Across the world in places like Pakistan, Sudan, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iraq and Somalia, Muslims are at risk of attack. But they are not threatened by annihilation from Americans or Israelis or Britons. They are not being put in danger by gangs of militant Christians spouting gibberish inspired by the Book of Revelation, nor are they worried about incurring injury from a Jew armed with a giant weapons-grade Channakah doughnut. It seems that the most immediate danger to Muslims and the most pressing risk to their safety, is much, much closer to home.

The primary danger posed to individual Muslims, of whatever path within Islam and of whatever level of religious observance, is other Muslims and the ideology of Islam itself.

We saw recently how scores of Muslim children in a Pakistani school were murdered, by other Muslims and we know that the majority of Muslims who are being killed in Syria and Iraq are being killed by other Muslims. In Afghanistan, Muslims murder and terrorise other Muslims for being the wrong sort of Muslim or, as the killers see it, as not being Muslim enough and in Nigeria the nihilist Muslims kill and oppress the non-nihilist Muslims.

Things are not much better for Muslims in Britain’s towns and cities either. If you are woman or a gay Muslim then you have everything to fear from Islam, and those who wield its communal power. Muslim women escaping from abusive relationships often live in fear of their new location being reported back to their family, because some families have an extensive network of contacts that they could use to track down the errant woman. If nature has a dealt you a tricky hand and you are gay or bisexual and a Muslim, then unless you are very lucky, you will spend your time constantly looking over your shoulder, scared of Islam, and knowing that there are enough headcases in your community who would love to carry out the Shariah punishment for being gay.

If you are an enlightened Muslim, or a free thinking Muslim, then it is likely you will have to endure death threats, attacks on your property and exclusion from communal religious life. If you belong to a minority Islamic sect that has eschewed violent Jihad, or choose to selectively read the Koran and other Islamic works in order to fashion a culture of religious liberalism, then your life is probably in danger from other Muslims.

Islam and its strict adherents kill, but before they go out and attack non-Muslims they first terrorise other Muslims. Islam creates a climate of fear and a culture of violence, and it is probably difficult for many non-Muslims, for whom religious freedom is a given, to get a handle on what that must be like to live with the constant fear of violence from neighbours, family and co-religionists. It must be crushing to be, for example, a woman in a Muslim culture who knows that lifelong servitude is her future and that this cannot be changed. Imagine being someone with liberal religious views in somewhere like Islamabad, they know that if they voice their views too loudly then they will be attacked by mobs of violent nutters. I can imagine it and it makes me shudder.

We should have empathy for those trapped within Islam, especially when they really don’t want to be, but we should also use internal Islamic violence as an illustration of what Islamic society is really like and make judgements of Islam based on behaviour and culture. We hear plenty of fine sounding reasonable words coming out of the mouths of Imams, Islamic community leaders, activists and other similar people, but these words are worthless when set beside the evidence of the backward, violent societies that Islam has created. A genuine religion of peace would not have created some of the illiterate, economically ruined, corrupt, violent, culturally desolate hells formed in nations that are guided by Islam.

Muslim individuals are in danger, a brief glance around the worlds media can tell us that, but they are not, as the mendacious grievance-mongering taqiyya artists of Tell Mama would like to have us believe, in danger from non-Muslim ‘fascists’, but from Islam itself, and the significant minority of its followers who believe that Islam should be imposed with violence and the threat of violence.

Imagine a culture where anybody who pops his head up and says something like: ‘free yourselves, you have nothing to lose but your chains’, and gets decapitated for it, and you have imagined a society run by Islam.