WBD543 Audio Transcription

The Corruption of Power with Maajid Nawaz

Release date: Friday 19th August

Note: the following is a transcription of my interview with Maajid Nawaz. I have reviewed the transcription but if you find any mistakes, please feel free to email me. You can listen to the original recording here.

Maajid Nawaz is a UK-based counter-extremism activist, author and content producer. In this interview, we discuss his membership of a fundamentalist pan-Islam political group, imprisonment in Egypt, and returning to the UK to work on counter-extremism. We also discuss being forced to leave his position as a presenter on LBC.

“The problem is that this idea that what we used to believe were inviolable, sacred rights, can be suspended because of an emergency then they’re not sacred, then they’re not inviolable, then they’re basically temporary and they’re not rights: they’re permissions.”

— Maajid Nawaz

Interview Transcription

Peter McCormack: Maajid, good to see you, finally.

Maajid Nawaz: Thank you, by the way, for coming down to see me.

Peter McCormack: Pleasure.

Maajid Nawaz: I know that you've come all the way from Bedford.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, have you ever been?

Maajid Nawaz: Of course I've been, yeah, yeah.  I used to travel all over the country to try and recruit people, pretty much most of the cities actually.  I was 17 years old, after my expulsion from Newham College for murder, but I didn't kill anyone, it was my bodyguard that killed people and then he ended up in jail, got life, but I was 17, I started recruiting people at Cambridge University.

Peter McCormack: Woah, woah, back up, back up; what?! 

Maajid Nawaz: So, I was at Newham College in East Ham; you know East Ham?

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Maajid Nawaz: So, I was basically recruiting people to Hizb ut-Tahrir, my group.  So I'm 44 now, I think we're about the same age.

Peter McCormack: 43, yeah.

Maajid Nawaz: Yeah, so I call it; I'm one year older than you.  You will remember when like the Anti-Nazi, the ANL, the socialist workers had a little thing called the Anti-Nazi League and it was like hip-hop and anti-racism versus -- so in those days Muslim political organisation was brand new; we were the first generation that started organising young Muslims on the streets because we were the first generation that were born and raised here.

So, I left home at 16 and I went to Newham College, and basically, because I was in Hizb ut-Tahrir, I was a recruiter for this group, I started organising people in the East Ham campus in Newham College.  Eventually, I stood for the Student Union, and my whole slate were activists that were serving with me in this group.  So, I stood as president and every single Union office position was my activists. 

So, we basically started this huge campaign and we won, so we took over the Student Union; I was President, and the women's officer, the whatever, the finance -- all the positions were Hizb ut-Tahrir activists all calling for a caliphate, so we took over this college.  Then of course there was trouble, because a lot of the kids in the college weren't used to the fact that we suddenly became politically active, and there were some tensions.

This guy came, his name's Saeed Nur, a huge guy, he turns up one day and I hear in the college that somebody's looking for me.  The way I was raised, if someone's looking for you, you go and find them, so I went and found this guy, a huge guy, and I said, "What do you want?" and he said, "I'm here to protect you".  I said, "What do you mean you're here to protect me?"  He goes, "Well, I hear from the brothers that you're doing a good job in the college and I'm going to be your bodyguard"; it came out of nowhere.  So, I was like, "All right then".  You're a kid, you don't really think these things through.

Peter McCormack: Feels prestigious.

Maajid Nawaz: Yeah, so I said, "All right then", and then there was trouble and this one kid called Ayotunde Obanubi, bless his soul, I'm not trying to brag or anything because it's sad, a person died and I always remember this because that's a human life, but unfortunately, one day, he pulled two knives out and started trying to stab Saeed Nur as a result of these tensions. 

I was standing right there, and Saeed Nur said to the guy actually, he said, "Look, if you don't put your knives away you're going to get into trouble; I'm going to have to kill you", this is literally what he said to him.  Ayotunde wasn't listening; he had two of them and he was slashing at Saeed Nur's leather jacket and he was making contact.

So, to be fair, and this is what I said to the police at the time, considering the circumstances, Saeed Nur was quite patient because he said to him, "You know, can you stop that or I'm going to have to kill you?" it's literally what he said to the guy.  The guy didn't stop, so then he pulled out this huge machete and just plunged it straight through his heart, and then a whole bunch of other people started hammering at my head, and the guy died, it was really sad; I put this in my book actually.

So we got expelled, so the college expelled the President and Student Union, which was me and all my committee, all of us in one go got expelled.  The police came and they found me at my parents' home in Essex and they said, "We want to talk to you about the killing", so I said, "All right, I've got nothing to hide, I mean I was there", and I told them the story I'm telling you.  I said, "Look, in my amateur 16-year-old brain, I'm telling you I think it was self-defence because he was being slashed at".

Anyway, he went down for murder; I think he got life.  The other kid, one of them with a hammer, he was juvenile so he didn't get life, but he got a long time, I think he got ten years or something, and they all went down.  That was probably Britain's first jihadi street murder, that was probably that.  So, we got kicked out.  Then my mum put her foot down, she got really upset, as you can imagine, and she said, "You've got to go to this grammar school", and I said, "I'm not going to grammar school", I went to a state comprehensive; I went to Cecil Jones.  That school got shut down after I left it.

Peter McCormack: A lot of my listeners are American and you probably want to explain what a grammar school is.

Maajid Nawaz: Yeah, so the grammar schools are selective schools where you pass an exam at 11 and, if you pass this exam at 11, everyone that passes that exam goes to this school for smart kids.  I didn't pass that exam but I got quite good GCSEs, which are the exams you do at 16; I say "quite good", I got one A in art and that was it, and the rest were Bs and Cs and Ds.  But she thought I was just not trying hard enough, I don't know how this happened, but she managed to organise an interview with the headmaster.  She said, "You've got to go in there and he's willing to meet you". 

So I thought, "Shit, I'm not going to tell him about the murder", so I went in, and his name's Mr Baker, so I'm there now, I've just been freshly expelled, everyone in Southend's thinking, "Shit, who's this guy, he's a murderer, he's been expelled, he's back now".  I'm in this grammar school where I feel like I don't belong. 

Anyway, so I'm speaking to the headmaster and he's like, "Why do you want to come to this school?" and I'm like, "Well, you know, my mum said I have to".  He says, "All right, well convince me, what are you going to bring to the school?"  So I started talking to him, and he let me in, he gave me an unconditional offer, so I ended up doing A levels in this grammar school, and that's when I was recruiting at Cambridge. 

This a funny story, it has a funny ending, fast-forward about I'd say seven, eight years ago, my economics teacher in that school; economics, politics, history were my A levels.

Peter McCormack: I did economics A level.

Maajid Nawaz: Did you? 

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Maajid Nawaz: So, I got an A for economics, so my economics teachers, the two of them, one became a magistrate, and Mr Skelly became the headmaster after Mr Baker.  So, Mr Skelly's now headmaster and he's loving the work I'm doing, so he contacts me, he says, "Come back, I want you to speak to the whole school", so I said, "All right". 

I went back there; My Baker is about to retire and he's in the audience.  So, I get up and I've got the entire school in front of me, not just my class, my A levels, the whole damned school's there from the little 11-year-olds all the way up to the 18-year-olds doing their A levels, and I'm giving this speech and I'm talking about this whole story.  He didn't know, until that day, Mr Baker didn't know that when I came to him at 16, it was just after this expulsion for murder. 

So, I tell the story and then I say, "And poor Mr Baker didn't even realise he let a kid into this school that got expelled for murder".  His face went beetroot red, all the kids started laughing, everyone was finding it hilarious apart from Mr Baker, but it was funny.

Peter McCormack: Oh man!

Maajid Nawaz: He appreciated it in the end because he knew it ended well.

Peter McCormack: So, tell me about this group, HT; I'm not going to try and pronounce it.

Maajid Nawaz: Hizb ut-Tahrir.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I'm still not going to try!  How did you end up being part of it; what was it?

Maajid Nawaz: It's going to sound a bit violent, but I grew up with -- so this wasn't the first knife fight that I'd -- we had a lot of trouble in Southend.  By the time I was 15, I'd probably seen more people stabbed than you have in your entire life.

Peter McCormack: Is that racial tensions from the area?

Maajid Nawaz: Yeah, a lot of racial violence, so Combat 18; so the 18, it stands for the initials of Adolf Hitler, the 1 is A and the 8 is H.  These were, at the time, former British Army who'd served in Northern Ireland, some of whom, the bad apples of whom, decided to become Combat 18 in their spare time.

Now, in Southend in Essex, we didn't have the proper geezers that were with them, we had their little young followers, and obviously we were young, so I was 14, 15 years old.  It would be you're just literally a walking target; it would be walking down the street and suddenly you just hear someone shout, "Paki", and they'd jump out the back of a white van, it was always white vans in those days, and they'd have hammers and they'd have machetes and they'd just literally hunt you for sport.

Michael, Mo we used to call him, half-Kenyan mixed friend of mine, he had a hammer put to his head, he was whacked round the head with a hammer.  Aaron got stabbed when I was 15, we were in this big knife fight with mates of mine, and these guys turned up; because we were mixed, West Indians and me, so obviously all forms of racial insults.  Aaron got stabbed on that day.  It was multiple problems we had, by the end of which I started carrying a knife strapped to my back for self-defence and protection against hardcore neo-Nazis with hammers and machetes.

Now, at the same time, the Bosnian genocide was going on against Muslims in Bosnia, Srebrenica, yeah?

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Maajid Nawaz: The 3,000 men and boys that were massacred in the mass grave there.  So, you can imagine, we were looking at this from the domestic scene, looking at the fact that we were being targeted, and then abroad you see Bosnian Muslims who probably were white, many of them blonde hair, blue eyes, but they were Muslims.  So, we thought, "Fucking hell, what chance do we have if that's going to happen?"  Two hours' flight, by the way, from London, and the Olympics had just been hosted there, so I thought, "Hold on, that's civilisation.  It's not like it was some backwater, and suddenly that's happening.  I know that can happen here because I'm facing it".

So that's what, to answer your question, began my journey, almost in a sense of the cycle of violence, to express myself and that anger through a reciprocal form of Muslim supremacism when faced with genocide and white supremacism.  So, I basically decided that it starts with, you need to defend yourself, it ends up with, "I'm better than you", and that's where we ended up.  So, we joined Hizb ut-Tahrir, I joined at 16 years old, and the basic ethos --

Peter McCormack: The goals of the group, yeah.

Maajid Nawaz: Yeah, the basic ethos is we wanted to establish a global caliphate.  Again, for your audience, it's important to put this into context, this is before Al-Qaeda, this is before terrorism was associated with Muslims.  At the time, you'll remember this because you're my age, terrorism was Irish, it was the IRA.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Maajid Nawaz: And, if you're lucky, you'd hear something about the left-wing terrorists.  So, when the Israeli jet was hijacked by the Palestinians, it was a left-wing group, it wasn't a Muslim group, right, it was these communists.  Yasser Arafat and all those guys were left-wingers, they were secular, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, these were all left-wing and communist groups. 

