” (17:34)

These principles directly contradict the idea of blanket permission to enslave or plunder others.

Third, practices of slavery and ransom in the medieval and early modern world — including in parts of Europe, Africa, and the Mediterranean — were historical institutions that predate Islam and Christianity alike. They reflect the norms of that era, not a simple reading of scripture.

Finally, it is important to separate historical states and political actions from scripture itself. Even if individuals or governments claimed religious justification, that does not automatically reflect the text of the Qur’an.

So historically, the Barbary Wars were about maritime conflict and commerce. Textually, the Qur’an cannot be used to justify the blanket claim that “Islam commands piracy or enslavement of outsiders.”... That said, I agree with dickie - "government is evil. secular and religious."

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saarnok · 5/9/2026, 11:53:20 PM · permalink

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resolutionaryman · 5/10/2026, 12:00:02 AM · permalink

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saarnok · 5/17/2026, 1:28:03 AM · permalink

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resolutionaryman · 5/18/2026, 2:47:36 AM · permalink

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saarnok · 5/18/2026, 4:14:25 AM · permalink

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resolutionaryman · 5/10/2026, 2:25:33 AM · permalink

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saarnok · 5/10/2026, 6:15:23 PM · permalink

That was an epic, wonderful response. I'd far rather you'd got it all into one, but still, absolutely epic. Exactly the sort of responses I want in my personal pocha.  
  
The historical annotations are both utterly atypical and entirely welcome.  
  
You're still wrong, and haven't responded to the thrust of my claim.  
  
Islam is evil.  
  
Please understand I'm not judging the actions of previous generations according to the sensibilities of our own, often absurd "morality".  
  
It's entirely believable that you consider the various textual admonitions of the Quran as the bygone product of an earlier age.  
  
What you're failing to understand is that there is no ameliorating tradition which renders moot the declarations of the Quran, and more importantly which prevents the adaptation of those exact same interpretations today.  
  
I'm a bit amused you included the "worthless POS" portion of my diatribe as a point without contention. But, a bit disturbed you didn't include any reason why my condemnation might be apropos in this context.  
  
I'm picking out the Nights of Malta example to throw back at you: Where is slavery still prevalent today?  
  
Obviously "Christian" principles, if there is any such thing, were insufficient to prevent justifying slavery which was common practice during the foundation of Christianity regardless when you imagine that religion started.  
  
It should become obvious, not that I ever made the claim, that Islam is not uniquely evil, but rather that it remains evil to this day.  
  
The example of slavery and stealing of trade goods is included quite simply to put the lie to the claim of Islam by the POS Barrack Obama as a foundational American influence and exemplar of moral piety. Essentially presenting the claim that Islam was an essential influence in what came to be American sensibilities, by pointing out it was Muslim countries which first recognized our independance.  
  
Slavery. The capture of trade goods. The pillaging of wealth from whoever has it is the history of mankind, regardless of how or by who it is recorded.  
  
Jews today consider non-Jews, "The Goyim" to be lesser than Jews.  
  
Which is a sentiment I know from experience I can post with little if any pushback. Which conceivably is partially because Jews today believe it.  
  
But, let me make a post condemning Islam, and watch the fireworks.  
  
Today: Regardless of the claims by "The Jews" about the antisemitism they face; nothing generates more pushback and demands for tolerance than a post finding fault with Islam.

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resolutionaryman · 5/10/2026, 7:06:55 PM · permalink

I appreciate the generous read of my last message—and I’m not dodging the thrust. I understand your claim as:

1) The Quran contains moral claims and permissions that are not safely “locked in the past.”

2) There’s no universally accepted internal mechanism in Islam that reliably prevents those same claims from being reactivated now.

3) Therefore Islam remains morally dangerous/evil in the present tense, not merely historically.

That’s a serious argument. I’m willing to engage it. But I still won’t accept “Islam is evil” as a clean conclusion, because it collapses too many distinct layers into a slogan. If we want truth instead of heat, we have to separate at least three things:

A) The Quran’s text (what it actually says)

B) The interpretive machine built around it (hadith, fiqh, madhhabs, state enforcement, clerical monopoly)

C) The lived moral character of actual Muslims across cultures (which, as my own experience echoes yours, varies wildly and often contradicts the ugliest stereotypes)

Where I’ll concede ground: mainstream, institutional Islam (especially in its juristic and state-enforced forms) absolutely can be—and often has been—morally dangerous. If by “Islam” you mean the dominant Sunni/Shia jurisprudential tradition with its enforcement impulses, I’m not going to pretend that’s harmless. It’s not. And yes, it remains “live” because people still cite it today.

