Key points
The 39-page document published under the name of the National Association of Muslim Police (NAMP) - circulated from a @muslim.police.uk address - presents itself as an institutional plea against “anti-Muslim hatred”. Its real aim, legible chapter after chapter, is to embed within the British police itself the conceptual framework and vocabulary of Brotherhood-style Islamism, beginning by erasing from the police lexicon the words that designate Islamism and jihadism.
The text combines three operations: 1) a polemical conflation of Zionism and anti-Muslim hatred, branding the IDF and the State of Israel a “terrorist group”; 2) a semantic blurring of antisemitism through etymology; 3) an operational demand to ban the terms “Islamist”, “Jihadist” and “fundamentalist” from British counter-terrorism doctrine.
1. A political manifesto circulated under the imprimatur of the police
The institutional status of the document is the first thing that should give pause. This is not an academic essay published in a personal capacity, but a text signed by the vice-president of a staff association recognised within the British police forces themselves, circulated from an email address at muslim.police.uk, on NAMP / Scottish Police Muslim Association letterhead bearing their official logo.
The NAMP is recognised by the National Police Chiefs' Council as a “staff association”. Its stated mission - to support Muslim police officers - has broadened into a function of doctrinal lobbying, of which this document is the most explicit culmination. The title leaves no ambiguity: the aim is to move “From Past Prejudices to Present Policies”, that is, to turn an activist narrative into public policy.
This arrangement - a faith-based community association producing, from inside a sovereign institution, the framework of thought that institution is then meant to adopt - is the purest example of what CERIF's work calls Brotherhood institutional entryism: not clandestine infiltration but a perfectly open occupation of the bodies of internal co-optation, placed at the service of an external ideological grammar.
2. Zionism cast as a “manifestation of anti-Muslim hatred”
Chapter 3 of the document crosses a threshold rarely reached in an institutional police text. On page 16 one reads:
The claim is staggering in its scope. The Jewish national movement - which encompasses a majority of the world's Jews, which is embraced by most political parties of the Middle East's leading democracy, and which is protected under British case law on the Equality Act 2010 - is here described in its entirety as a “manifestation of anti-Muslim hatred”. This equation produces two immediate and politically organised effects.
First, it legitimises, from within the British police, the use of anti-Zionism as an operational category. An officer who subscribes to this thesis will treat the display of an Israeli flag, a sign of support for Israel or criticism of Hamas as a possible “anti-Muslim hate incident”. The reversal is total: what British hate-crime doctrine protects (the expression of a Jewish and national identity) becomes, instead, what ought to be monitored as a symptom of racial hatred.
Second, it aligns police vocabulary word for word with that of the Muslim Brotherhood organisations and of Hamas, for whom anti-Zionism structures the whole of militant rhetoric. The NAMP does not reformulate, does not qualify, does not translate: it takes up the propaganda rhetoric as is, in a document internal to the police.
3. The explicit branding of the IDF as a “terrorist group”
The operation is completed, on page 30, by an astonishing named list:
The IDF - the regular army of a state allied to the United Kingdom, a cooperation partner in intelligence and security - is named explicitly as a “Zionist terrorist group” in a NAMP document. No nuance, no distinction between military operations and events of war, no reference to the rulings of international courts: the label “genocide” is applied indiscriminately to events belonging to radically different legal categories (Qibya 1953, Kafr Qasim 1956, Sabra and Shatila 1982 - where direct responsibility lay with the Lebanese Christian Phalangists -, the Gaza military operations of 2008–2014).
Coming from an activist academic, this blurring would be of no consequence. Coming from the vice-president of an association recognised by the police chiefs, it produces public policy: it invites every Muslim police officer to regard themselves, in the exercise of their duties, as morally opposed to the army of a partner state - and to treat any bilateral cooperation with it as “anti-Muslim hatred”.
4. Semantic blurring of antisemitism
Chapter 3 develops an etymological operation with considerable legal consequences. Quoting John Esposito, the author explains:
This reasoning, which presents itself as scholarly, is a political operation. Antisemitism designates, throughout contemporary European case law, hatred of Jews as a group - the meaning given to it by Wilhelm Marr (who coined the word in 1879 precisely to name his own hostility to Jews), then by virtually all historians of the Shoah, then by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), whose working definition is today adopted by several dozen states. To broaden antisemitism to “all those who speak a Semitic language” amounts to legally diluting the specific protection owed to Jews, and to bringing hatred of Muslims within the same legal framework - even though the latter is already covered in the United Kingdom by the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 and the Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 2021.