It only became Islamist, and by that term I mean a desire to impose one version of Islam over society, as opposed and as distinct from Muslim, which is just a traditional religious Muslim, it only became Islamist as the Afghan War kicked off in the 1980s with the CIA backing the Arab fighters and Bin Laden in Afghanistan to defeat the Soviets.  That's when the Islamist thing kicked off, right, it was CIA-funded initially, and that took a while to reach the rest of the world. 

So up until we came along, terrorism wasn't associated with Muslims.  If you think of it this way, we were more like the Trotsky to the Stalin of Al-Qaeda, right.  So, we developed the intellectual ideas for the caliphate and popularised them among Muslims, and it's that sentiment that Al-Qaeda then built on to say, "Right, okay, you guys want a caliphate, we're going to bring violence to try to bring that caliphate about".

So, we were just like the group that was saying, "We've got to have a global caliphate".  Our means of getting that would have been to infiltrate militaries to recruit soldiers for military coups, which I also did but that's another story.

Peter McCormack: How much structure was there to this group?

Maajid Nawaz: Very structured.

Peter McCormack: How global was it?  You're saying you were about 15, 16, that was about when I first remember having access to the internet, but it was very limited, it was lists on Yahoo, it was pre-Google.

Maajid Nawaz: That's right.

Peter McCormack: So it wasn't like it is now.

Maajid Nawaz: So, you would have had very limited access.  So, we were trained in using -- that was our modern tool, right, that was our blockchain.  So, we used that in a way that today you see black marketeers using cryptos, right?  We were the ones that pioneered the use of the internet for communication purposes for subversive messaging.  So, we were heavily reliant on the internet.

The group was global; it had one leader under which pretty much every country, certainly every Muslim majority country, had a chapter of our organisation nationally and then inter-cities.  Here in the UK, we packed 12,000 Muslims into Wembley Arena for a caliphate conference actually in 1994, I think it was.  We put orange stickers all over the country, some people will remember them, it said, "Khalifa", which is the Arabic word for caliphate, "coming soon to a country near you", and we whacked them all over the country.  I remember whacking them on police cars and finding it really funny.  We packed 12,000 people into Wembley Arena, that's just here in the UK, they came from all over Europe. 

The group, just to give you some sense of its history, it was founded in 1953 in Jerusalem; it's an old group.  It's not as big as it used to be, a bit like people went from being whatever, socialist to anti-globalism protestors, whatever, but this group was massive in the 1990s.

Peter McCormack: So, it was established by Palestinians?

Maajid Nawaz: Yeah, so the founder, his name's Taqi al-Din al-Nabhani, he's a Palestinian, he founded it in Jerusalem.

Peter McCormack: Wow!  And your role within the group, Danny was telling me beforehand that you rose pretty quickly through the group.

Maajid Nawaz: Yeah, so basically I was the first British Pakistani member to go to Pakistan, they set it up in Pakistan.  I set up the Danish Pakistani chapter in Denmark.  I then went to Egypt and I revived the group in Egypt, because it had been crushed after an attempted coup.  So, the assassins of the former president, the President of Egypt, Anwar Sādāt was assassinated in 1981, and the assassins were the jihadis who used to be members of my group. 

So what happened was they did what I just described to you, they basically got impatient and said, "Right, we're now going to use violence".  So, there was a guy called Salim al-Rahhal, who was a member of my group, who trained the guys that ended up assassinating Anwar Sādāt in Egypt in 1981 for attempting peace with Israel after the Peace Treaty.  I ended up in prison with those guys, but that's another part of the story as well, but basically when I went to Egypt it was to revive that chapter because they wiped the group out after the failed coup attempt, after the assassination.  So, I was then head of the Alexandria chapter in Egypt attempting to revive the group there.  That was the tough part because it was quite a dangerous gig.

Peter McCormack: How old were you?

Maajid Nawaz: I was 21.

Peter McCormack: Right.

Maajid Nawaz: I got arrested at 24, and so all of that happened before I was 24, so I was quite young.  Then, when I got back from Egypt after the five-year sentence in prison, the British chapter wanted to make me the leader here.  I was on their Leadership Committee, and then they made me the offer.  They had told me that's what they wanted to do, but one week after they told me that, I basically quit the group, and that was at the age of 28.

Peter McCormack: Is there any pressure when quitting a group?

Maajid Nawaz: Oh yeah.

Peter McCormack: I interviewed somebody with regard to gangs and the process of leaving a gang is very difficult; you can be killed for leaving a gang.  Are there extreme pressures that come with leaving the group?

Maajid Nawaz: Well, you're not going to get killed by the group itself, because the group is very specifically focused on military coups, not on terrorism; the danger isn't that.  The danger is you get ostracised, that comes par for the course; but the danger is, beyond the ostracisation, the physical danger isn't just in the leaving, which I think you can get away with and a lot of people have, the physical danger is if you start speaking out against the basic tenets of the ideology. 

Peter McCormack: Which you did.

Maajid Nawaz: That's what I did; that's what pisses off mainly the jihadi groups.  Of course, ISIS didn't exist by then.  It's an interesting history; so everything we know ISIS, Britain and Europe, was actually traced back to the group I joined because the leader of the group, when I joined it, his name's Omar Bakri Muhammad -- actually, because you're from Bedford, you know Luton, right?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, of course, very well.

Maajid Nawaz: And Al-Muhajiroun and their activities in Luton, Anjem Choudary and all those guys, that kicked off the same cycle of violence; that's why the EDL came about, it's the same cycle we're talking about.  Tommy complains about seeing Muslims mistreating soldiers in the streets of Luton, and I say to him, "Yeah, and I grew up fighting neo-Nazis.  It's the same cycle of violence, Tommy, mate; we've got to get off that bandwagon".

Peter McCormack: His name's not Tommy though, is it?

Maajid Nawaz: No, it's Stephen, but I know him anyway, he's all right.  So, that Luton thing, so what happened is Omar Bakri Muhammad was the leader of my group and he left as that jihadi scene, that I mentioned to you, grew.  So, when I said that they built off the intellectual groundwork we built for a caliphate, the jihadis exploited that for violence, quite literally.

So, the leader of my former group, Omar Bakri Muhammad, left and founded Al-Muhajiroun, and Anjem Choudary was his little acolyte in that group.  I mean, Anjem Choudary, everyone thinks he's a big scary monster, he was my lawyer on that murder case in Newham College, he was my lawyer, right.  I make fun of him, because he knows who I am, you know what I mean? 

So Omar Bakri got kicked out of the country, so Anjem had to become the leader, but Anjem, you don't really take Anjem seriously where I'm from.  So, Anjem became the leader of Al-Muhajiroun and then what happened is, as that sort of process of the violence used to exploit the ideas, the foundations that we laid, Anjem went down the path, Al-Muhajiroun, as you would probably be aware of, Al-Muhajiroun and Anjem's group is what became ISIS in Britain. 

So, the tragic killing of Drummer, Lee Rigby, in Woolwich where it was an attempted beheading on the streets, that was Anjem's people.  But they're all an offshoot of my group, and in fact the founder of their group was the former leader of my group.

Peter McCormack: But there was no violence when you were in the group?

Maajid Nawaz: No, no, apart from that Newham College incident; the group wasn't violent.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but that was a reaction.

Maajid Nawaz: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: There was no established violence as a means to --

Maajid Nawaz: No.  So that's why the analogies with socialism work, right.  So, as I say, the group was the Trotsky to the Stalin; the Stalin people came along in the end and started becoming violent, which is this Al-Muhajiroun end, and then ISIS is what emerged from it.  But our group, until this day, and there are still members of it, and I've criticised their ideology, but you've got to be fair and honest about this otherwise you're not taken seriously, and in that scene you've got to be taken seriously.  People have got to know that you're not just making it up as you go along because otherwise they're not going to listen to you and they're not going to leave the group and trust you.

That group, until this day, is not a terrorist group, and that's why it's not banned in any liberal democratic western country across Europe.  Every single European country, Britain, America, the group is still legal.  It's in Australia they're legal, they're in the Australian press -- I'm pointing at Danny because he's from there, or he lives there.

Peter McCormack: He lives there.

Maajid Nawaz: So they're active in Australia, and you'll see some of them in the press, but they're not banned because they're not a terrorist group.  And even my imprisonment, we were adopted by Amnesty International's prisoners of conscience; it's important to make that point.

Danny Knowles: What does that mean?

Maajid Nawaz: Amnesty, it's a difficult thing to get from Amnesty, they were founded for that purpose.  A prisoner of conscience means you've been imprisoned for your ideas and that's it.  So, we were put in prison for our revolutionary Islamist ideas, not because we committed any crime in Egypt, it was because we were recruiting to a group that didn't have a permit to operate in Egypt. 

First of all, it's important to remember that the Egyptian constitution was suspended after the assassination of Sādāt in 1981, they suspended the constitution.  Now this is relevant to today's times, because it was suspended using the excuse of an emergency, national emergency.  It never got reinstated, from 1981 until I was arrested in 2002, one year after the 9/11 attacks, the constitution had been suspended all that time. 

There were people in prison for 24 years under the suspended constitution, under the emergency law, which was an extrajudicial process that put you through the state security courts; we weren't tried in civilian courts, we were civilians tried in military courts.

Peter McCormack: That's like saying there's nothing as permanent as a --

Maajid Nawaz: Yeah, exactly, as a temporary emergency.  So that constitution remained suspended.  We got picked up and we got put into what were called in Arabic "Mahakim 'amn aldawlat altaaria", which means emergency state security courts.  It is an ominous as it sounds.  The prosecutor was sitting on the bench with the judge, and our defence was down there with us and we were in cages.

Peter McCormack: Sounds a bit Guantanamo.

Maajid Nawaz: We were held in cages, dude.  So, it was an emergency trial under exceptional circumstances with no rights, and the charge was, quite literally, "Propagating by speech and writing for a non-legal organisation", that's what we got convicted for.  So, that's why Amnesty adopted us as prisoners of conscience.  Their point was, you can't put someone in jail for their ideas, no matter how bad you think those ideas are, that's not an imprisonable offence.  It's certainly not a torturable offence, and we were dragged through their torture dungeons.  They're electrocuting people on their teeth and genitalia in front of me because they don't like their ideas, so that's not fair and that's not right.

So, when people want to understand why terrorism emerged on the Muslim context, that prison I was held in, just imagine you torture a 17-year-old kid on his private parts in front of his dad to force a dad to confess.  Now you're a father, there's only so much psychologically you're going to be remain sane after that, until you become insane and are prepared to do anything to react, because you feel like your dignity's basically been taken from you.

