Maajid Nawaz’s shoes clack against the hardwood floor as he ambles up and down the center aisle of the Oxford Union’s hallowed debating chamber. It’s January 2013 and the British activist, sporting a slick black tuxedo and a gelled coiffure, urges the House to accept the motion that the American Dream is a noble ethos to which all people should aspire.

By his account, he should be on the other side of the aisle. “For 13 years of my life, I considered America my enemy,” he says, rehashing the events that marked his discipleship with Hizb ut-Tahrir, or “The Liberation Party,” a pan-Islamic political organization that aims to establish a global caliphate through non-violent means.

The self-described former “radical” joined the group’s British chapter when he was 16. It was during his four-year stint in the bowels of an Egyptian prison last decade, he says, that he began to reject the dogma of religious extremism that landed him there, and came to embrace the values of liberalism that now define his public profile.

Today, instead of supporting the cause of Quran-thumping diehards, he’s ingratiated himself in the growing union of neoconservatives and hawkish liberals who believe in Western exceptionalism and the efficacy of power, especially military power, to expand its influence and protect its interests. He has found in them an opportunity to expand his platform, and they, in him, a veneer that deflects accusations of Islamophobia and Western triumphalism by fixating not on Islam per se but on the alleged threat posed by its foreign “ism” affix: Islamism.

Against the backdrop of ISIS beheadings, Syria’s downward spiral, and rising fears of domestic terrorism, Nawaz’s story has made him a go-to commentator in American print and television media. Following the Paris attacks in November, he strolled through the streets of the French capital with CNN’s Anderson Cooper, explaining the need to confront the religious species in the genus terrorism. On Fox News’s The Kelly File, Nawaz warned of a “global jihadist insurgency,” and, to the delight of network devotees, lambasted Obama’s strategy to defeat the Islamic State as one of obfuscation, denial, and inaction. Nawaz is also a contributor to The Daily Beast and the author, with neuroscientist-cum-atheist-celebrity Sam Harris, of the book Islam and the Future of Tolerance, published last fall by Harvard University Press.