In a free country people should be free to choose whatever spiritual path they choose. Up to a point I’m firmly in the camp of Queen Elizabeth I, who once was said to have declared when asked about her religious position: ‘I do not want to have windows onto men’s souls’. To that monarch, the faith that is inside a person’s head is entirely up to them and should not be an issue for the government and should not be restricted. I say that I agree with Queen Elizabeth I up to a point, because there are some theological and ideological paths that are identifiably bad and which attract bad people who often go on to carry out or plot evil acts.

It should not matter to the life of the nation whether someone chooses to follow Hashem, Jesus, Buddha, the pantheon of Hinduism, neo-Paganism or the Flying Spaghetti Monster or any one of many other peaceful religious paths. It is up to the individual to decide whether or not they bind themselves to the precepts of these faiths, especially when their chosen religious path is completely compatible with the society and culture that has been built in the United Kingdom, which many are. It goes without saying that a person who chooses one of these paths should not be treated as being of any less value as a person as anybody else and neither should they be looked at with any degree of suspicion. Very few people who have chosen one of these peaceful religious paths listed above have caused me much personal aggravation and neither have individuals person choices of these belief system brought many problems to the wider community.

Sadly that is not the case with those who choose Islam. Those who choose to follow this path seem to fall very quickly into a culture that approves of violence against unbelievers and a theology that encourages such violence. Islam is also an ideology that attracts those who are inherently violent, who are mentally disturbed. People such as the violent and the mad or even the misguided, who become enmeshed in Islam often do not take that long before they start to show the symptoms of this awful spiritual disease.

Converts to Islam are regularly implicated in or convicted of crimes that have at their root the criminal’s adherence to Islam. Time and time again we are regaled in the media, both mainstream and alternative media, of those who convert to Islam and very shortly afterwards don the violent mantle of an ideology which has over the centuries since its formation, brought misery and destruction to wherever it has invaded or foolishly been tolerated.

We seem to be in the situation where we are presented with at least one violent convert to Islam per month. This is a figure that more peaceful faiths cannot reach unless it is in their own nightmares, as these other non Muslim ideologies are either not founded on violence or where theological violence has been abandoned or reinterpreted in the light of later religious and secular knowledge. You have to look long and hard to find similar acts of unjustified violence carried out by Christians, Jews, Buddhists or Hindus, especially by new adherents to these faiths, but we can find copious numbers of new and very violent Muslims.

One of the latest cases of a new Muslim going typically and Islamically violent comes from South Wales. A young convert to Islam who lived in the town of Llantrisant in the Rhondda Valley became the latest member of the group that could be called the mad and the sad, to be convicted of a terror related offence.

Sky News and other outlets have reported that a Welsh teenager, Lloyd Gunton aged 17, has been convicted of planning a terror attack in the city of Cardiff, already a place with a significant jihadi problem, and promoting ISIS. He’s been gaoled for life with a recommendation that he serve a minimum of 11 years in prison.

Sky News said:

Lloyd Gunton, 17, had armed himself with a hammer and knife and wrote what was described as a martyrdom letter as part of his plot to kill “non-believers” in Cardiff.

This newly minted Islamic savage, who like a number of others who choose Islam and choose Islamic violence, suffers from a mental impairment, had intended to engage in mass murder in the Welsh capital. He had plotted to cause mass casualties with a vehicle and other weapons such as a hammer and a knife. This Islamic savage was stopped by the police just hours away from Gunton carrying out his slaughter plan.

Gunton had researched a number of targets where he thought he might be able to kill the greatest number of ‘unbelievers’. These included shopping centres, a library, a theatre and the Principality Stadium that was to host a Justin Bieber concert. If this savage had gone ahead with his plan to attack one of these places we could have been looking at a death toll that could well have equalled or exceeded the 22 innocent persons deaths caused by another Islamic savage in Manchester in May 2017.

We should be thankful that this violent Islamic savage has been caged for a long time. But, this case should make us more aware of the danger posed by converts to Islam. Those who voluntarily choose Islam, knowing what it is and the sort of danger that this ideology poses for the rest of us, have to be quite frank, departed the path of decency and should no longer be protected by the cultural cloak of freedom of religion.

We have a right to be suspicious of those who choose to follow paths that bring only evil and destruction, we should therefore be suspicious of and show opprobrium to, those who choose the ideology of Islam. For a person to choose Islam, when there is so much evidence both contemporary and historical that this ideology brings misery and oppression, needs to be called out and criticised.

To choose Islam is not merely to choose to follow a particular deity or even set of deities, it is to align oneself with a theology steeped in fascistic religious violence and supremacism. Converting to Islam should not be seen by members of civilised societies as a valid form of spiritual expression because of the violence, the destruction and the cultural vandalism that characterises Islam in nearly all its mainstream forms.

If someone today said that they were converting to Stalinism or Nazism or Racialism then many other people whether their views were left, right or centre would treat those who did so with a large amount of contempt. Those who chose one of the destructive ‘isms’ listed above would, quite rightly in my view, be argued with, publicly and privately vilified, mocked and shunned. It’s time to bite the bullet and treat those who choose the dangerous, destructive and oppressive path of Islam with a similar sort of disgust and hostility with which we would treat anybody else who chooses voluntarily to be a Stalinst, a Nazi or a Racialist. Islam is a bad ideology that attracts bad people, we should no longer treat those who choose this path with any respect whatsoever.