So, the prison we were in is where modern-day terrorism began.  We were in this prison called Mazra Tora Prison.  The levels of torture, I don't even want to describe for you because it's not nice for your audience but basically that prison, Mazra Tora Prison, is where the modern-day founder of modern-day jihadism, his name's Sayyid Qutb, but if you look up his book, Milestones, it's pretty much the original founding pillar of intellectual pillar for jihadism today; Ma'alim fi'l-tareeq is the name in Arabic of that book. 

All the jihadists, they all know who I'm talking about, Sayyid Qutb was held in that prison, and he was tortured in that prison, and he was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, which until that point was a non-violent group which was even more moderate than the one I joined; they would stand for elections.  He went from that to pretty much inspiring Ayman al-Zawahiri, who was just killed the other week as the leader of Al-Qaeda, he was held in that prison too, the prison I was in.

It was that prison I was in that produced Ayman al-Zawahiri, it produced Sayyid Qutb because these guys, Sādāt's killers that were -- so by the time I went in, I was 24, they'd been in prison for 24 years; I met them, the assassins of Sādāt.  After Sayyid Qutb and his generation were tortured in those prisons, they founded the jihadi groups that these guys then went and joined and killed the president over.

Peter McCormack: So, when did you turn you back on it all; was it in prison?

Maajid Nawaz: Well, I studied a lot in prison, I debated everyone.  I had communists in there, socialists, people accused of being Israeli agents, people accused of converting from Islam to Christianity, people accused of converting from Christianity to Islam.  The running joke in Egyptian prisons was, if you change your mind under Hosni Mubarak, the Dictator, from anything to anything, the crime is changing your mind, he's going to throw you in prison. 

So, just imagine, forget university, we had the who's who of the history of Egypt's revolutionary scene, from jihadis, or the white men assassins of Sādāt, all the way through to the guy that got second place in a fixed election against Hosni Mubarak for a liberal party called El-Ghad, his name was Ayman Nour, and his crime was he got second place and they threw him in prison because he actually won, so all of that.

We had this famous Egyptian-American sociologist professor called Saad Eddin Ibrahim, whose crime was he wrote an article saying -- so it was a combination of a republic and a monarchy and, in Arabic, he put that word together to say, "Hosni Mubarak should not make his son the next President, this is not a dynasty", and they put him in prison just for writing that article, and he's a famous Egyptian-American sociology professor. 

After jail, many years later, I shared a platform with him in America.  He's an established, well-known commentator, but they put him in prison.  So, he's in there with us, all these people were in there with us.

Peter McCormack: Was it tense debates or was it like an intellectual environment?

Maajid Nawaz: No, it wasn't tense.  It could have been tense, but on the jihadi side, we're all in the cells together, everyone's going to be polite to us, know what I mean?!  So it was good, we had great really, really in-depth conversations.  The founder of Egypt's largest terrorist group at the time, which is known as Gamaat Islamiya, they had the numbers, their founder was in there with us.  The leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, he was Doctor Mohammed Badie, who's in jail again now, but he's a very old professor, he was in there with us; we had the who's who there. 

So I was sentenced to five years, I spent four years because we got released after completing our sentence, but they were a bit late in releasing us.  It was meant to be two-thirds of the sentence, or whatever, three-quarters I think, but I spent that time in there debating with all of them.  My mind was never satisfied, I kept asking questions, but I didn't want to leave the group while in jail; that looks weak, it looks like you're doing it just to get out of prison, so I never did that.

I got out, finished my sentence, came back.  It's when they offered to make me the leader here, that's when I had to then make a decision, "Do I want to carry on with this?  I don't believe in it anymore".  So, that's when I left.

Peter McCormack: What didn't you believe in though?  What was changing your mind in terms of the group and their beliefs?

Maajid Nawaz: So, I'm a Muslim, I'm very proud of my Muslimness, but I don't think I should force you to do that.  The thing is, when you're angry and you're 16 and everyone's forcing me, I mean, as I described for you, there was shit I haven't even gone into, but if everyone's trying to make you something that you're not because they don't like you and they don't like what you look like, you're 16-year-old self says, "Well, I'm going to make you before you try and make me".  So, it was that kind of reaction, it's a cycle of violence.

So, in a sense, I grew up, it's hard not to when you're 24 and you're in prison with all these people and you've got to make a choice.  I was in solitary confinement for four months in that prison, so I had to sit there in that time, we had no lights, no toilets, no bed, I had to piss on the floor where I'm sleeping and they'd give me 15 minutes in the day and then wash it down with a bucket.  So, in that moment, after seeing the torture, there was a moment where I had to decide, "Am I going to get revenge?  I'm going to be that father that's watched his" -- this is a true story, by the way, this 17-year-old kid tortured in front of his dad -- "Am I going to be that dad", because they ripped my son out of my arms at 1, I had a boy, he's 21 now, and so I'm deprived of my son, I'm in prison, I'm angry and I had to make a choice, "Am I going to turn into a killer for revenge?" 

We weren't violent, but I knew that they were trying to push us to that, because that's the best way to destroy anything we're trying to do is make us violent so they can caricature us.  So, I thought, "You know what, no, I'm going to win this, I'm going to show you guys that actually you're the ones in the wrong".  So, I had to make a conscience decision to try and say to people, "There's a better way to do these things".

Peter McCormack: And the better way being…

Maajid Nawaz: Well, first of all, remove any hate, it's got to start there because that Tommy that you referred to, Stephen --

Peter McCormack: Stephen Yaxley.

Maajid Nawaz: He's got perfectly legitimate reasons to be upset about the fact that Al-Muhajiroun, Muslim Islamists, were spitting on returning British soldiers; that's not nice to do that.  That's their job, they didn't make the decision to invade anywhere, they're just in the Army and they're told where to be deployed, right.

So, at one point, you've got to realise that, okay, you've got a reason to be upset but then I've got a reason because I came before you, and we had a reason because of Combat 18.  These soldiers served in Northern Ireland, they probably saw someone's head get blown off.  So at one point you've got to stop and think, "How far back am I going to go?" 

Peter McCormack: Or go forward.

Maajid Nawaz: Yeah, exactly, it starts with purging the hate from yourself, and that's what I decided to do.

Peter McCormack: So then your agenda changed in terms of what you wanted to do.  Was it then to start educating people or trying to help others maybe escape the group, try and have more peaceful debates?

Maajid Nawaz: So, part of the problem is, the way I am now talking to you about this so candidly, I mean I've written a book with this all in there, but the delivery, the candour and the lack of apology for it is what I can do now.  At 28, when I left the group, the problem is that you've got to remember Bush was still President, Blair was still Prime Minister, we were still occupying Iraq and Afghanistan and the EDL was rising.  Now, in that environment, to tell you the story unapologetically, as I just have, including the murder in Newham College, it's difficult for people to trust where I'm coming from and think this guy's genuinely trying to do the right thing.

So, before the man who you see sitting in front of you now could have emerged, I had to earn the trust of everyone, and this is what I said to people like Tommy, like, "You could have done a lot better after leaving the" -- you know I helped him leave the EDL?  "You could have done a lot better if you, like me, spent a good period of a few years within that circle, just challenging -- the reason you said you left is you said it was getting taken over by neo-Nazis, so you could have done a lot better by challenging that racism in your circles the way I challenged Islamism in mine to show people that you're trying to make amends". 

So, I did that for ten years, I set up an organisation, the world's first, to challenge extremism and terrorism from a Muslim community, so that was a Muslim voice challenging it.  It was those ten years of work, where working with governments -- people myself and my brother, Usman Raja, who works with me on Warrior Creed, one of our shows here, the GETTR show, it's sponsored by GETTR, he's the co-host in there.  He's one of Britain's first MMA fighters, he came up in the fistfight scene, in the pits, and now he trains professional fight teams; Prize Fighters is his team.

See, what happened, he joined my organisation and he would go into prisons to speak to the highest level convicted terrorists for the purposes of help rehabilitate them into society, provide mentorship; and meanwhile, I was doing the policy side at work.  We did that long enough, and the point is that you've got to show people that you're serious when you say, "We want to end the violence", and that's what we did.

Until this day, we've got the show Warrior Creed, the very first episode, we got a message after the show from a New York Al-Qaeda convict who had travelled to Afghanistan to learn how to make bombs, who came back, and it was a New York subway plot and he was trying to blow up the New York subway, got convicted.  After the first show of Warrior Creed, he watched it, he texted in, he was like, "Oh man, I loved the show, thanks, keep going".  Here, in the UK, we've got the guy that was the head of the Muslim terrorists in Belmarsh, he's one of ours.

So, what we did is, for ten years, we started trying to pull this all back in, and we feel like now is the time that we've demonstrated, through a lot of hard work, that we're trying to do the right thing.  Actually, now is the time where, with all the that track record, having trained governments across the world, having done a lot of interventions in prisons with the convicted terrorists, holding it down the way we did, now is the time to really try and combine everything we learned from my time in Hizb ut-Tahrir and everything we learned through our work in counterextremism, to bring that all together now because it's a unique experience, and it's a very, very interesting world.

We're at a crossroads and the example of what's just happened to Salman Rushdie, is where can bring all of that experience and put it into focused analysis but also try and hold people together, because that's going to be used again to try and divide communities.

Peter McCormack: Well, I want to ask you about that, but just before we get into that, you talked about intelligence agencies, part of the framework of the state, which is something at the moment, especially in the world where I live, in the Bitcoin world, people are very distrusting of the state.

Maajid Nawaz: Rightly so, by the way.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, rightly so.  Do you feel there is an important role of intelligence agencies or do you believe these agencies should be broken down?  The reason I'm bringing it up is because it seems to me that counterterrorism work's super important, we hear from the Met here about the plots they've foiled, some of them sound absolutely terrible if they'd have succeeded; but at the same time, you hear about intelligence agencies also kind of fostering issues in foreign countries.  So, it's kind of like, where do you…?

Maajid Nawaz: Yeah, well, look, before I answer that, let me just say to you, you won't find or speak to anyone that has done more on that front with them than us.

Peter McCormack: Okay.

Maajid Nawaz: I've been to Downing Street more times than I can remember, I edited Cameron's speeches on extremism, I actually edited them.  I've met Cameron more times than I can remember, I met Blair, met Bush.  I was banned from going to America initially, and I went in, they wanted me to testify in the Senate under Senator Lieberman's first committee on the Homeland Security back in 2006, I think it was.  So they called me in but I couldn't go in, I was banned, so I was the first Islamist ever to testify in the Senate on extremism.

So, they got me what was called a parole visa.  Because I was blacklisted because of my prison, they got me a parole visa which is what you give Mafia bosses to bring them in to testify; it's like a temporary visa, hence the name parole visa.  I wasn't on parole, but that's the way they got me in, and they had snipers in the hotels across from me and I was under 24/7 armed security, but I testified in the Senate's first committee on extremism under Senator Lieberman. 