Where I won’t concede: the move from “this tradition contains live dangers” to “Islam is evil” as an essence statement. That same rhetorical move can be made about Christianity, Judaism, secular ideologies, nationalism, even “liberalism,” once any of them have coercive institutions and an authorized class that can launder power into righteousness. That doesn’t absolve Islam; it just means the category “evil” is being used as a verdict rather than an analysis.

On your key point—“there is no ameliorating tradition”—I partially agree, but I’d frame it differently:

Islam does not have a single centralized authority that can definitively render certain readings permanently out of bounds for all Muslims everywhere. So yes: harmful readings can re-emerge, and they do.

But it’s not true that there are no internal constraints at all. There are competing constraints—some stronger, some weaker, some more widely respected than others: appeals to justice, to “no compulsion,” to public welfare, to harm-reduction principles, to maqasid-style reasoning, to moral conscience, etc. The problem is: those constraints aren’t uniformly authoritative, and they can be overridden by hadith-driven literalism, juristic inertia, and state power.

And that brings me to the point I’ve been making (which is directly responsive to your thrust): the biggest practical danger is not merely “a text exists,” but “an institution can enforce one reading as God’s will.” When that happens, the outer rim becomes a control system. That’s where you get apostasy punishments, stoning regimes, expansive purity codes, women’s legal inequalities, and the rest—often justified more by secondary literature and juristic tradition than by the Quran’s own limited legal footprint.

That doesn’t let the Quran off the hook, either. If your argument is that the Quran itself contains material that can be weaponized today, then the only honest move is to specify which passages/claims you think are the irreducible core of that danger, and then we test them against a standard. My proposed standard is not “modern absurd morality” nor “whatever the majority says,” but something like: conscience, natural law, human dignity, and observable outcomes (what actually happens when a society implements X?).

Now, on the “worthless POS” portion: you’re right to flag that I didn’t treat your condemnation as “apropos.” Let me be clearer. \[In general I think dehumanizing language is analytically corrosive... and yet I sometimes use it too! But I also understand why you reached for it, and I won’t play dumb about the target. You weren’t merely tossing out a random insult; you were expressing moral contempt for what you see as propaganda and moral laundering.\]

My sentiments on Barack Obama: I’ll state mine plainly. I do concede that I too feel Barack Obama is a “POS.” I personally don’t like him, his policies, his rhetoric, his message—and I see him as part of the technocracy, part of the world’s problems, and especially part of the social problems in the USA. I’m not interested in hagiography of him, and I’m not interested in treating his talking points as moral instruction.

So: when you say the slavery/pillaging examples “put the lie” to Obama’s “Islam as a foundational American influence” framing, I don’t think you’re attacking history so much as attacking a rhetorical maneuver—using selective historical annotations to launder a moral conclusion. I agree with you that “X recognized independence, therefore X is morally exemplary” is propaganda logic. Diplomatic contact and moral virtue are not the same category.

On your slavery question (“Where is slavery still prevalent today?”): I’m not going to improvise a country list and pretend certainty. What I will say plainly is that slavery persists in modern forms—debt bondage, forced labor, domestic servitude, trafficking—across regions and systems, including in places that call themselves Muslim, Christian, secular, capitalist, communist, you name it. If you want, we can anchor it to a mutually accepted dataset (Global Slavery Index, ILO estimates) and talk specifics without turning it into a “gotcha.”

But I also think the deeper point you’re aiming at is this: “If humans are always tempted to rationalize exploitation, what stops Islam—from its own resources—from rationalizing it again?” That’s fair. My answer is: nothing stops it automatically. No tradition is self-disarming. The only thing that stops it is a living ethical discipline that places conscience and justice above institutional convenience—and the refusal to let clerical/legal machinery override moral reality.

On your point that Christianity also failed to prevent slavery: agreed. “Christian principles” (whatever one means by that) were historically compatible with both abolitionism and pro-slavery argumentation, depending on which texts were emphasized and which institutions had power. That supports your broader claim: Islam is not uniquely dangerous in the abstract. The question is what remains “live” now, in enforceable form, and what mechanisms reliably block the worst readings.

On the “Jews/goyim” comparison and the social dynamic you’re describing: yes—there are real asymmetries in what gets criticized safely in public. Sometimes that’s because people weaponize criticism as cover for racism. Sometimes it’s because institutions have trained people to treat critique as blasphemy. Sometimes it’s because “Islamophobia” has become a rhetorical shield that prevents honest scrutiny. I don’t deny any of that.

