LONDON - The "perversion of Islam is the source of a lot of the problems in the Middle East," and more than force is needed to tackle extremism, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair said Tuesday.
The Centre on Religion and Geopolitics -- an initiative of Blair's Tony Blair Faith Foundation -- analyzed propaganda from ISIS, al Qaeda and al-Nusra Front over two years for the report.
It found the Salafi-jihadist groups shared nearly identical ideologies and said challenging their interpretation of Islam was critical to defeating them.
"There's no point in just tackling the violence unless you tackle the ideology of extremism behind the violence," Blair said.
"You've got these broad ideological strands that lie behind a lot of this extremism. If you take, for example, some of the organizations in the Middle East, some of those clerics that are putting out the most extreme stuff -- they'll have Twitter followings that go into millions of people.
"These people are saying things about Jewish people -- about even those in their own religion who are different that we would regard as completely unacceptable -- and it's those waters of extremism in which the violent extremists can swim," he said.
"The majority of people within Islam do not support either the violence or the ideology. What we are talking about, however, is a radical Islamist way of thinking that results in extremism by small numbers of people, but that thinking is shared by larger numbers of people, and you've got to attack both -- the violence and the extremism, the thinking behind it," Blair said.
He said countries where extremism had taken hold needed to overhaul their education systems.
"We've got to use our negotiating power and might with these countries to say, 'You're going to have to reform the education systems that are educating millions of young people day in and day out to a view of the world that's narrow-minded, bigoted and hostile to those who are different.' "
Blair, who was Prime Minister from 1997 until 2007, led Britain when it went to war in Iraq. He later was the Mideast envoy for an international quartet of the United States, Russia, United Nations and the European Union to try to achieve a settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He stepped down from that position in June. (CNN)