Will Labour suspend the National Association of Muslim Police?

The leaders of Britain’s Jews have raised ‘serious questions concerning police impartiality’ and asked that the National Association of Muslim Police (NAMP) be suspended from any policy role in policing. It comes after The Spectator revealed that NAMP had called Zionism ‘one of the manifestations of anti-Muslim hatred’, described the Israel Defence Force (IDF) as a ‘Zionist terrorist group’ and defended Hamas against ‘unverified stories about acts of violence’ committed on 7 October.

In a letter to the policing minister, Sarah Jones, yesterday the Jewish Leadership Council (JLC) pointed out that these extraordinary statements were made in a policy document published on an official police.uk website, which NAMP is for some reason allowed to use. As the JLC’s Russell Langer put it: A police-affiliated organisation appears to have used official policing infrastructure to advance highly partisan and disturbing political positions while also participating in discussions relating to policing policy, hate crime, counter-terrorism and community relations… This was… to all intents and purposes, published officially by the police… A reasonable member of the public would fairly assume that material hosted on official policing infrastructure has passed through some form of review.

They would expect that its content is broadly consistent with the standards expected of police services. Publication on the police.uk website has institutional significance. These claims need to be seen in the context of NAMP activists’ long association with extremism NAMP claimed in its paper that no Israeli children were killed in the 2023 attacks, apart from one, two days later, which it tried to blame on Israeli forces. The actual number killed was at least 36.

It said claims of ‘assaults’ and ‘beheadings’ against Hamas were ‘unverified’ – another untruth. It attacked the media for ‘falsely insinuating that [Palestinians] perpetrate atrocities against innocents’. It spoke of ‘Zionist terrorist groups including the IDF’ and claimed: Zionism represents one of the manifestations of anti-Muslim hatred, stripping Muslims of their humanity. Most popular In its letter, the JLC said that NAMP effectively ‘paints the majority of British Jews, who are Zionists, as promulgators of anti-Muslim hatred’ and charged that the group ‘is exercising influence in a manner that undermines confidence across all communities’.

It called on Jones to ‘review NAMP’s current role within national policing structures’ and ‘consider whether NAMP’s participation in policy development should be suspended pending that review’. As we reported last week, NAMP is affiliated with at least 19 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’.

It 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’. NAMP’s only response on the day the JLC published its letter was to quietly remove the document from its website. (It survives in web archives.) By Monday, three days later, it got around to publishing a statement insisting that it did not support terrorism and that the document – despite having NAMP’s logo at the top, being published on NAMP’s website, and being written by its then vice president with his NAMP affiliation at the foot of every page – did not represent its views.

It expressed its ‘regret’ at ‘any concern, discomfort, or misunderstanding’ the document ‘may have caused’. These claims need to be, shall we say, seen in the context of NAMP activists’ long association with extremism. As the official Shawcross review found , 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.

NAMP’s brazen final paragraph of their statement was an attack on ‘those who seek to sow division’ (that is, presumably, we who exposed the document, rather than those who wrote it). This would, they said, ‘undermine the many years of work NAMP has dedicated to fostering positive relationships between people of different religions and backgrounds’. If defending murderers is NAMP’s idea of fostering positive relationships, let’s hope those many years of work come to an end quite soon.

Over to you, minister.