Former British prime minister Tony Blair urged his successor and the country’s government to “be honest” about the fact that an Islamist ideology motivated the beheading of a soldier in Woolwich two weeks ago. Current prime minister David Cameron has called the murder a “betrayal of Islam” and insisted that “there is nothing in Islam that justifies this truly dreadful act.”

“There is a problem within Islam — from the adherents of an ideology that is a strain within Islam,” Blair countered in a Daily Mail editorial over the weekend. “And we have to put it on the table and be honest about it.”

Blair warned that “the seeds of future fanaticism and terror, possibly even major conflict, are being sown.”

“The ideology is out there,” he wrote, citing the Muslim Brotherhood’s taking power in northern Africa, Syria’s civil war, and Iran’s influence in the region. “It isn’t diminishing.”

“So I understand the desire to look at this world and explain it by reference to local grievances, economic alienation and of course ‘crazy people,’” he continued. “But are we really going to examine it and find no common thread, nothing that joins these dots, no sense of an ideology driving or at least exacerbating it all?”

Blair called for “a modern view of religion and its place in society and politics” and for educating ”children about faith, here and abroad.” He referred to his foundation, the Tony Blair Faith Foundation, as a vehicle to address these issues, but said his efforts will not be enough.

“It is a drop in the ocean compared with the flood of intolerance taught to so many,” Blair concluded. “Now, more than ever, we have to be strong and we have to be strategic.”