Neoconservatism had the philosophy that you go in with a supply-led approach to impose democratic values from the top down. Whereas Islamists and far-right organizations, for decades, have been building demand for their ideology on the grassroots.

The only certainty we have is that those who are certain of a way to arrive at worldly salvation, are committed enough to organize around this, and seek power to enforce it, will invariably descend into a bloody totalitarian fascism.

As people's opportunities to succumb to confirmation bias increases online - only seeking out information that confirms their prejudices - ignorance, extremism and close-mindedness have continued to rise unabated.

There are members - very, very close and dear members - of my family - I'm talking immediate family - who simply don't speak to me anymore and haven't done so for years. My marriage fell apart.

The truth is, 'Charlie Hebdo' is not a racist magazine. Rather, it is a campaigning anti-racist left-wing magazine.

For my own part, once I became a teenager, I experienced severe and violent racism.

Increased sympathy for an Islamist cause, lack of integration, and the absence of acceptance of Muslims into British society makes it harder for Muslims to challenge Islamism and tough for non-Muslims to understand it.

I was filled with hate and anger. But during my trial, something decisive happened: Amnesty International adopted me as a prisoner of conscience, and it was an unbelievable feeling to know that there is someone fighting for you on the outside. Amnesty's 'soft' approach made me seriously consider alternatives to revenge.

The Islamist ideology took decades to incubate within our communities, and it will take decades to debunk.

Academic institutions in Britain have been infiltrated for years by dangerous theocratic fantasists. I should know: I was one of them.

By the age of 24, I found myself convicted in prison in Egypt, being blacklisted from three countries in the world for attempting to overthrow their governments, being subjected to torture in Egyptian jails, and sentenced to five years as a prisoner of conscience.

Chance explorations on search engines do not 'accidentally' lead users to extremist websites.

We cannot hope to effectively counter extremism if we just focus on schools, universities and prisons: we need to take this online as well.

I can now say that the more I learnt about Islam, the more tolerant I became.

After much soul searching I was able to renounce my past Islamist ideology, challenging everything I was once prepared to die for.

I really didn't grow up religious, and I didn't grow up acknowledging my Muslim identity. For me, I was a British Pakistani.

Hip-hop in the '90s began moving towards the Nation of Islam and the 5 Percenters, black nationalist movements; very much so, these movements embraced a form of Islam: Malcom X's form of Islam prior to his change.

What's my audience? British society. Am I received relatively well? Yes. Is there within that... if you break it down, challenges with Muslim communities? Of course there are.

The conclusion that I have come to is that actually, no religion, whether it's Islam, Christianity or any idea based on scripture or texts, is a religion of 'anything,' really.

I can say with a level of confidence that Islam is not a religion of war, only because the majority of Muslims don't subscribe to that perspective, not because there's something inherent in the text that tells me it's a religion of peace.

I joined a radical group at the age of 16 because I'm a passionate man; the good news is that I turned myself around since then. But my character is still quite free and passionate.

The positive is I'm delighted at the way the Liberal Democrats as a party have supported me and the way in which the work I'm doing, through the Liberal Democrats, has abled to broaden some of the work I work on.

Wherever I've been, I've left people who joined Hizb ut-Tahrir. I have to make amends. What I did was damaging to British society and the world at large.

Hizb ut-Tahrir spearheaded the radicalization of the 1990s and cultivated an atmosphere of anger.

I say I haven't lost my religion. I've lost my ideology.

My arrest in Egypt happened in 2002, and I was convicted to five years as a political prisoner.

I think I would encourage leaders to start working with communities in order to inoculate angry, young teenagers.

The University of Westminster is well known for being a hotbed of extremist activity.

I was born and raised in Essex, just outside London, to a financially comfortable, well-educated Pakistani family.

I had a mind inquiring enough to question world events, as well as the passion fostered by my background to care, but I lacked the emotional maturity to process these things. That made me ripe for Islamist recruitment. Into this ferment came my recruiter, himself straight out of a London medical college.

All my friends were non-Muslims. I actually knew very little about Islam - like, very little.

I became, suddenly, not just a Muslim in faith. I became a Muslim in politics. Somebody whose politics were pre-defined by one interpretation of Islam.

Before someone can change his ideas, he has to open his heart.

I worked my way through the education system and was treated as though I had value.

My upbringing was completely liberal from the start. In fact, I didn't even have a Muslim identity.

I realised that the idea of enforcing sharia is not consistent with Islam as it's been practised from the beginning. In other words, Islam has always been secular, and I had been totally ignorant of the fact.

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

To be forced to defend oneself is an inherently undesirable position to be in. The focus shifts from ideas to the person conveying them.

To suggest that a Muslim cannot think for himself sounds to me very much like an incident of anti-Muslim bigotry.

I am a Muslim. I am born to Muslim parents. I have a Muslim son. I have been imprisoned and witnessed torture for my previous understanding of my religion.

My feminism, as intended by me, extends to empowering women to make legal choices, not to judge the legal choices they make. My fight is for rights.

In current times, our moral uproar is best reserved for those who aspire to stone men or women to death, not those who consensually watch women - or men, for that matter - dance.

I was in prison with the assassins of the former president of Egypt, Anwar Sadat, who was killed in 1981. Those who weren't executed in that case were given life sentences, and two of those were with me in prison.

There were people who had sampled my voice from speeches when I was an Islamist and made them the chorus of pro-Islamist rap songs who then began talking about me as an apostate.

Being veterans of the struggle to push back against fundamentalist Christians, American liberals are well acquainted with the pitfalls of the neoconservative flirtation with the religious-right.

Islamism is an ideology that seeks to impose any version of Islam over society.

Satire has been a sanctuary historically monopolized by progressives, originally used as a discreet tool against Western religious fundamentalism.

Not all Muslims wish to express themselves in public through a communal religious identity. Identities are multiple, and some may wish to speak instead just as citizens in their professional capacity, through their political party, or their neighborhood body.

Satire is, by definition, offensive. It is meant to make us feel uncomfortable. It is meant to make us scratch our heads, think, do a double-take, and then think again.

Traditionally, open-minded secular liberal rationalists have not made a case for tolerance.