Homeland Security's Department, Secretary Chertoff was in charge then, met him, trained the whole of Homeland Security.  I've trained the FBI, I've trained New York Police, I've trained British Government across the sector, all of them.  We were the first ones to train all of them, police, civil servants, all of them, foreign office, we did the training across the board, and they all know that and they all know me on a first-name basis.  No one can say that I haven't tried, haven't got the pedigree to say that I fought extremism.

The reason I've set it up like that is because these agencies are doing more harm than they are doing good, and I'll tell you that, and I'm the one that trained all of them in this.  Basically, the problem is, you mentioned the foreign element --

Peter McCormack: But malicious or incompetent?

Maajid Nawaz: Both, so their leaders are malicious and the people that are serving, they're like the troops.  So, just think of the army, you know those soldiers that went to Afghanistan and Iraq, especially Iraq, I mean they didn't know there was no WMD, they get deployed, and it's not their job to know.  But the idiots that knew and made that decision, and Doctor Kelly gets killed, I mean they call it suicide, yeah?  Well come on, after Epstein, you really believe that?  So, basically, you've got the leaders.

So, you look at the US now, and this is a classic example, that Trump's FBI raid, and the whole thing -- and I can say this because people will say, "Oh, Maajid, you're defending Trump", I say, "Shut up!  I wanted to destroy your entire system".  I'm married to an American-raised Catholic, white-American girl from Tennessee, I remember when Trump was going on about his Muslim ban and they'll say, "Oh no, it wasn't about a Muslim ban, it was about six countries ban".  All right, but he campaigned using the word "Muslim ban".

Peter McCormack: Muslim, yeah.

Maajid Nawaz: That's the word he put in his campaign speeches, so don't tell me I can't say he campaigned for a Muslim ban when, if you read his speeches, that's the word he used.  Despite that, and that's why I'm saying it in this way, because despite that, I can see when a process has been politicised.  The FBI raiding a former president's house, when you know Hunter Biden, now the New York Times has admitted it, like many years too late, that that laptop is legitimate, you know there are crimes on that laptop that, yes, Hunter Biden isn't President, but they implicate the father, and the least you can say, if you're going to be charitable and give the benefit of the doubt, it's kompromat on the father; that's being charitable.

Actually, it looks like there are crimes that the father's involved in, and there are eyewitnesses.  Bobulinski was Hunter Biden's business partner and he's on record saying that, "The big guy's, he's the President, and I've met him".  You've got witnesses now, you haven't even touched Hunter Biden, he's free, and you're raiding Trump's house.  So, you don't need to be pro- or anti-Trump to see bullshit, and the point is --

Peter McCormack: What are saying though, that both should be investigated?

Maajid Nawaz: What I'm saying is the politicisation of the counterextremism industry, it's to your question.  Homeland Security has put out this policy now that the people that protested on 6 January are domestic extremists and could be domestic terrorists.  Now, this is the politicisation of the extremism agenda.  What I mean by that is that could be trespass, it could be a criminal offence. 

Whatever happened on 6 January, it could be criminal, it could be trespass, it could be violent, but terrorism is something specific, and if you politicise industries like this, you destroy the whole thing.  It's like, if you disagree with me in this podcast now, say, "Maajid, I'm not so sure I like what you're saying here", and I say, "Well, that must be because you're a racist", first of all, that's not fair on you, but second of all, it makes a mockery of what real racism is, and then anyone that actually faces racism is never going to be taken seriously anymore.

Peter McCormack: But, in following you, this is what you always say, language is important.

Maajid Nawaz: Absolutely.

Peter McCormack: The words we use are important.

Maajid Nawaz: Yeah.  So, Trump voters, even 6 January protestors, might have committed criminal offences, just like those people here when they smashed -- remember when they smashed the Department for Education, the anti-student -- 

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Maajid Nawaz: That's not terrorism, dude, call it violence, call it trespass, call it criminal damage, don't fucking call it terrorism because now you're making a mockery.  People put their lives down.  I said this recently on a different podcast, I toured 27 cities in Pakistan speaking out against terrorism.  When Malala Yousafzai was shot in the head, I organised public protests in Pakistan with her face on placards saying, "We will not surrender". 

I went to Quetta, which is the Taliban headquarters in Balochistan in Pakistan, went to the heart of their city and organised a huge public talk against terrorism.  I went to North Nigeria, where Boko Haram's from, I went to Bayero University and organised about 2,000 students speaking against terrorism with Boko Haram people in the audience calling me an apostate.  I was wearing a flak jacket, that's all I had; that's not going to protect you from a bomb. 

People put their lives on the line to fight this stuff, and then because of your domestic little smallminded political agenda, you're going to now weaponise this work and use it against your political opponents.  I believe that our institutions have become politicised and weaponised across the board.  China did this with the Uyghurs.  So China, when it rounded up the Uyghurs, said that they're all terrorists, and that's why I can no longer sustain the work I was doing.

Peter McCormack: There was a terrorist element within the Uyghur group because of the stabbings they had in the Uyghur region.

Maajid Nawaz: Of course.  Just like Tommy says, there is an extremist element with the Muslim communities.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but it's not the Uyghur, it's the separatists; you need to separate them.

Maajid Nawaz: Of course.  Think about it like this, any critique you might have of the EDL, it's the same with the Chinese regime.

Peter McCormack: Well, it would be like, back in the troubles in Ireland, saying, "All the Irish are representative of the IRA".

Maajid Nawaz: Exactly, yeah.  So, you've seen those videos and they're rounding them up in mass concentration camps, "Oh, they're terrorists"; fuck, you know, that's the problem, right.  So, China did it and the way China did it is what's interesting because this brings us to tech, and your audience is a tech audience, so the way China did it is interesting, Hikvision cameras, Huawei and AI and facial recognition technology.  So, what they did, and you can check this all out, it's all reported in the news --

Peter McCormack: Seen it all.

Maajid Nawaz: -- you can train your AI to recognise specific ethnic features.  The Uyghurs are a Turkic people, they're not Han Chinese.  So whereas the outsider may not be expert in detecting the difference, I can tell you, I can tell the difference just by looking at them.  99% of the time I can tell you if he's Bangladeshi, Indian or Pakistani, and if he's Pakistani, I can tell you if he's from North Pakistan or South Pakistan, just by looking at him, but that's because I'm not an outsider to that.

So, there is a difference in terms of features and bodies between Han Chinese and Turkic Uyghur people, which is why where they're from is called East Turkestan, occupied Xinjiang.  They train their cameras to detect Uyghur features, and they used all of the fact they've got all these cameras everywhere, they've got the social credit system in place, literally Black Mirror, imagine bringing the might and the power of your technocratic state to pick on a community.  That's what they did using the extremism agenda in China.

So, when I did my five-day hunger strike to try and raise attention to that, it was a silent hunger strike for five days to get 100,000 signatures on a parliamentary partition, because in the UK, that forces a debate in Parliament; they have to debate it if you get 100,000 signatures on that specific parliamentary.gov website.  So, to get to the 100,000 I basically did this hunger strike, and it was to draw attention to this; I think it's two years ago now.  That was, for me, the beginning of me deciding I had to get out of this extremism industry, because I realised that what they were doing was using everything I had tried to build --

Peter McCormack: They weaponised it.

Maajid Nawaz: Weaponised it.  I knew that it's not just China, because I knew, and you'll remember this, because remember two years ago, people didn't know about the Uyghur genocide and everyone was about to roll out Huawei in Britain.  The Metropolitan Police still uses Hikvision cameras, the very cameras, by the way, that The Times reported two weeks ago, you can look it up, that has been sending data, so the Met Police are using these cameras and the cameras are sending data to China to servers in China; what's going on there? 

The same companies that are using facial recognition technology to target an ethnic minority community, those cameras, that company are being used by the Metropolitan Police and the data is going back to the same people.  So, you just think that obviously they don't have good intent, they're already complicit in a genocide.  So at the time, two years ago, when I was on that hunger strike, I realised that it's not that I can't trust an individual policeman that I trained --

Peter McCormack: It's the institution.

Maajid Nawaz: The problem is, and this is a problem with systems everywhere, which is why your audience will understand this, all systems skew towards power, they skew towards centralisation; it's the nature of a system.  It's like saying all men have a -- again, this is by way of analogy, but it's going to make sense.  A man and a woman's sexual drive, so a man is quicker to arouse and quicker to climax and a woman takes longer to arouse and longer to climax; that's just a biological difference that is inherent within us.  So, no matter what you do, that's going to the be the case; it's a quality of the product. 

So, a system skews towards centralisation because it exists to centralize, that's why it's there.  So, it will always find a self-perpetuating logic to further centralize because it was founded on that principle, which is why the US Constitution exists, to keep the separation of powers; the Founding Fathers understood this.

So, what I realise is it doesn't matter, this could be a lovely policeman that's got the best of intentions right up until --  I mean, the head of MI6, I know him, we've had drinks together, I've sat there, had a chat with him, John Sawers.  He came and visited me in prison, the very last head of MI6, he was Ambassador to Egypt at the time; I mean, I know all these guys.  The Mayor of London visited me in prison, Sadiq Khan.  So, it's not that they're evil people, they all know me on a first-name basis, the problem is that the system cannot help but skew towards centralisation and it will use any excuse it can to do so.

So, it's about using existing agendas, and almost the human species does this naturally, it seeks for justification to achieve an ends; and that justification, if it exists in the rhetoric that's already out there such as, "We need to do X, Y and Z to stop extremism", it will appropriate that for the purposes of centralisation.  That's when I realised that you've got a problem in China with this extremism agenda being used for a genocide, but we are all tied into China for our tech, at the time, we were, right.  We were about to roll out Huawei, it was before the genocide was acknowledged by our government and by the American State Department; it is now thankfully.  But we were reliant entirely on their tech infrastructure and were going to become even more so because of 5G.

Peter McCormack: My friend, Mark Moss, talks about this a lot, and he looks at different cycles; he looks at tech cycles -- what are the three cycles, Danny?  It's tech, financial and cultural?

Danny Knowles: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: He says you tend to go in these group cycles, and one's like a 40-year cycle and one's an 80-year cycle and one's like a 250-year cycle, and he said they're all heading now to hit their cycle peak right now.  He says we're at peak centralisation, and what's happening is we're overcorrecting to the point whereby the things that governments are doing now are things, 20 years ago, we wouldn't have thought they would do, locking down entire societies and such.  What he talks about is that, when it overcorrects, it will recorrect, and the recorrection is rise of decentralisation --

Maajid Nawaz: Absolutely.

Peter McCormack: -- whether it's Bitcoin or the use of cryptography, all these things are now, that the revolution that's coming behind this where people are kind of like, "We've had enough of this".

Maajid Nawaz: Yeah, that's right, and that's why I left, I called it.  The problem is, if you think about it, if that lockdown and people like Andrew Neil, again, I've discussed with him many times, nice guy in person, but you cannot let him get away with the fact that he wrote that column and says, "Is it time to punish the unvaccinated?" in the middle of lockdown, putting it in the Daily Mail.  Now, you lock down a whole society and you say, "I'm going only let --" I'm double-jabbed, but for me it's about --

Peter McCormack: Choice.

