Maajid Nawaz Quotes

Back when I was an Islamist, I thought our ideology was like communism - and I still do. That makes me optimistic. Because what happened to communism? It was discredited as an idea. It lost.

Of course, Islamist terrorists must be captured or killed and their networks disrupted. But to stop their movement’s growth, their ideology must also be undermined.

Some of those drawn into the holy war had been secular nationalists only a few years before. If one looks at the biographies of these people, remarkable continuities are revealed.

The Muslim Brotherhood is the parent organization of extreme ideology. They are the godfather of all terrorist organizations. They spread it all over the world.

There are too many people sympathetic to radical Islam. We should be looking at them more carefully and finding out how we can infiltrate them.

ISIL is inspiring groups that already exist to rebrand themselves, but in rebranding themselves into a more radical ideology. That's what makes it dangerous.

One of the themes of 'The Longest War,' my book, which came out before the Arab spring happened, was how al-Qaida and bin Laden was losing the war of ideas in the Muslim world, not because the United States was winning them, but because al-Qaida was simply losing them.

We want to go further than preventing people from becoming terrorists and focus on a broader approach to counter-extremism - both violent and non-violent.

No one is born a terrorist, but the route to become one is surprisingly easy. We need to listen to those who have been there, and those who have made their way back, if we want to stop others from taking their first steps down this same path into darkness.

We need to make sure these Islamic terrorist organizations don't become mainstream. We're fighting an ideology as much as a group of radical terrorists.

The survival of ISIS's ideology is success enough for them. We must spare no effort in denying ISIS this success.

The way the terrorist is trained to operate, especially the suicide terrorists, makes punishment and the threat of punishment far less valuable to those who would prevent the crime.

We need to defeat al Queda and other terrorist organizations.

Repentance means you change your mind so deeply that it changes you.

Terrorists cannot win unless they affect the way we think and act.

You can’t negotiate with them. You can’t buy them off. They want a change of the world. The only way to defeat the Islamic Fundamentalist terrorists is to persuade them to abandon their effort…. It must be an intellectual victory.

We cannot use force everywhere that a radical ideology takes root.

People don’t get radicalized overnight. It’s a process that takes 3 or 4 years.

We see what Hamas, what kind of this organization, how radicals, their ideology, and we see the consequences every day. You know, the rockets on Israel - and I don't know any other countries that they will accept reality with, every day, rockets on their towns, cities.

Libya became a rat's nest of extremism after NATO helped depose dictator Moammar Gadhafi, and it now exports weapons, jihadists, and ideology to Europe, Africa and the Middle East.

The condition that the Taliban part with al Qaeda is not just a condition, it is an objective. We must convince them that al Qaeda ideology and dogma will not help them.

Let's have a conversation about how we destroy ISIS.

Terrorists regard themselves as a vanguard. They're trying to mobilize others to their cause. I mean, every specialist on terrorism knows that.

Donald Trump is an extremist leader who came out of nowhere. He's self-financed, recruits through social media, attracts his followers with a radical ideology to take over the world, and is actively trying to promote a war between Islam and the West.

Tamerlan Tsarnaev, one of the two brothers who carried out the marathon bombing, was a non-practicing Muslim who only became an Islamist militant once his dreams of becoming an Olympic boxer faded. At the time of the attack, he was unemployed.