Tipsheet

Former Islamic Radical: We Must Undermine The Ideology ISIS Believes is a Noble, Higher Calling

Maajid Nawaz is a former radical leader who once believed in building a Islamic caliphate through terrorism. After stint in prison, he had a change of heart and when he got out, he founded the first anti-radicalization think-tank. 

Last night Nawaz made an appearance on The Kelly File to give viewers some insights into the beliefs and motives of ISIS, the terror army that has beheaded two American journalists while issuing direct threat to the United States.

"There is absolutely no justification for what they've [ISIS] have done. We must not only condemn ISIS' tactical beheading of innocent people, including journalists from across the world and in particular Sotloff today, but we must go further than that because mere condemnation is not enough. We've got to actively work to undermine not just them as an organization, but to undermine the ideology, the poisonous ideology that they are based upon," Nawaz said. "Calling them [ISIS] psychopaths does kind of let them off too easily. They bare 100 percent responsibility for their actions. They subscribe to a dogma that they justify in their own minds what they're doing. They think somehow they're serving a higher, noble cause and it's that cause, it's that narrative,  it's that ideological world view that we need to undermine. We need to actively work to undermine it on a civil society level so that it becomes unattractive and as unappealing Soviet Communism has become today." 

Nawaz went on to explain that we've seen this kind of evil before in Nazi Germany where atrocities were justified through group think and are seeing that same evil now in a different form. 

Watch the full interview below.