Maajid Nawaz: When I made that decision to say, "I'm going to stop the hate", what that means is sticking up for people that are deemed the other, that's what it means, instead of hating on them.  That means hard, hard decisions when sometimes, when a whole society wants to pick on them, you've got to stand by people that are marginalised and are being demonised, doesn't matter who it is.

Peter McCormack: To be fair to the audience, when the first lockdown happened, I agreed with it, I thought it was a good idea.  I was following the news from China and Italy, and I was --

Maajid Nawaz: Has it changed your mind?

Peter McCormack: Oh yeah, well, I supported it at the start; I changed my mind during it because it went on for months.  I do have the benefit of knowing that COVID wasn't as serious as we first thought.  I still think it's serious, people have died and people have got sick, but I think the cure --

Maajid Nawaz: Was worse than the disease.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, was worse than the disease now, and I understand that now, and I regret it.  I also once shared that there was an article once, it was about the pandemic of the unvaccinated, and I shared that on Twitter, I said those words.  One of the reasons I wanted to talk to you is that, being sat here with you now is just a series of coincidences and luck and fortune. 

I didn't set out to be a broadcaster in any way, I set up a podcast as a hobby five years and suddenly people like it.  But with that has come this sense of responsibility in the things that I say and where they reverberate, but also the people I talk to and the things they say; I take a deep responsibility with it.  Now I'm not a lot more considered about the things I say because of that, and it worries me.

Maajid Nawaz: Yeah, it's a learning curve, man, it's a learning curve.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Maajid Nawaz: To be honest, a lot of people, if they hear that history you've just mentioned, because there's a lot of us that were against it from day dot, but even I'm outflanked; there are people that say, "Maajid, why did you even get jabbed?"  You're always going to be outflanked by a purer person, so that's not a good way to go.  Then, I say to them -- I had to tell someone off the other day because he was like, "You're double-jabbed, you're a sell-out", and I said, "Dude, get dragged through a torture dungeon and then get injected in prison against your will and then understand why I was trying to show everyone I'm not troublemaking anymore.  Are you telling me to get a jab?  I'll go and get a jab, but you can't force people"; it was my line, right.

The problem is, if you go down that line, someone's always going to try and outcompete you.  The best thing to do is, as long as you're not a fucking controlled opposition trying to pull the wool over everyone's eyes and now pretend that you're against it and then wait for the next thing, like climate lockdowns, "Oh, I'm suddenly for it again", people need to forgive people that made a mistake and say they have the evidence now and they're adjusting their position; that's how we all learn, we're all on a journey.  As long as we can have those conversations, that's the way forward, but the key thing is we must never do this again, we must never decide that it's okay to lock an entire society -- as I said to Rogan on his podcast, "Give me one of your kidneys, I need a kidney, you've got two", literally that's the logic. 

Now, you might think, "Yeah, but, Maajid, you're young and healthy too", okay, but that's the point.  If you get to a point where you're going to triage and prioritise people and you're doing it through the social credit system, which is what China does and what we were trying to implement with a vaccine passport, because if you remember it was linking health data to criminal record data, that was on the damn apps, so if I get to a point where I've got more points than you, will I deserve your kidney when I need one because I've got 100 points and you've got 10?  So I'm more worthy and deemed a higher earner, more intelligent, maybe more handsome?

Peter McCormack: I don't know, man!

Maajid Nawaz: I've got to take your kidney.

Peter McCormack: Well, see about that!

Maajid Nawaz: That's what I said to Rogan, he was like, "Woah!"  That's the problem, is that this idea that what we used to believe were inviolable sacred rights can be suspended because of an emergency, then they're not sacred, then they're not inviolable, they were basically temporary and they're not rights, they're permissions.

Peter McCormack: Well, the problem is, sometimes, as you try and discuss or explain these situations or these ideas, is that you can get classed as a conspiracy theorist.

Maajid Nawaz: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: That's something I've called people in the past, but amongst certain groups of friends or my parents' friends, they think I'm a conspiracy theorist, and I'm light compared to some of the people in the cohorts I mix with, but you get classed as such.  But actually that's a really frustrating pejorative.  So, I had it when I was trying to explain CBDCs on Facebook to everyone, I was saying, "You know, the government's going to try and sell this, they're going sell this BritCoin, they're going to tell you the benefits of having it".

Maajid Nawaz: And pretend it's crypto.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but it's controlled, it's complete control of your money.  One of my friend's mum's blocked me on Facebook, she said, "I'm fed up with your conspiracy nonsense".  It's like, Jesus, how do I get to the point where you can present this and you can see the facts in front of you?

Maajid Nawaz: Right, so just like I said I can get outflanked on the purity thing, like, "Pete, you were defending this stuff", and then someone comes, "Yeah, but, Maajid, you're double-jabbed", so you have to have humility, you can also get outflanked on the pejoratives.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Maajid Nawaz: So, it's all karma, man.  So, if one day you called someone a conspiracy theorist, even in private, it's come back at you, it's just karma, and that's where all of us have to learn that these cycles, they can go either way.  All we can do is have integrity and try and be honest and try and learn from experience, which requires humility, and that's it, then the last thing, consistency.

So, you're now on something, you're saying, "Listen, I'm trying to warn people about CBDCs", you're going to get called names.  Why?  Not because people don't understand, it's because there are people out there who benefit from CDBCs coming in, like the Bank of England, who are richer than you, more powerful than you, who are going to fund people to call you a conspiracy theorist.  That's actually what's going to happen, not some ignorant Facebook, not your friend's mum but some ignorant person on Facebook thinks that you're thick when actually they're thick; no, that's not the problem.

That lady, and again I don't mean she's thick, I'm not talking about her, but the lady that called you that name, she's not the problem; she can't influence the world, she's not going to bring or stop CBDCs.  The problem that you're going to face is the people that want to bring it in are more powerful than all of us combined, they're wealthier than all of us combined, they have the power and they're going to try and bring it in regardless.  The way you do that, if you're a corporate, is you basically, as every corporate does, you fund PR firms to make your case, and part of that is negative campaigning, just like in politics.

So, that's what's really going on, is that they will pay people on social media, with bots, to call anyone that challenges CBDCs, the AI will pick it up and a whole bunch of bots will start calling you a conspiracy theorist.

Peter McCormack: We see it, look, as a bitcoiner, you see it already. 

Maajid Nawaz: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: We know the honesty of what Bitcoin is, what is stands for, why people use it.  We understand that there are people in certain jurisdictions of the world who absolutely rely on Bitcoin, either as an activist or as maybe even a woman who wants to have access to financial services; there are legitimate human rights uses for Bitcoin.  All we ever see from some of the more leading press is negative article after negative article, misleading and mistruths.

Maajid Nawaz: That's right, it's all propaganda, Pete, that's all.

Peter McCormack: Well, yeah, it is, and we've started to realise who's funding these articles, it's been exposed and it's frustrating, it's really frustrating.  I want to tie this back to the LBC because you talked about when people, they've got things wrong and they've realised, they should be honest, they should have integrity, apologise, I can imagine there are people at the LBC who think they owe you an apology but maybe haven't given it, or can't give it, but know they're wrong now.

Maajid Nawaz: Yeah, of course.

Peter McCormack: Can you tell the LBC story?

Maajid Nawaz: Yeah, they're going to get sued or they're being sued. 

Peter McCormack: Your show was big.

Maajid Nawaz: Yeah, man.  So, I'm very proud of these two shows I've got now, I mean Radical is sponsored by Odysee, and I've got Warrior Creed sponsored by GETTR, and I've got my Substack newsletter, Radical Dispatch, which is doing really well, in fact it's the highest earner at the moment, the Substack.

Peter McCormack: Great, well that's a good thing when you got cancelled like that.

Maajid Nawaz: That's right, people supported me, and I'm very grateful to people, and that's the love, you know, it's showing the love back.  But the LBC lot, and the thing is what really winds me up, and this you're going to understand because I think, I suspect, that politically you're going to sympathise with what I'm about to say.  You can't make a fucking show about being all pro-minority voices and all like, "Let's platform marginalised voices and let's make sure that we're being anti-racist", and all that bullshit that they speak, when you recognise that ethnic minorities in particular have been experimented on medically throughout history. 

So the African Americans and the Tuskegee experiment is a famous example, but more specifically with vaccines, and more intimately, the CIA in Pakistan, my second home country, my parents' country of birth, I've got cousins and uncles and aunties that still live there, this is very real, the CIA conducted a fake hepatitis B vaccine programme on children in their hunt for bin Laden.  When we know that, as a recent example of national securitisation of the health industry to achieve national security objectives, we know that, it's a very real and intimate example of what happened.

Let's not forget, in a field I was very, very instrumental in setting up, which was the counterextremism industry for governments, I mean we founded that through Quilliam, you're going to manipulate all of that good work and the health sector to deceive children and take their DNA, who knows where that data's being stored, and weaponise it on your counterterrorism objectives.  You're going to weaponise their health data which, by the way, is what Hitler did, weaponised health for national security, his version of national security.  The principle's what matters, he did that in principle, and the CIA did it in principle; they weaponised health in pursuit of a national security objective, with children as the innocent victims.

Now, you're LBC, and the parent company, Global, and you make a big deal about being conscious about ethnic minority tragedies and the histories and marginalised voices, and I'm there saying, "Right, here's this story about the CIA" -- this was reported by Vox, by the way, again I mentioned it on Rogan as well and he put up to the slide.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, we saw it.

Maajid Nawaz: Right, so it's there, so we're not making this up.  Now, I'm in a company that claims it exists to allow people like me to speak in that way without being censored, it claims that, yeah, for too long, ethnic minority voices haven't been heard about their experience.  So, now I'm on this national prime time show on the UK's largest commercial radio group, getting 500,000 listeners on a weekend lunchtime when people should be having their Sunday roasts or drinking their Bloody Marys on a Saturday and they're listening to this show, and you're telling me that I'm safe, I can speak my mind because you're here for me.

Peter McCormack: That's how you built your audience.

Maajid Nawaz: That's right, and that's what they kept telling me, that's what they told me, "Yeah, man, we're going to support you.  We understand this is specific".  So, I'm on air and I'm saying, "Listen, first all I've been jabbed against my will in prison and I know that you guys, CIA, security industry have done this to children in Pakistan, you've weaponised the health sector for your national security objectives, so I'm not buying this.  You can't tell me that you're going to force people to be jabbed or they get sacked, which is the 'no jab, no job' policy, and that I can't ask questions basically;  that's it, that's what it comes down to.  We've been abused in the past, how do I know you're not abusing us again?  Why should I trust you when that's what you did?"  "Trust the system", go and tell that to those Pakistani kids that had their DNA taken. 

