As many of us expected would be the case, Mickael Harpon, the French police employee who last year went violently mad at his workplace, killing four people with a knife before he was killed by police himself, was a convert to Islam who had been radicalised. Yet again we have had deaths and injuries caused by a person who did not have Islam foisted upon them by being born into a Muslim family, but instead actively chose Islam as a life path. A decade after converting he became radicalised and on the path of jihad.
French investigators appear to have confirmed Harpon’s jihad motivation through a forensic search of his phone where there was one internet search, made an hour before the attack, looking for information on ‘how to kill kuffars’. I think that this removes any doubt that any might have had that this attack was not jihad.
There do seem to be an awful lot of those who convert to Islam ending up on the path of jihad. Whilst there may be many individuals who convert to Islam who do not do this, there is a disproptionate number of Islamic converts who go bad like this. This is especially noticeable when we compare those who convert to other monotheistic faiths. I’ve known loads of people who have comverted to Christianity and Judaism and I’ve only known one who went a bit ‘iffy’ although there were no deaths or injuries involved, just someone who had a mental illness episode. Islamic converts on the other hand do seem to be highly overrepresented when it comes to those who do violence in the name of their faith or as a method of advancing their faith.
Converts to a faith often take more orthodox paths within their faiths. I’ve seen Christian converts who have taken a much more literalist path and have engaged in evengelistic activites more enthusiatically than some of those who come from families that have been churchgoing for generations. Similarly, those Jewish converts that I’ve enountered are sometimes the most vigorous when it comes to following the Jewish dietary laws or following the laws of charity.
The large number of people choosing Islam and who go bad may be down to the fact that Islam at heart is a violent religion of conquest and normal non-violent people get groomed and wrapped up in that idea. It may also be the case that people who are inherently violent are attracted to the violence wihtin Islam. This phenomena of choosers of Islam becoming violent at an alarmingly common rate sets it apart from the other monotheistic faiths. Yes Islam is different, but not in any nice way.
This fact that Islam is different and too often its converts declare war on the rest of us is going to give many Western societies a bit of a dilemma. That dilemma is this: How is it possible to reconcile having a society where there is freedom of religion, in my view a damn good thing, whilst at the same time having society being protected from a religious ideology whose new adherents go bad very often? Personally if someone wants to go through the Koran pick out all the ‘nice’ bits, live their lives via good principles and the few nice bits of Islam and call themselves a Muslim then that doesn’t bother me and shouldn’t be a problem for others either. The problem is this is not what is happening. There are too many people choosing Islam and then either remarkably quickly or as in the case of Harpon, after some delay, turning to violence.
We need to recognise that problem as a society and do something about it maybe by having those who convert to Islam more closely monitored by both the state and the wider community than they are at present. We have the situation where freedom of religion allows not just the good but the bad when it comes to theological and faith paths, the question for me at least is, how do we deal with the bad without adversely affecting the good? It’s a difficult dilemma for sure and one we should all discuss. It may well be that in order to survive as societies where freedom of religion can exist, Western nations and Western culture may just have to accept that although the vast majority of individual Muslims are peaceful, Islam is plainly not, and because of that not allow Islam to access the benefits of a free religious society. In a way the West may have to kill off the idea of absolute freedom of religion because bad ideologies are exploiting this right, but that is ‘destroying the village in order to save it’ and brings with it its own set of problems.