The etymological argument is, moreover, refuted by linguists: “Semitic” is an eighteenth-century term, coined to classify languages, never peoples. No specialist of contemporary antisemitism - from Hannah Arendt to Léon Poliakov, from Pierre-André Taguieff to Jeffrey Herf - has ever defended the thesis advanced here. It belongs to political apologetics, not to analysis.
5. The operational demand: erasing “Islamist” and “jihadist” from the police vocabulary
All of the above serves to prepare the operational demand set out in chapters 7 and 10. It is clear:
The word “Islamist” designates a political project distinct from Islam as a religion. It is precisely because this distinction is cardinal that it is intolerable to the Muslim Brotherhood movement: it identifies it as a political actor. The NAMP proposal - to replace “Islamist” with “Anti-Western Terrorism” - abolishes the very possibility of naming the ideological adversary politically.
6. An elastic definition of “anti-Muslim hatred”
The document offers its own definition of “anti-Muslim hatred”, which deserves to be read word for word:
Three features make this definition a legal trap. First, it encompasses “attitudes”, not only acts or speech - opening the door to the punishment of unexpressed opinions. Second, it includes “hatred towards the faith”, that is, the theological, doctrinal and philosophical critique of the Muslim religion - which directly contravenes the freedoms guaranteed by the Equality Act 2010 and the British principle of lawful criticism of religions. Third, it extends to “Muslim property”, a category with no precise legal definition, which may cover a mosque as readily as a halal shop or a financial asset - clearing the way for a flood of litigation.
This definition reproduces the main flaws of the British APPG definition of “Islamophobia” (2018), which the Jenkins–Gilligan report methodically dismantled in A False Compromise (CERIF summary 2026/03). The NAMP - police officers - is in fact proposing the same normative framework as the activist organisations campaigning to criminalise criticism of Islam - but this time clothed in the moral authority of the police itself.
7. Selective Qur'anic apologetics and historical revisionism
Chapter 9 undertakes an ambitious demonstration: that Islamic law of war “predates and surpasses” international humanitarian law. The author cites surah Al-Baqara, verse 190 (“Fight in the way of Allah those who fight you, and do not transgress”), and surah Al-Anfal, verse 61 (“If they incline to peace, incline to it also”).
The operation is classic Qur'anic apologetics: extracting the peaceful verses while ignoring the so-called “sword verses” (Tawba 9:5, 9:29), passing over in silence the debates on abrogation (naskh) that divided the legal schools for twelve centuries, and presenting the result as if Islam constituted a single, unambiguous doctrinal body, superior to Geneva. No serious specialist of international humanitarian law - neither Antonio Cassese, nor Yoram Dinstein, nor Marco Sassoli - would maintain that the Geneva Conventions had been prefigured by the Islamic law of war. The proposition belongs to the Friday-mosque sermon, not to scholarship.
The same selective operation is applied to history: the document claims that “anti-Semitism was non-existent in the Arab world” and that Muslims systematically protected Jews. It takes considerable revisionist energy to ignore the status of dhimmi, the Baghdad Farhud (1941, 180 dead), the expulsion of 850,000 Jews from Arab countries between 1948 and 1972, or the pogroms of Aleppo (1947), Aden (1947), Tripoli (1945 and 1948) or Tunis (1967). These facts, fully documented, receive not a line.
The claim is also contradicted by contemporary opinion surveys. According to the Pew Research Center (“Unfavorable Views of Jews and Muslims on the Increase in Europe”, 17 September 2008), the proportion of unfavourable opinions of Jews reached 97% in Lebanon, 96% in Jordan, 95% in Egypt, 76% in Pakistan and Turkey, and 70% in Indonesia - figures with no equivalent in contemporary Western societies. The same institution, in its survey “Muslim Publics Divided on Hamas and Hezbollah” (2 December 2010), confirmed that negative views of Jews in the Muslim-majority countries studied “remained at or near record highs”. The idea that antisemitism was “non-existent in the Arab world” does not survive a moment's empirical scrutiny: the over-representation of anti-Jewish hostility in Muslim countries is, on the contrary, one of the most stable findings of international opinion research.
8. The argumentative neutralisation of criticism
One last operation deserves attention. The document opens, in its preface, with praise for “the importance of admitting ignorance in leadership roles”. The rhetoric is clever: any interlocutor who would challenge the text's analysis is filed in advance among those who “blindly follow the narratives presented by media and politicians without question”. Criticism is thus, by construction, proof of ignorance.
This manoeuvre of pre-emptively reversing the burden of proof is typical of activist discourse seeking to immunise itself against debate. It makes the text a rhetorically closed object: one does not refute it, one submits to it - either one submits, or one reveals oneself as ignorant.
