The official representative body for Muslim police officers in Britain has branded Zionism “one of the manifestations of anti-Muslim hatred,” described the Israel Defence Force as a “Zionist terrorist group” and defended Hamas against “unverified stories about acts of violence.”
This is very far from the first controversy to envelop the National Association of Muslim Police
The inflammatory claims are made by the National Association of Muslim Police (NAMP) in a policy paper on “confronting anti-Muslim hatred,” written by its then vice-president, Khaldoun Kabbani, published on its website last year but not publicised until now.
In the wake of the Henry Nowak scandal, the document will increase concerns that British police are being corrupted from within by extremist identity and grievance politics. It will also raise further worries about the Government’s controversial definition of “anti-Muslim hostility.” The NAMP paper is intended as a contribution to what the term should cover.
NAMP is affiliated to at least 16 of Britain’s 43 police forces and has a formal national role within the police. The College of Policing – the police’s official professional body, an arms-length organisation of the Home Office – praises NAMP as “an important part of policing” which plays “a crucial role in supporting our workforce” and has developed joint guidance with NAMP on matters including prayer and Ramadan. The latter recommends that police give Muslim suspects special treatment, including that “prayer and fasting times should be taken into consideration when planning searches of Muslim homes” and that Muslim suspects in custody be allowed 30 minutes between their fast and interviews.
NAMP also works with the National Police Chiefs’ Council, holding workshops with them and being allowed to present to the NPCC’s counter-terrorism advisory group with a request that the term “Islamist terrorism” be abandoned because “its use by the police contributes to faith hate crime.”
The mentality behind this ridiculous demand – since 1999, 94 per cent of terrorist deaths in Britain have been caused by Islamists – becomes clear from the document we reveal today. In it, NAMP specifically defends an Islamist terror organisation, Hamas, against “alarming and unverified stories about acts of violence” committed by it on and after 7 October 2023, “including claims of beheadings and assaults. These reports have significantly contributed to increasing hatred towards Islam.”
Claims of 40 babies being decapitated were untrue, but the UN did document Hamas carrying out beheadings, or attempted beheadings, during the attacks, along with multiple sexual assaults.
NAMP also claims that “reports from Israeli and Western media initially claimed that Hamas killed 120 children…However, these reports have been challenged by more recent disclosures indicating that not a single Israeli infant was a casualty during the said attacks. It was later confirmed that only one child’s death occurred two days following the attack.”
In fact, according to that well-known friend of Israel, Amnesty International, at least 36 Israeli children were killed in the Hamas-led attacks, along with 659 adult civilians, many of them little more than children themselves. These numbers go unmentioned as NAMP attacks the media for “falsely insinuating that [Palestinians] perpetrate atrocities against innocents.”
Fortunately, NAMP knows who the real terrorists are. Its document speaks of “Zionist terrorist groups including the IDF” and opines: “Zionism represents one of the manifestations of anti-Muslim hatred, stripping Muslims of their humanity.”
Why is an organisation like this allowed to be anywhere near the profession of law enforcement?
With a certain inevitability, NAMP accuses “Zionists” of “the misuse of the Holocaust” in the Israel-Palestine conflict before itself grindingly misusing the Holocaust in the exact same cause. As it says: “In the tragic history of Auschwitz, the process of dehumanisation by the Nazis towards the Jewish people highlights a broader mechanism of oppression, where dominant groups suppress empathy through propaganda and indoctrination to facilitate cruelty. This mechanism is not confined to the past but is observed in contemporary conflicts, such as the situation between the Israeli Government and Military and Palestinians.”
As my Policy Exchange colleague David Spencer has written, a central element of the crisis that has enveloped British policing is the distraction of officers from the core policing task of keeping the public safe, preventing crime and catching criminals. Staff networks such as NAMP are a major cause of that distraction.
This is very far from the first controversy to envelop NAMP. Policy Exchange has repeatedly covered this subject over many years. As Spencer shows, NAMP has spent years lobbying for partisan changes in policing and government policy in a way that can only undermine trust in police impartiality. The Shawcross review of counter-extremism found that senior figures in NAMP and its force affiliates have promoted several individuals and organisations with disturbing views or affiliations and shared conspiracy theories, anti-semitic hate material and calls for the destruction of Israel. Why is an organisation like this allowed to be anywhere near the profession of law enforcement?
One definition of corruption is the perversion of an institution working in the public interest into one which at least sometimes works for private or sectional interests. The activist corruption now reaching into parts of the police risks becoming as harmful to public confidence, as demoralising for ordinary officers, and as much of a boon for criminals as was the straightforward money corruption of some forces in the 1970s. It requires a similarly deep, far-reaching reset, and a similar determination to expel and destroy it. One part of that must be to banish, or even better to outlaw, NAMP and other staff networks like it.
Andrew Gilligan is a senior fellow at Policy Exchange