But here’s where I’m drawing the line in the sand:

I will critique Islamic doctrines and institutions precisely, hard, and without apology.

I will not declare an entire faith “evil” as an essence, because that’s not analysis; it’s a totalizing verdict that inevitably smears millions of people who are not enacting the worst readings—and who often resist them.

If you want to move this forward productively, give me your strongest “still live today” examples from the Quran itself (not hadith, not jurists), and your strongest example from mainstream jurisprudence/state practice. Then we can do the real work: what is the claim, what is the mechanism of harm, what constrains it (if anything), and what should be rejected outright.

![video](https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/ursLAIjTVAg)

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resolutionaryman · 5/10/2026, 7:11:45 PM · permalink

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saarnok · 5/11/2026, 12:29:38 AM · permalink

Quite a lot to respond to, and I'll do a poor job of it in specific, but let's establish the meaning of the key word here: Evil.  
  
We're apparently in agreement that virtue signaling over "sins of the past" is just silly at best and likely entirely counterproductive.  
  
We require some sort of timeless gauge by which to address this issue which doesn't change according to the sensibilities of the moment and which fits every possible instance without appeal to jurisprudence, "god says so", "the founding fathers", etc.. Yes?  
  
This means establishing some sort of baseline from which ethical actions and moral positions can be analyzed and graded.  
  
For me, that baseline is Free Will.  
  
The single factor which exists in all contexts of moral consideration is the voluntary consent of people in their interactions which is itself based on the idea that it is people's natural right to make decisions, and beyond that it is the basic nature of people to make decisions: It is the defining characteristic of a person as such.  
  
To the extent an ideology, system, institution, etc. subverts, thwarts, discourages or prevents voluntary consent, especially if it makes a pretense of preserving same, that thing or person is evil.  
  
Every possible example of evil, unethical, criminal action in the past, present or future is bad precisely because it violates informed voluntary consent. It is evil because it seeks to eliminate the exercise of free will in human interaction.  
  
Being about 10 thousand times more familiar with the Bible than the Quran, the ready example from Numbers 15:32 springs to mind wherein the Israelites find a man gathering sticks on the Sabbath and stone him to death.  
  
This story basically oozes evil from it's pores. "The Law" is simply imposed on the Israelites, they don't consent, they obey or die. It's imposed on the man in the desert simply because he happens to be within reach of them. He's not covered under their existing law and they have to get a special ruling to decide what to do with him and then they kill HIM for breaking THEIR law which governs THEM.  
  
This is the establishment of the principle that THEY, the chosen people, can and should impose THEIR law on anyone they have the power to impose it on.  
  
This also serves to illustrate that one doesn't need a direct command to "slay the unbeliever" in order to effect the same outcome.  
  
This serves to illustrate that Judaism is evil. Something I can say essentially with no pushback.  
  
Now, can we agree on this definition of evil as I've illustrated it?

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resolutionaryman · 5/11/2026, 1:45:30 AM · permalink

I agree with your baseline: a timeless moral gauge has to bottom out in something like informed, voluntary consent — free will expressed as real agency in human-to-human affairs. Where coercion replaces agency — especially while pretending to "protect" virtue, order, or righteousness — you reliably get what we'd reasonably call evil.

Where I'd tighten your framing is this: the core problem isn't a tribe-label ("Judaism," "Christianity," "Islam") so much as an architecture — centralized moral certainty plus enforcement power plus insulation from accountability. That combination consistently produces consent-violation, whether it wears the clothing of religion, state, party, corporation, or expert technocracy. Expertise isn't the danger; unaccountable expertise fused to coercion is.

Think of it this way: every major tradition, every ideology, every system of governance sits somewhere on a wheel. At the hub — the center — you find the things that actually converge across cultures, races, and centuries: accountability, compassion, the refusal to dehumanize. The further any institution moves outward along its spoke — toward monopolized truth, enforcement mechanisms, and insulated authority — the further it gets from that center, and the further it gets from every other tradition doing the same thing in the opposite direction. The spokes diverge. The consent violations multiply. The hub is where the shared moral core lives, and no single label owns it.

On Numbers 15:32 specifically, your reading makes moral sense under the consent standard: an imposed law, non-voluntary jurisdiction, lethal punishment, and the outsourcing of moral reasoning to an authority-claim. It's a clean illustration of how law becomes evil when it overrides agency and then sanctifies the override.

Where I part ways is the jump from "this text depicts consent-violating coercion" to "therefore Judaism is evil, full stop."  
  