The Taliban started blowing up vaccine centres after that, that's what it does in reality, physically, that's what it does.  That's why the Taliban would blow up vaccine deployment in Pakistan and Afghanistan, that's why they do it, because that got exposed.  The CIA has, by the way, admitted doing it and has apologised.  So, imagine you do that and then you're coming to the same people and saying, "Trust us".  "Fuck off!"  Do you know I mean?  "I don't want to trust you; you have to justify yourself.  Who do you think you are?  You have to justify why I have to believe you, otherwise fuck off, because I know what you did in Iraq; there were no weapons of mass destruction there". 

Peter McCormack: A lot of oil.

Maajid Nawaz: Exactly.  So, that is the stance I took and, by the way, while being double-jabbed.

Peter McCormack: Help us understand how somewhere like LBC works because I've only every been independent.  You have producers and researchers, but is there like a hierarchy like, "This is the agenda of shows I'm going to be making this week", or can you just turn up with your mic and just present and they accept it?

Maajid Nawaz: So, I did what I'm doing here, I just would go in and speak; I don't know what other people did, but they were probably prepared and they had notes and they would speak to the editor.  But from the beginning, I was very clear, "Look, I know what I want to say and I know how to do it, so let me just do my job", and they did, and that's how we built up those listeners.

Peter McCormack: Did they give you any soft warnings first, saying, "Look, we're not sure where you're going with this, Maajid?"

Maajid Nawaz: Oh, this stuff, yeah, yeah, and I told them to fuck off, and they got rid of me.

Peter McCormack: Talk us through it, like just overnight?

Maajid Nawaz: So, it was a bit of a stitch-up.  They published that tweet out of nowhere saying, "We're terminating the contract", it was like, "He served us well, and the contract's coming to an end anyway, we're not renewing it", which was bullshit because that was in January.  I had a contract, they know this, I had a contract, the existing contract they said is ending soon, was all the way until the summer, and they'd already agreed a new contract which had already been, in emails, agreed to and everything; it was waiting my signing and I was away for Christmas.  So, it was all bullshit, they're lying, and they know they're lying, they all know their lying and they can sit here in front of me, they know they're lying.

Peter McCormack: Was it audience pressure?

Maajid Nawaz: No.

Peter McCormack: Were they under political pressure?

Maajid Nawaz: It wasn't audience pressure.

Peter McCormack: Is it the culture of the company?

Maajid Nawaz: So, they have the equivalent of radio bots, like you see online, that was happening, so there are people paid to call in to do the physical version of a bot.  So, that's all set up as well, but that's a different thing, that's PR companies again, basically.  The problem wasn't that though because that doesn't lose them money, it's the bottom line.  What happened was, with lockdown -- this is nice inside scoop for you -- LBC had just bought all the outdoor billboards, you see these outdoor billboards, the advertising boards?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I know.

Maajid Nawaz: They used to be called Clear Channel.

Peter McCormack: Clear Channel, yeah.

Maajid Nawaz: Now, they're Global; you see Global underneath them all?

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Maajid Nawaz: I know the guy that sold it to them, he had dinner with me, he's an Indian-British guy.  After he sold it to them, he was a fan of my show, he sends me an email, he knows this, and he was like, "Hey, can we have dinner?  I love your show.  I just sold all these outdoor billboards to Global".  I was like, "Oh yeah, sure", so we had an Indian together, and we were in Mayfair, we were having Cobra beer with our curry. 

So, this whole story is that they had taken a huge bank loan, this is also reported in the press, by the way, after lockdown they reported this because their finances are in trouble; they had taken a huge bank loan to finance their acquisition of Clear Channel so that they could, like all monopolistic practices, like all systems, accrue more power.  They wanted radio and outdoor advertising; you see how that would be a self-fulfilling feedback loop.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Maajid Nawaz: So, they had taken a huge loan to get those outdoor billboards and then lockdown hits; who's advertising on outdoor billboards?

Peter McCormack: No one's outdoors.

Maajid Nawaz: Overnight, their biggest customer became government health warnings.

Peter McCormack: Oh, okay.

Maajid Nawaz: So suddenly, you've got a private broadcaster whose biggest customer is government; again, that happened because of lockdown, no malicious planning, it's just how systems work.  So now you've got a company that needs to survive, and the only people paying it to survive, why it's got this huge loan to pay off, is the government.  So, they're paying their loan back to the bank because they've just acquired all these outdoor billboards, and the only adverts going up are, "Stay indoors, stay safe", you know what I mean?

Peter McCormack: The opposite of what you were saying.

Maajid Nawaz: Exactly, right.  So, in between my show we'd have these annoying adverts every 15 minutes.  I'm saying, "Ignore this bullshit, don't get turned into tyranny", and suddenly the break comes, and it's like, "Stay indoors, stay safe", so it was very jarring.  So I think, at some point, for the government, it became very inconvenient because they knew the show was being listened to, it was causing a stir, it was the only voice on a national platform that was challenging any of this bullshit, but it was challenging it in a very unapologetic way, very, very direct, with all the facts and all the receipts and all the bullshit. 

For example, this thing you said about the cure being worse than the disease, that's a question that we put to the government.  There was a freedom of information request specifically on that point, "Has the government done an impact assessment," which is what it was called, "on the cost of lockdown versus the benefits?" and they had done an impact assessment; they never published it.  Then the court orders the government to publish the thing; they had a time limit, they never published it.

The reason they never published it is because it showed the obvious, that actually the benefits don't outweigh the costs of this thing and more people are going to die because of it than from what you're trying to save.  They had that impact assessment, so it was very inconvenient because then there's me, every weekend, reminding everyone that they've never published, for example, this piece of evidence that they have and that a judge has ordered them to publish; it doesn't look good. 

So I reckon at one point, and this is never going to be in any email, somebody over a drink probably said, "Listen, have a word, we're paying you a lot of money for these ads and your guy's ruined it for us".  I think the bottom line got affected basically.

Danny Knowles: So, you think this came from someone in government rather than like the Commercial Director or whoever of LBC decided that it didn't work?

Maajid Nawaz: Well, they would have had a word with the commercial people, yeah.

Danny Knowles: So, you think it actually came from government?

Maajid Nawaz: Yeah, and this "doesn't work" thing is bullshit.  The audience was rising and rising, we know that because --

Danny Knowles: Oh no, I totally believe your show worked, I meant like the juxtaposition of the show.

Maajid Nawaz: Yeah, so it would have been someone having a word with the commercial people, but then ultimately also because of the speed at which it happened.  So I get back from Christmas and, as I say, we've got a contract until the summer and a new contract agreed, and the thing is, again this can all be checked.  My agents are JK Rowling's agents, they're not fucking like little small-time people, they all know this; we've got emails.  So, we're with the Blair Partnership, which is the agency Rowling set up actually, and Neil Blair runs it; he's a mate of mine as well.  We've got all the emails with like, "Yeah, agreed, contract deal done.  We've got this new contract and we're really happy with it", it's all in email. 

So, I get back though and what happened is I tweeted, "I shall not go quietly into the dark", and my point was, "I'm not going to stop talking this, guys, just because you're now signing me for a new contract.  You can't buy me and you can't threaten me, it's just not going to happen.  You've got to be worse than the torturers to try and cow me into saying something I don't want to say; it's just not going to happen.  You can threaten me with what you want".

So, I tweet that, "I'm not going to go quietly into dark, I'm going to continue talking about this because actually, most of it is going to come out after you guys are done with this bullshit.  That's when you're going to see all the costs of what you did, the people dying of heart attacks, the people with all these adverse events, vaccine reactions and all that stuff is going to come out eventually, and I've got to be there to tell those stories".  I think that's when they realised, "Okay, this guy's in it for the long haul". 

So, suddenly, that tweet came out from them saying, "Thank you, but we're not going to renew the contract"; it came with no warning whatsoever.  They're going to get sued, they're being sued.

Danny Knowles: What was the culture like at LBC?  Was it a purely commercial decision do you think or were they against it anyway?

Peter McCormack: Did you have any allies?

Maajid Nawaz: Most of them, overwhelmingly, were following the sheep narrative, most of them, yeah.

Peter McCormack: Did you have any allies who backed you?

Maajid Nawaz: Yeah, I mean don't want to -- obviously, because some people are still there, yeah, so you don't want to get people into trouble.

Peter McCormack: But that's the issue when you start to censor speech in different ways, or where people start to self-censor.  That's one of things that I hate most is, once you have these mob mentalities and people start to self-censor, it's still a censorship, it's damaging. 

I got divorced ten years ago, sorry, Con, my son's here; in some ways, it was awful but it also changed my life in other ways for the better; I wouldn't be sat here, I'd still be working in advertising in London, I've got this whole new life out it.  Do you think, in some ways, in five years, you'll look back and think, "That might have been one of the best things that ever happened to me?"

Maajid Nawaz: So, I got divorced about ten years ago and I have a son as well, and again, I really understand why you've drawn that because it does change you.  That analogy is good because you think it's the worst thing that happens to you at the time it happens, but then you grow.  It's not to say it was a good thing because you don't want to speak badly about your ex-wife like that either, it's just you grow into something else that, if not for that experience, by definition, you wouldn't have grown into, so you have to accept it.

The only way to look at experiences like that is say, "I am who I am now because of that, good or bad, it's who I am and I have to be happy and comfortable with who I am".  So, like divorce, this LBC thing, to be honest, I was --

Peter McCormack: It was a divorce.

Maajid Nawaz: Yeah, and I've grown into what this is.  You're sitting in my new studio, we've got two shows coming out from here, and we've got a Substack newsletter that earns more than the two shows, and it's all under Radical Media, which is the group.

Peter McCormack: And you can't get cancelled on this one.

Maajid Nawaz: It's my business, and what the model, as you know, is you build up your base, you build up your sponsorships, you build up your audience base, your listenership, and eventually someone comes along and says, "Here's 200 million, come on our platform".

Peter McCormack: I would love that!

Maajid Nawaz: Yeah, but that's Rogan, isn't it, you know what I mean?

Peter McCormack: I will get my football team in the football league!

Maajid Nawaz: Yeah, but look at you, you got this and you've got a football team.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Maajid Nawaz: That means you're doing something that's working for you.

Peter McCormack: What it worth it, Con?

Connor McCormack: Fuck, yeah!

Peter McCormack: There you go.

Maajid Nawaz: Not the divorce, obviously, it's your mother, yeah! 

Peter McCormack: Oh no, no, I mean, he loves his --

Maajid Nawaz: I'm joking, I'm joking, I know what you meant.

Peter McCormack: He loves his mum, but he also enjoys this and he loves the football as well.

Connor McCormack: I can see how much happier my dad is in this job, so that's worth it.

Maajid Nawaz: Yeah, so you should tell the mic what he said in case the audience didn't hear, yeah.

Connor McCormack: I said I can see how much happier my dad is doing what he's doing now, so that's what's worth it.

