Judges at the Central Criminal Court in London have recently gaoled a woman who converted to Islam and then went on to plot to carry out a terror attack at St Paul’s Cathedral in the capital. Michelle Ramsden, 44, was gaoled for life by Mr Justice Sweeney for her part in the planned attack.

Ramsden was told by the Judge that she was a ‘danger to the public’ and ‘there’s no way of saying when you will be fit for release’.

Various press reports say that Ramsden originally became impressed and involved with Islam when a Muslim family generously helped her when she needed it. She converted to Islam in 2007 but became disillusioned with moderate Islam and stopped going to the mosque. Ramsden became more and more involved with Islamic extremism and was a member of online groups of Islamic extremists.

Ramsden was caught after she expressed her desire to carry out a bomb and gun attack on St Paul’s and said that she wanted to destroy the Cathedral and ‘kill as many people as possible’. Her comments came to the attention of the security services and anti-terror police and she met up with a man who Ramsden supposed was a bomb maker but instead was an undercover officer. Ramsden’s claims of wanting to carry out a bomb and gun attack on St Paul’s was given extra credence after she visited the site in order to find out about the building’s security.

Hopefully Britons will not be bothered by this nutcase for a long time whilst she is incarcerated. Unfortunately for us, there are many more lunatic converts to Islam to replace Ramsden.

Ramsden and her choice to join Islam and descend into jihadism is not a singular one. There are many others who have chosen Islam and then some time later, choose to either go on terrorist rampages or be caught planning a terrorist rampage. This is now becoming such a common occurrence that it’s easy to believe that there must be something badly wrong with Islam for it to attract so many bad, violent and destructive people? For Islam to attract so many individuals who would be willing to carry out acts of violence in the name of Islam, must surely dispel the notion that Islam is at heart a ‘religion of peace’.

It’s really odd isn’t it that we rarely if ever see converts to Anglicanism, Jainism, Judaism or Methodism, act like this? When was the last time that you heard of a Methodist suicide bomber or saw the headline ‘Convert to Methodism gaoled for terror plot’? The answer is that neither Methodism or these other religious paths do not have at their heart a message of ‘kill, kill, kill,’ or a bloodthirsty deity at its head nor scripture that orders its contemporary followers to murder people in the name of these faiths.

Whilst I am probably the first to agree that there are many thousands of decent hard working Muslims in the UK, I believe that they are decent individuals in spite of Islam and not because of Islam. Many of these Muslims know little about Islam or its history, only what small amount they’ve been told by parents and Imams. Many Muslims don’t even appear to have read the Koran in a language that they understand, thereby robbing them of an understanding of just how awful Islam as an ideology truly is.

Too many of these converts to Islam do read the Koran and other parts of Islamic scripture in their own language, therefore they do understand what Islam is all about and can see the exhortations that Islamic scripture contains for Muslims to commit acts of violence in the contemporary world. The path that has been walked by Ramsden, which is one where a person becomes interested in Islam and then steadily becomes more and more extreme, is a path that has been walked by many others. It is a path that has led individuals to commit horrific acts of terror such as the murder of Lee Rigby in Woolwich in 2013.

Despite believing, as Queen Elizabeth I did, that the State should ‘not have windows into men’s souls’ and thereby believing in freedom of religion, I do believe that there is something so wrong and so dangerous about Islam that those who actively choose this path are probably dangerous wrong’uns themselves. Maybe there’s a case to be made that those who choose to convert to Islam are probably those who would also be likely to go extreme quite easily and swiftly and such individuals should be treated with some degree of suspicion both by the State and by the people.

Freedom of belief and freedom to choose a religious path are important rights in a free society and by and large the exercise of these rights only really affects an individual or their immediate family. But, the growing number of individuals who convert to Islam and then go onto commit terror attacks or plot terror attacks, represent an attack on religious freedom as shown by the hatred of Christians expressed by this latest nutcase convert. A person converting to Methodism or Judaism or Hinduism, does not represent any threat to freedom or to our nation and society. Unfortunately, on the other hand, as we’ve seen so often, those who choose the path of Islam do represent a grave threat to security and should be seen as such.