A few reasons:

First, a text describing coercion doesn't logically entail that every adherent or every interpretive tradition must enact coercion. Communities relate to texts through interpretive ethics, historical context, and evolving norms — sometimes in ways that explicitly restrain the coercive readings.

Second, if the definition is consent-centered, then no tradition is a monolith. The moral evaluation should track actual practices, institutions, and enforcement mechanisms — not identity labels.

Third, and most importantly: the same consent-violating architecture appears across essentially all large institutions when they gain enforcement power. Inquisitions, forced conversions, apostasy regimes, compelled tribute, caste stratification, state propaganda, education monopolies, economic coercion. The root diagnosis has to generalize. Coercive moral authority is the recurring failure mode — not the particular spoke it rides in on.

On Islam, I'm not using the term the way mainstream orthodoxy or state-backed identity politics uses it. Quran 2:62 is the principle I'd point to: moral standing isn't monopolized by institutional membership. Accountability, sincere faith, and righteous action are what matter — regardless of label. By that reading, anyone genuinely aligned with truth, justice, and mercy is aligned with what "submission" actually means, whether they're Jewish, Christian, Sabean, or otherwise. That's not a diplomatic softening — it's the verse actively breaking the religious monopoly on righteousness.

So: I accept your definition of evil as what subverts or nullifies informed, voluntary consent. Numbers 15 is a strong example of that dynamic in action. But the deeper, transferable lesson is what happens whenever any institution — any spoke — claims a monopoly on moral truth and enforces it. The further out from the hub, the more they diverge from each other and from the center they all claim to represent.

The practical test that applies across religions, states, and ideologies stays the same: does the system preserve informed choice, real exit rights, transparency, and limits on enforcement — and does it treat dissenters as human agents rather than problems to be managed? Where the answer is no, evil by our shared definition isn't a risk. It's the operating principle.  
  
One additional concern I feel compelled to name:

None of the above requires me to fully trust the texts themselves — and I don't, not uncritically. My reservations about the preservation and translation of religious scripture, particularly the Torah and Bible, run deep. The work of Dr. Amon Hillman — a classicist with a PhD in ancient Greek and a background in medical pharmacology — raises a question that deserves to be taken seriously on its own philological terms, entirely separate from his more controversial conclusions: that what we accept as ancient Hebrew translated into Greek may in fact have been Greek first, later rendered into Hebrew and other languages, and that the directionality of that translation matters enormously.

The argument is linguistic and, on its face, difficult to dismiss. Ancient Greek carried somewhere between 250,000 and 500,000 unique words. Ancient Hebrew, by contrast, had roughly 8,000. The philological principle Hillman applies is straightforward: you cannot translate from a lower degree of technical precision to a higher one. Granularity only travels downward. A language of that richness and specificity — one capable of expressing calculus and physics in words alone, one whose colloquialisms and technical vocabulary leave fingerprints no translation can replicate — does not get enriched by being filtered through something far simpler. The Septuagint, he argues, reads as an original Greek document precisely because it carries those fingerprints. The Hebrew texts read as what they likely are: back-translations, necessarily losing resolution at every step.

This is the part of Hillman's work I find most defensible and most important, because it stands independent of his more explosive interpretive claims, which remain contested and would require independent corroboration before carrying the same weight. The linguistic directionality argument does not. It rests on methodology that any serious classicist can evaluate on its own terms.

What it suggests to me is not that everything is false, but that institutional hands have been on these texts for a very long time — selecting, translating, emphasizing, omitting — and that those hands have rarely been disinterested. If the coercive architecture I described above was already operating during the formation and transmission of the texts themselves, then what's being enforced in the name of scripture may not represent original moral intent so much as the accumulated interests of whoever controlled the manuscript tradition at each successive stage.

That makes institutionalized religious coercion doubly troubling: it overrides agency in the present while potentially defending a version of truth that was already compromised before it arrived. The enforcement protects the corruption.

This doesn't collapse into nihilism about all scripture. The perennialist test still holds: where teachings across unconnected cultures, time periods, and traditions converge — where the spokes all point to the same hub — that convergence carries evidential weight that no single corrupted manuscript tradition can manufacture or erase. The further any institution moves outward along its spoke, toward monopolized truth and enforced conformity, the further it travels from that center and from every other tradition doing the same thing in the opposite direction.  
  
But it does mean I hold every institutionally transmitted text with a degree of suspicion proportional to how much institutional power shaped its journey to us — and on that count, the Torah and Bible and the Hadith of Islam warrant considerable suspicion indeed.

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braven · 5/14/2026, 5:14:25 PM · permalink

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resolutionaryman · 5/14/2026, 5:30:26 PM · permalink

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