Peter McCormack: And we get to go to football every Saturday.

Connor McCormack: Yeah, and see them smash them 7-1!

Peter McCormack: Yeah, that was good.

Maajid Nawaz: So, it's just that you become you now.  We can all look back with regrets, but where's that going to get us, man?  We just end up depressed.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, well listen, look, I've loved this and appreciate your time, and I know we've got to bring it to an end at some point, but I do want to ask you about something because it's something I don't know enough about, what's happened with Salman Rushdie; we talked about it earlier.  I'm aware of him but from when I was young, I mean I want to say I probably like a young teenager when I heard about the Satanic Verses, and I didn't know anything about it, and then he's kind of largely passed me by until recently.  I'm obviously aware of him, I'm obviously aware that he had a fatwa, is how you refer to it, put on?

Maajid Nawaz: Yeah, the Iranian regime put a fatwa out.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, and then for me, it seemed like that was something in the past, nothing to worry about, all gone.

Maajid Nawaz: It was.

Peter McCormack: And somebody's jumped on stage and stabbed him, I think I read, 12 times.  I've actually had an opinion that's even changed in the last few days, talking to Danny about it, or Jeremy as well, I think my words were of the lines of ,"I absolutely support his right to free speech, I absolutely do.  I also think sometimes maybe there are certain things you can avoid saying.  You don't want to provoke hatred through criticism of things that are quite important to people in terms of things like religion", but then Danny came back and --

Danny Knowles: I've got that quote here; do you want me say it?

Peter McCormack: Was it his tweet?

Danny Knowles: No, it wasn't, it was a quote from Salman Rushdie, it said, "Respect for religion for has become a code phrase meaning fear of religion.  Religion's like all other ideas, deserves criticism, satire and, yes, our fearless disrespect", which I think is brilliant.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, and I see that point.  I guess it's because I'm not the kind of person who's going to create religious satire because it's just not me.  But I've gone round and round in circles with this, but I know you've going to have looked at this and you're going to be able to educate me on what's happened and where you think it's from.

Maajid Nawaz: Yeah, well I just wrote a Substack on it as well, so I do want people to have a look at that.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, we'll put that in the show notes. 

Maajid Nawaz: So, listen, imagine you're in Google Maps right now, I'm going to ask you zoom out, so pinch in on your Google Maps and zoom right out so you're looking at the whole planet now and not just this question of Salman Rushdie for a second, yeah, because it's important. 

So, a question as sensitive as this, it requires a bit of a throat clearing before I give you my view on that.  So, the throat clearing bit is this, as I'm sure you probably know, Danny, from your research, I'm pretty much the only Muslim in Britain you can find that's ever defended any of this stuff, publicly, on TV, out of Muslims and non-Muslims.  But you can't probably find even a non-Muslim that's done what I've done on the free speech stuff.

When I stood as a Liberal Democrat candidate here in London, I even put out an image and said, "Allahu Akbar min --", I said, "God's greater than to be offended by this, I'm not offended.  Let's just leave people alone", because there was a group that were wearing it on their T-shirts and we were in a BBC debate and the BBC censored it.  It was the time I had just helped Tommy leave the EDL, so people were like, "Maajid, stand by your principles", and then that led to a huge debate on Newsnight, still on YouTube, you can watch it, where I'm debating Mehdi Hasan on this stuff. 

I'm like, "Listen, you've got to let people -- you can be as offended as you want, but back to the point about you can't force your offence onto people.  So, I'm not saying you can't be offended, be offended, that's your religion, be offended, that's your prophet, you love him, be offended, but what you can't do is going around saying -- so in other words, I have every right to be offended, I've got no right whatsoever to tell you that you can't offend me; they're two different things.  I can be offended; I can't tell you you can't offend me.  Your right to offend me exists while my right to be offended exists, that's the problem there.  You can't tell someone they can't offend you otherwise we end up where nobody can speak".  So, that's throat clearing point number one.

Like on the extremes and stuff, you won't find anyone in this country that's done what I've done on this stuff.  Again this is still online, everyone can check it, you mentioned LBC, look it up, I hosted Charlie Hebdo staff on my show, right.

Peter McCormack: Prior to the --

Maajid Nawaz: After.  Prior to Charlie Hebdo is when I put that cartoon up, that's when I was with the Lib Dems; it became a huge scandal.

Peter McCormack: Were you targeted?

Maajid Nawaz: There were multiple death threats.  Nick Clegg had to get involved as the Deputy Prime Minister to try and back everyone off; that's all in the news, you can look it up, look up "Lib Dem candidate, Maajid Nawaz, Nick Clegg, cartoon", it's all there.  Nick Clegg had to intervene in the national debate to try and calm everyone down.  This is before Charlie Hebdo; can you imagine how controversial it was?

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Maajid Nawaz: Right, but I did it on a point of principle to say, "This needs to be shown to people that a Muslim can also say, 'I'm not offended'", and of course a whole bunch of people were offended at me.  So, that's all throat clearing, that's not my actual response to the Salman Rushdie case.  I say all of that so that people take my response in the best of faith.  I'm the one that has defended your right to do all of this.  And forget Muslim, I'm the only one that's done it out of all communities when it comes to actually posting this stuff and having TV debates and hosting the Charlie Hebdo staff after -- there was one of the staff survived the attack, she was on my show.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, one.

Maajid Nawaz: Yeah, she was on my show, Yasmine.  You can look it up, it's on the LBC website.  So, I've done all of that, now I'm going to say this attack was an attempted political assassination, it had nothing to do with all this debate we're talking about.  So this free speech debate, as important as it is, it's the wrong framework to look at what's happening right now with Salman Rushdie.  What's happened is, if you remember in the news, John Bolton was saying that the Iranians were trying to assassinate him.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Maajid Nawaz: Before that, the Saudis said, "If Iran develops a nuke, we're going to develop a nuke".  The Trump raid in Mar-a-Lago, it just turns out White House staff have reported they were looking for Iranian nuclear papers.  When I say were looking for nuclear stuff, the nuclear documents, it was related to the Iranian nuclear documents.  This is all related to the Iran nuclear deal, so you've got a problem now and that is does Iran get a nuclear bomb?  Pakistan has one; Israel has one, though it's a policy of plausible deniability; everyone that looks at them at least knows Israel's always had one.  Even Israel doesn't deny it, they just say, "We're not going to comment". 

Saudi doesn't have one, and there's a civil war going on right now between Saudi and Iran in the Middle East; Yemen is the battleground, and that's what the civil war in Yemen is about, Saudi interference, they're carpet-bombing the whole place, there's child starvation going on there, that's all about this struggle in the Middle East about who's going to be the reigning supreme power; is it Iran or Saudi Arabia?  They're two competing interests, and Israel's on the other side.

So this nuclear deal, Saudi's threatened to develop their own bomb if Iran does, the reports of John Bolton attempted to be assassinated by an Iranian revolutionary guard operative, that's all linked to this, and the Trump raid, it's now being reported that the nuclear papers that were being searched out were related to the Iran deal.  There's an Iranian female activist called Masih Alinejad.  She, on the same day, had somebody with a loaded automatic rifle outside her house basically threatening her.

Peter McCormack: I think I've interviewed her.  Big hair?

Maajid Nawaz: Yeah, you may have done.  And that guy was arrested on the same day Rushdie got attacked.  So, that's why I say zoom out and you look at all of this and you realise, what this was was an attempted political assassination by competing regimes over the Iran nuclear deal, and there's a whole bunch of people that may not want that to happen and scupper the deal.

Peter McCormack: But this is a thesis.

Maajid Nawaz: It's a thesis, but the thing is the other one isn't even a thesis; this was not related to free speech.  The other one isn't even a thesis, it's a relevant principle that we will believe in, but that's not what happened here.  This guy was an Iranian operative, his fake passport, the name he's using, it's all linked to the IRGC, even the name they've given is linked to one of the commanders.

Peter McCormack: Was this what you said about Eric Weinstein said, "If you search by his Muslim name you'll find different --"

Danny Knowles: Well that was slightly different, but his name on the passport was that.  So, why was Rushdie targeted?

Maajid Nawaz: So the Iranian regime, think about the fatwa that you mentioned; so Khomeini was the founder of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Khomeini put a fatwa on Rushdie in the 1980s.

Peter McCormack: He was the Ayatollah?

Maajid Nawaz: Yeah, and the founder, so he was the Supreme Commander, but also the founder.  That's why the fatwa sticks because he wasn't just any old Ayatollah; there have been two more after him.  So, what happens is Khomeini puts this fatwa on, he dies.  Khamenei comes along, the next dude, says, "We're going to not suspend it, we're going to cancel the fatwa.  We want to try and open up to the world".  This is in the 1990s when Tony Blair's in a tent with Gaddafi in the desert, everyone's trying to get along.  So, he goes, "We're going to get rid of the fatwa, we've got to get along with everyone", so he gets rid of it.

Khamenei comes along, the next dude, and says, "You know what, we're going to reinstall the fatwa", so he reinstalls it and then he says, "You know what, we're going to temporarily suspend it as opposed to cancel it".  So the status of the fatwa right now is that it's suspended not cancelled.  But then there was another guy in Iran, a big cleric, who says, "While this fatwa's suspended, I'm going to raise the bounty on it", so he raised it up to 33 million or some figure around there.  So, the fatwa was in this kind of like "it is on and it's not on" state, so there's a higher bounty but officially it's suspended. 

Now, back to your question about why Rushdie.  So when you know that history, you know that any attack on Rushdie is immediately going to be linked to blaming Iran, because Iran is complicit in the abuse of this word fatwa, because by the way in the religion, fatwa doesn't mean death sentence; this is another thing that really winds Muslims up.  Obviously there are always going to be people that will weaponise terms; all fatwa means is "religious ruling", that's all it mean.  I could give you a fatwa now about whether it's allowed for you to drink that water in Islamic law, literally that's just what it means, religious ruling.  Is beer allowed?  What about non-alcoholic beer?  Muslims aren't allowed alcohol but non-alcoholic beer, is that allowed?  The answer to that would be a fatwa.

Peter McCormack: Right, okay.

Maajid Nawaz: So, it's important for your audience to understand as well that the term's been weaponised and the problem is because their Muslims look like terrorists, when actually in their everyday conversation, they will be talking about, "What is the Shaikh's fatwa on, 'Can I walk into this building in this state of cleanliness when it's a mosque?  Should I have ablution?'"  These are all fatwas you give, they're religious rulings.

So, the problem is the Iranian regime has been obviously guilty itself in weaponising these terms for its political objectives.  So they called this a fatwa; you can see the link though because it's a religious ruling that Salman Rushdie needs to die, so that's why the word fatwa came along.  So anyone that attacks Salman Rushdie, because of the history of this fatwa, immediately Iran's going to get blamed.

