You don’t have to be insane to choose Islam, but it helps

Another day arrives and so does another mentally unbalanced convert to Islam. According to a report on the Birmingham Live website (h/t ROP), Alex Davies aged 26, who converted to Islam when he was 20, flipped out, travelled to Manchester where he stabbed a random victim six times from behind. He was convicted by a jury of attempted murder after pleading not guilty due to insanity and was sent for an indefinite period to the Ashworth maximum security mental hospital for an indefinite period.

Davies, formerly a resident of Manchester, claimed that he heard voices whilst he was in Birmingham telling him that he was a ‘Muslim leader’ and that he had to stab a random non Muslim in order to prove himself as ‘a fighter’. He then went to Manchester where he stabbed Jaroslaw Poterucha in the back.

However this was not the only incident that Davies was involved in. A few days after the stabbing, which occurred in August 2016, Davies was seen wearing full Islamic dress at the RAF Northolt base in West London. Birmingham Live said of this incident that Davies was seen in obviously Islamic clothing and chanting in a private area of the base. Military Police confronted him and removed him from the base but as he was not carrying anything suspicious and refused to identify himself they had no alternative but to let him go.

Davies then went on to threaten two pizza shop workers and is said to have said: ‘Can I kill you now? You are not Muslims’. He was arrested for this incident and sent to HMP Bullwood in Oxfordshire on remand to await trial. Whilst on remand he attacked prison officers three times on one occasion with a wooden stake studded with razor blades and screaming Allah hu Akbar during the attack. Shortly after this incident he confessed to the Manchester stabbing incident and was arrested whilst in prison.

This is a particularly disturbing case and one that raises quite a few questions for me. Questions such as did the Muslims who converted him realise that he was mad before they converted him but just didn’t care? If this is the case then this is a major ethics fail. Converting the obviously mad is not something that would be ethically acceptable among either mainstream Christian churches or among any of the different Jewish traditions.

Unfortunately this does not seem to the case with Islam who will take converts no matter how violently disturbed they may be. This for me brings into play the possibility that whoever converted him knew that he was a violent nutter, but thought Davies might be useful in spreading terror? If this is what happened then it may be an indication that we have a severe problem with Islamic groups sending the mad out to wreak havoc and it is a problem that is going to have to be dealt with pretty sharpish. Another scenario that could apply with regards to Davies is that it was Islam itself that sent him down this path? It may well be that the way that Davies immersed himself in what is a very violent ideology, awakened some dormant mental vulnerability and that this scenario may be playing out in the heads of other vulnerable individuals who convert to Islam. As I have said before, there is the strong possibility that converts to Islam, many of whom seem to have ‘issues’, constitute a grave threat to security and that more control needs to be put on such converts by both the government and society at large.

If nothing else, this case proves that you don’t have to be a complete mental fraggle to embrace Islam, but it surely must help. The route that Davies took is one that many others including both of the murderers of Fusilier Lee Rigby. It is a route that has also been travelled by some mentally ill individuals who were once personal friends of mine who chose Islam and that act of choosing Islam damaged both the individual themselves and those around them. The act of choosing Islam does seem to have a habit of making mentally ill people much worse and bringing out previously suppressed or latent violent feelings. No other religion in the modern world, apart from Islam, seems to create or nurture so many obvious madmen and it is now time to start being much more worried about the damage that Islam is doing to vulnerable individuals such as Davies. Davies could have killed people and it is only by sheer luck that he did not. I fear that the future will bring many more incidents like this and sadly more than a few people may end up dying at the hands of people who convert to Islam and suddenly develop a desire to kill.