Imam Afroz left the federal government-backed National Imam's Consultative Forum in April in no doubt how worried Australia should be about the young radicals.

"We have had a program for the last seven years now in which we have had 240 people who were considered to be moving in a direction which may have led them to violent radicalisation - to terrorism," Imam Afroz told the national forum.



His warning to the forum, made up of over 20 imams from every state and territory, was recorded and broadcast last night on Channel Seven's Today Tonight.

Imam Afroz, who runs the Al-Ghazzali Centre for Islamic Sciences & Human Development, could not be contacted for comment last night.

But Sydney-based Maajid Nawaz, himself a former radical who spent 13 years inside Hizb ut-Tahrir, the fanatical global Islamist political movement, said it demonstrated the extent of the problem.

He said he did not consider it a success that there were still 120 young radicals potentially headed for terrorism.

"I find it astonishing we've got one centre that has 240 radicals," Mr Mawaz told Today Tonight

"If 120 can become violent in one Islamic centre, that tells me the scale of the problem. It's massive because that's only one centre."

That is on top of the hundreds of followers who follow Hizb ut-Tahrir, Sheik Feiz Mohammed, the Global Islamic Youth Centre at Liverpool and Auburn's Bukhari House Bookshop and prayer hall in western Sydney.

Mr Mawaz had offered to debate Muslim leaders at a public meeting organised by the TV program but was told they did not want to further alienate the extremists.

He said in order to stem the rising tide of radical young Australian Muslims turning to hate the community had to "aggressively claim the middle ground".