So, Senator Marco Rubio, the minute that happened, puts out a tweet and says, "It's time to call off the Iran nuclear deal".  So, that's why Salman Rushdie, because the thing is, whoever wants to scupper the nuclear deal will know that you attack Rushdie and Iran gets blamed, and people like Senator Marco Rubio will come along and say we're going to cancel the Iran nuclear deal.  So, the real question is, who doesn't want this deal to go ahead?  This was an attempted political assassination. 

I'm going to say one more thing now, because of the state of the world we're in, it's not the first attempted political assassination; it's the only one the algorithm has actually managed to find you about, but before that, let's not forget Shinzo Abe in Japan, he's just been assassinated.  So, there was an attempted thing on John Bolton, the former national security advisor for Trump, he's saying, "The Iranian regime are trying to assassinate me".  We're in a time, let's just remember, the Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated, which is what kicked off the world war, right, so we're in a time of that again. 

So, basically, it starts with proxy conflicts, then it escalates, and then you end up with a clampdown on your own citizens from fear of war, which is what COVID was really about, because it was concerned about bioweapons, and then you end up with assassinations, and then one day, one of these assassinations is going to trigger a war, and that's the dangerous situation we're in.

Peter McCormack: Wasn't there a nuclear scientist assassinated a few years ago?

Maajid Nawaz: Yes, in Iran as well.

Peter McCormack: In Iran, yeah.

Maajid Nawaz: Remember, Qasem Soleimani, the Commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, was assassinated by Trump.

Peter McCormack: Yes, actually assassinated.

Maajid Nawaz: That's right, Khashoggi was assassinated and chopped into pieces by King Salman of Saudi Arabia in the Turkish Embassy, in the Saudi Embassy in Turkey.  So these are all political assassinations been going on.  The algorithm will only bring you the one that everyone's upset about, but they're going on, so that's why I say zoom out a bit.

So what's going on is, we're in a period where Iran is allied with China, that's basically the situation, Russia, Iran and China is on the one end and you've got the rest on the other end, and that's the divide.  So, there are reciprocal assassinations going on right now.  I'm not even passing judgment on the Iran nuclear deal as to whether it's good or bad for the world. 

I mean, if you ask me, all the problem is war in the first place, but somebody doesn't want that deal to go ahead, and that's what this particular incident is about, because you're right, it's been there since the 1980s, this is has been going on to the point where Salman Rushdie felt that it's over, which is why he was on that stage without the top security he used to have.

Peter McCormack: He still had two security there, didn't he?

Danny Knowles: I don't know actually.

Maajid Nawaz: I'm sure it was police there.

Danny Knowles: So, who do you think is behind this attack then?

Maajid Nawaz: Well, look, the reason I'm hesitating is that this now is speculation, this part.

Peter McCormack: You could make an argument that the Saudis don't want it to go ahead, you can make an argument that Iran themselves don't want it to go ahead, you can make an argument the US doesn't want it to go ahead.

Maajid Nawaz: That's right, and the reason is because, in Iran, there are factions, the hard-line factions who don't want peace with the West, and then the softer ones who do.  So, it could have been Iran doesn't want it because they hate the West and don't want peace.  China is allied with Iran.  Israel definitely doesn't want Iran to have a nuclear bomb.  So, Saudi Arabia doesn't want Iran to have a nuclear bomb.  So, who? 

Basically, what we know is the effect of this, it will be to damage the nuclear negotiations, but there are so many people that want them damaged; beyond that, it's an intelligence operation to find out who's behind it.

Peter McCormack: Gosh.  Well, man, listen, look, I wanted to do this for a long time and fascinating, as I expected.

Maajid Nawaz: Thank you.  And thanks for coming down from Bedford, thank you.

Peter McCormack: Anytime.  I hope we can get to it do it --

Maajid Nawaz: I flew in for this, by the way, from Tennessee if it makes you feel better.

Peter McCormack: Did you actually?

Maajid Nawaz: Yeah.  I was going to extend the trip, my in-laws were like, "Stay until Monday", because we were two days late going out.  I said, "Well, I could do, but I promised Pete I'd be here for this interview".

Peter McCormack: We could have put it back a couple of days.

Maajid Nawaz: No, but that's what I'm saying, I said to them, "Look, he's coming all the way from Bedford so I've got to at least be here".

Peter McCormack: Were you in Nashville in Tennessee?

Maajid Nawaz: No, Knoxville.  We married in Nashville.

Peter McCormack: I love Nashville.

Maajid Nawaz: But they're from Knoxville, but Nashville's beautiful.

Peter McCormack: Nashville's become my favourite place in the US.

Maajid Nawaz: Mate, if I was going to buy anywhere I'd buy there.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, Danny, you loved it, didn't you?

Danny Knowles: Yeah, I think that's probably my favourite place.

Maajid Nawaz: That's where we're from, that side of the family is Tennessee, yeah, Nashville, Knoxville, Carthage.

Peter McCormack: Are you out there a lot?

Maajid Nawaz: Yeah, my son was born there, I got married there.  I mean, he's born American and that's where his grandparents are.

Peter McCormack: Next time I'm in Nashville we'll let you know, because I'm there two or three times a year.  But, look, I appreciate it; I've wanted to do it for a long time, I'm going to want to do it again, six months to a year, we'll hit you up and do it again.

Maajid Nawaz: Absolutely.  You're always welcome on -- I think the kind of chat we're having, it's Warrior Creed would probably be more our style, because Radical's a very long serious interview format.

Peter McCormack: I'm not always the best guest, I prefer to ask the questions, but maybe one day. Give a shout-out to all your platforms, tell people where to go.

Maajid Nawaz: Did you just diss me?!

Peter McCormack: No, I dissed me!

Maajid Nawaz: "Maybe one day, I don't know!"

Danny Knowles: Maajid, you don't want him to!

Peter McCormack: Do I like being a guest?

Danny Knowles: No!

Peter McCormack: I hate being a guest.

Maajid Nawaz: I'm sure we can bring it out.  What kind of music did you grow up listening to?

Peter McCormack: Heavy metal.

Danny Knowles: You can do that.

Maajid Nawaz: Do you remember the Public Enemy, Anthrax --

Peter McCormack: Of course, Bring the Noise.

Maajid Nawaz: That's right, and do you remember the Ice T Body Count; do you remember that?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, and I remember actually the soundtrack to, what is it, Judgement Night was an entire album of hip-hop and metal bands, Faith No More did a track with Boo-Yaa T.R.I.B.E.

Maajid Nawaz: Yeah, the anti-establishment metal bands basically.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I mean that was me.  I nearly worn a Metallica shirt this morning, but then I didn't; but yeah, I still listen to the same music I listened to as a teenager, which is basically heavy metal and a bit of hip-hop.  I tried listening to some of his drill stuff but I'm just not cool enough.

Maajid Nawaz: Did you see what I did there, Danny, see, look, he's talking.

Danny Knowles: Yeah!

Peter McCormack: So, you talk to me about football, heavy metal --

Maajid Nawaz: Yeah, but's not a political show, it is literally about fitness, health, wellness, lifestyle.

Peter McCormack: I mean, I'm not that fit.

Maajid Nawaz: The last thing we just did actually, so let me end with this because it's important and it's always very interesting.  You know Malcom X, right, what a lot of people don't know is that he had an eldest grandson also called Malcolm, called Malcolm Shabazz, which was Malcolm's name after he came back from the pilgrimage, El-Hajj Malik el- Shabazz, when he got killed.  When Malcolm stopped being like, "All white people are the Devil", he went on a Hajj to Saudi Arabia and he came back and he said, "I'm going to work with everyone to try and bring unity", and that's when he got assassinated.

His eldest grandson is called Malcolm Shabazz, so our last Warrior Creed podcast was about him, because he basically was incarcerated at the age at 12 because Betty Shabazz, Malcolm's wife, her house got burnt down; she died in the fire.  No one knows if it was black ops, whatever, but they pinned the blame on the 12-year-old kid because he was in the house.  They said, "You must have set fire to the house", so they threw him in jail; he's Malcolm X's actual grandson.  So, he was incarcerated from the age of 12 through the criminal justice system; it's horrible this story, and his grandmother's just died.  So, he's been raised in the prison as a 12-year-old, so he obviously went down the wrong way, obviously; what 12-year-old kid wouldn't after such circumstances?

So, in the end, he's trying to fix himself up, he also went to pilgrimage like his grandfather and he started fixing himself up.  He got a sponsorship to study in Iran, he got a presidential visa to go and study out there as part of his Muslim studies and stuff, and yeah, you know, he's African American in the US.  Anyway, he gets arrested again jaywalking, like literally actually jaywalking.  They were harassing him all his life, and he put out this blog and he said, "The FBI keep harassing me", and he says, "I think I'm going to get assassinated.  The character assassination comes before the physical assassination"; that's literally a line in his blog post that he wrote.

Then, one day, he goes to Mexico City, and who knows what happens, but the story that's being told is that he gets a bar tab for $1,200 and he's like, "I had a drink, what do you mean $1,200?"  So he gets into a dispute over the bar tab in a bar where the mariachi perform, so the cartel's mariachi, the performers; now they're not cartel, but they're hired by the cartel for the performance of the music.  So basically, he gets beaten to death.

Peter McCormack: Jesus!

Maajid Nawaz: And killed in Mexico City, and it's very, very suspicious.  And if you've seen Who Killed Malcolm X? on Netflix, the documentary, you should watch if you haven't, because the whole thing was a set-up.  It's all come out now that New York Police set up Malcolm X.  And the grandson had written this blog saying, "I'm being harassed by the FBI", and then he gets killed in Mexico, so very suspicious circumstances; it's a mystery at the moment as to what happened, and of course you can imagine, the family's had a lot of trauma.

I met him, he attended one of my talks in Doha; I was doing a debate for the BBC Doha Debates under Tim Sebastian's stewardship, and he was in the audience, and then another person in the audience who became a friend of mine as well, called Rajae, basically met him there.  She's a Dutch-Moroccan singer and then she made some music, collaborated with him on music with Tupac's producer.  So, we were getting that story on Warrior Creed, so it's not like an interview, it's more like basically interesting stuff that we like to talk about.

Peter McCormack: Well, I've got a few things, some of them I'll tell you about when my son's not around that we can talk about as well.

Maajid Nawaz: Absolutely.

Peter McCormack: Look, love this, just tell people where to follow all the platforms.

Maajid Nawaz: Right, so basically on Substack it's maajidnawaz on Substack, called the Radical Dispatch; on my GETTR profile, @maajidnawaz, it's Warrior Creed, it's exclusive to GETTR every Friday at 11.00am EST, 4.00pm UK.  Then I've got a sponsorship with Odysee where the Radical Show is on Odysee once a week and we release episodes every Sunday.

Peter McCormack: All right, well, we'll stick that all in the show notes.  Thank you so much, loved this.

Maajid Nawaz: A pleasure.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, do this soon.

Maajid Nawaz: Absolutely, thank you very much.