Anyone watch Larry King interview Maajid Nawaz last night? Wow.
KING: We're back with Maajid Nawaz. I promise you some more time because this is too important a story and we got a little jammed tonight. I apologize. You travel the world, speak to young Muslims attracted to one side. How do you bring them over?
NAWAZ: A key to what we do is challenging what we call the narrative. That is the propaganda that Islamic extremist organization are so adept at selling to young, vulnerable, Muslim minds. That propaganda involves the twisting of foreign policies grievances and the justification through twisting of religious theology for the stances that these extremist organizations take.
I call it a narrative, the Islamist narrative, and we have to start challenging that narrative. We're doing that, the world's first counter-extremism think tank here, based in London. We travel the world and we do that.
Sadly, I have to say that currently, both in Pakistan and in the United States, yes, there is an effective counter-terrorism strategy. But in both countries, what is lacking, what is the gaping vacuum is that there is no counter-radicalization strategy. Before somebody becomes a terrorist, they have to be an extremist. An extremists usually operates within the law because it involves extremism in terms of ideas rather than violence.
But it's the prerequisite to terrorist violence. And there is no policy in place at the moment to challenge these extremist ideas.
KING: How do you do it?
NAWAZ: The key thing is we have to, first of all, have the skills to identify what the ideology is, how it differentiates from Islam as a faith, and then isolate it from the faith, and refute the key tenants of the propaganda.
So for example, the idea that America is at war against Islam and Muslims. Yes, America went into Iraq with Britain and other countries. Yes, America and Britain went into Afghanistan. But they didn't go into Iraq because Iraqis were Muslims. And they certainly didn't go into Afghanistan because the Afghanis were Muslims. If this was a war against Islam and Muslims, then don't these people know that in the United States of America, there is a mosque in every state and there are many, many American Muslims. There are many British Muslims.
And like Hitler, who started with the Jews inside Germany, if this was a war against Islam and Muslims, you could begin by starting with Muslims inside America. So it's by picking apart these contradictions that we refute the narrative. Currently, there is no counter-radicalization strategy to do that in the state. There is no equivalent of a counter-extremism think tank. Nor is there such a thing in Pakistan.
My request, what I'd like to emphasize, is that the U.S. government, U.S. media, U.S. civil society and U.S. communities -- and the same for Pakistan -- they need to start to devising a counter- radicalization strategy and not just a counter-terrorism strategy.
KING: We only have a minute. Is there a high percentage of Muslim extremists?
NAWAZ: The narrative is spreading far and wide. There's a very tiny minority among Muslims who actually turn to terrorist violence. What we are concerned about is the propaganda that this is somehow a war against Islam and Muslims. That is spreading far and wide. That doesn't translate in the majority of cases to violence. But it does provide the mood music to which suicide bombers dance. That's why we're so concerned about addressing that narrative.
Part of that, for example, the media can play a role in not adopting the binary, polarized, them or us world view. For example, by publicizing the fact that the first person to report this failed amateur bomber in Times Square was himself a Muslim who reported it, who spotted the car bomb, a street vendor.
KING: Good point.
NAWAZ: And that picks apart the narrative. It defeats this mentality that al Qaeda and extremists are so keen on propagating.
KING: Thank you, Maajid. We're going to have you back very soon. Maajid Nawaz, former leader of an Islamic extremist group, fighting against it now, extraordinary story. |
