It’s hard to imagine having an AK-47 with you at your wedding, but it seems that in Turkey this is quite commonplace – albeit against the law. The law is there because people could get killed arsing about with guns at a wedding, and this is precisely what happened in Akcagoze yesterday: the groom got a bit over-tumescent, and accidentally killed his father plus two aunts.

Swinging east to Pakistan, a couple from Birmingham were killed out there because their daughter had turned down the bloke lined up for her. Her parents being modern enough to accept her decision, the groom’s lot carried out their murder as an ‘honour killing’. That phrase strikes me as having the same problem as ‘professional foul’ in soccer, but anyway dishonour has been met with summary execution, and that’s that.

Spin that globe harder now and over the oceans to Indonesia, where radical cleric Abu Bakar Bashir, once imprisoned for his links to the terror group behind the Bali bombings, was arrested early today for alleged involvement with a new militant network. Being a man of the cloth does not seem to have given Abu much of a dilemma to date: the Bali bomb killed 200 people, and although he only got out of the prison cells last month, he is already suspected of involvement in three new terror cells. It must’ve been force of habit.

Now – a question: have I chosen these three stories from the BBC’s world Top Ten this morning because I’m a racist? I think the answer is no. I’ve chosen them because of the following undeniable realities:

1. Three out of the top ten are about murderous insanity in Muslim countries
2. Given the steady toll of Islamist violence in the last decade, Islam easily outstrips any other religion for death, mutilation and hatred
3. All three stories involve religious ceremonies and clerics.

To be half-awake and write about such stuff these days is to be branded a bigot. I am not and have never been an extremist. The only Party I’ve ever joined was the SDP, Gold help me. But every day, at least a dozen times a day, these news stories appear, one after the other, about stonings and noses being chopped off and hotels being bombed. And these do not say to me that this is all a plot by the Satanic West to destabilise Islam, because that is confusing us in the West with people who give a damn about any of this mediaeval religious bollocks. They say to me, ‘We are dealing with barbaric cultures here, and Western Europe – whatever its other faults – is not barbaric. It does not need any more of this’.

There are many misguided and ignorant people just gagging to have Turkey in the EU. There are just as many people insistent that we should tolerate Islamic bigotry by Pakistanis towards free speech and democracy in the UK. And if places like Turkey and Pakistan and Indonesia ever – just once – condemned Islamism, then I’d be the first to say ‘live and let live’.

It is a common technique of the Establishment these days to force anyone with an independent and well-documented view into one extreme or the other. The preferred smear of choice for The Slog has always been ‘a site with fair-Right crypto-Nazi views’. It’s laughable: the Tory Party is too right-wing for me much of the time.

I don’t want a command economy and I don’t want Friedmanite economics. I didn’t want Thatcher and I didn’t want Blair. I don’t want a multicultural society, I want a multi-ethnic society with one culture. I don’t want austerity, but I know I can’t possibly go on borrowing money forever. I don’t want Sharia Law, and I don’t want law-abiding people being deported. I don’t mind genuine asylum seekers, but I don’t want them paid more to live on than UK OAPs. I’m very happy for people to be gay and happy, but I don’t think gay marriage is a culturally sound idea. I deplore inherited wealth beyond a certain acceptable level, but I am anti-Stateist on most issues.

The Left – assuming they couldn’t make the Nazi charge stick – would patronisingly observe that these are the ideas of a middle of the road bourgeois. Well, fine for them to put me in whatever pigeon-hole they can hate, but I’m not a LibDem and I dislike all forms of class consciousness. I am an anti-privilege empiricist radical, and I suspect that somewhere out there are millions like me. All I need now is a snappier name.