9. Andrew Gilligan's converging investigation in The Spectator
Andrew Gilligan's journalistic work, published in The Spectator on 5 June 2026 - the reading of which led me to discover this document - brings several decisive elements that place the textual analysis conducted above within a broader institutional mapping. They deserve to be recorded here, for they shift the significance of the NAMP document from the sphere of discourse alone to that of the actual infrastructure of the British police.
An organisation recognised throughout the police hierarchy. Gilligan documents that the NAMP is affiliated with at least 16 of the 43 British police forces, that it is officially praised by the College of Policing - the police professional body, under the Home Office - as “an important part of policing” that plays “a crucial role in supporting our workforce”. The College even developed with it a joint guidance on the handling of Muslim suspects: it recommends that “prayer and fasting times be taken into account when planning searches of Muslim homes” and that Muslim suspects in custody be granted thirty minutes between breaking the fast and questioning. What the reading note described at the ideological level thus translates into criminal-investigation doctrine.
A presentation before the counter-terrorism advisory body. Gilligan reveals a fact that directly extends our analysis of chapter 7: the NAMP was invited to present its theses before the NPCC's counter-terrorism advisory group - the national advisory body on counter-terrorism - to call there for the term “Islamist terrorism” to be abandoned, on the grounds that “its use by the police contributes to faith hate crimes”. The argument I analysed at the rhetorical level was thus in fact carried into the very body where doctrine is decided.
The argument from the figures. Gilligan recalls a decisive factual element: since 1999, 94% of terrorism deaths in the United Kingdom have been caused by Islamists. The demand to ban the word “Islamist” from police vocabulary therefore means, in practice, banning the naming of 94% of the country's terrorism-related deaths.
The defence of Hamas in the document. Gilligan rightly highlights a passage of the text I quoted above: the NAMP there describes as “alarming and unverified stories” the accounts of atrocities committed by Hamas on 7 October 2023 and after, including the beheadings and rapes. Yet, as Gilligan recalls, the UN itself has documented both the beheadings (or attempts) and the sexual assaults. And according to Amnesty International - which Gilligan ironically calls a “well-known friend of Israel” - at least 36 Israeli children were killed in the attacks, along with 659 adult civilians. The NAMP document, which claims to denounce the “dehumanising drift” against Palestinians, itself carries out a symmetrical dehumanisation of the Israeli victims.
The precedent of the Shawcross review. Gilligan finally recalls something British officials have known since 2023: the Shawcross review of the British counter-extremism programme had identified, among the leading figures of the NAMP and its local branches, individuals who had “promoted several people and organisations with concerning views or affiliations, shared conspiracy theories, antisemitic material and calls for the destruction of Israel”.
Gilligan sums up the situation in a formula that deserves to be quoted in full:
The analogy with the financial corruption of the British police of the 1970s - which led Robert Mark to a complete reset of Scotland Yard - gives the measure of Gilligan's diagnosis: we are no longer in a doctrinal debate but in the question of institutional corruption. The present reading note, analytically, converges with that assessment.
Conclusion: a warning signal
The NAMP document is nothing like a simple plea for the non-discrimination of Muslim officers. It is a coherent ideological manifesto, which asks the British police:
- to give up naming Islamism and jihadism;
- to adopt a definition of anti-Muslim hatred broad enough to encompass theological criticism and the statistical mention of a fact;
- to recognise Zionism as a “manifestation” of that hatred, and the IDF as a “terrorist group”;
- to dilute the legal specificity of antisemitism into a common linguistic category;
- and to present Qur'anic apologetics as a moral standard superior to international humanitarian law.
The method is exactly the one the CERIF conceptual grid identifies as characteristic of contemporary Muslim Brotherhood entryism in Western societies: not a show of force, but a slow lexical, doctrinal and legal substitution, carried out from within institutions in the name of fighting a “phobia” whose very definition is produced by those it is supposed to protect.
The fact that this text carries the logo of an association recognised by Britain's police chiefs, and that it is circulated from a @muslim.police.uk address, deserves, on its own, the attention of European decision-makers. No equivalent of the NAMP should be allowed to publish, under the imprimatur of a police institution, a text calling for the army of an allied state to be designated a “terrorist group”. This is, precisely, the governance failure that Germany's Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz warned of in June 2026 (see the CERIF summary of the BILD exclusive).
The document examined is the culmination of a patient strategy, set out here in all its coherence by its own author. As such, it is a documentary exhibit of the first importance - not for what it says, but for what it reveals about the state of progress of Brotherhood institutional entryism in a Western democracy.
Florence Bergeaud-Blackler
Anthropologist, Research Fellow at the CNRS (HDR)
Founding President of CERIF - European Centre for Research and Information on Brotherhood-style Islamism
cerif.eu