Britain’s official representative body for Muslim police officers has sparked outrage after a policy paper published on its website proposed scrapping terms like “Islamist” and “jihadist” to label “terrorists with Islamic affiliations.”
The National Association of Muslim Police (NAMP) has deleted the 39-page paper titled “From Past Prejudices to Present Policies: Confronting anti-Muslim hatred and Promoting Human Rights,” which also demonizes Zionism as “one of the manifestations of anti-Muslim hatred.”
This cannot pass with the document being quietly deleted.
The paper, which calls Zionism “a narrow, nationalist, and colonialist viewpoint that fosters anti-Muslim hatred,” was drafted by Khaldoun Kabbani, former vice president of the NAMP. Published in July 2025, it became widely known only after it was featured in The Spectator on June 5, 2026.
Top Muslim Cop Condemns Association of Jihadism with Terrorism
In a lengthy section on “Islamic Teachings on Warfare and Humanitarian Principles,” the paper warns that “characterising terrorists with Islamic affiliations as ‘jihadists’ or ‘Islamists’ distorts these terms and unfairly associates the broader Muslim community with radicalism.”
“Such misrepresentation is notably absent when discussing terms related to other faiths like Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, Judaism, and Christianity,” Kabbani writes.
“Terms such as ‘Islamist’ blur the distinction between extremism and the peaceful practices observed by the majority of Muslims, perpetuating anti-Muslim hatred and casting unwarranted suspicion over the entire religion,” the paper emphasizes, failing to acknowledge the academic distinction between “Islamism” as a totalitarian political ideology and “Islam” as a religion.
“Terms like ‘Islamic terrorism’ inaccurately imply that terrorism is intrinsic to Islam, which is misleading and incorrect,” Kabbani argues. “The atrocities committed by the Third Reich under Adolf Hitler and Fascist Italy under Benito Mussolini, though culturally Christian, are typically described by their political ideologies, not their religious affiliations.”
The paper concludes with proposals “to remove the direct association of terrorism with Islam” and instead use terms like “Irhabi/Irhabism/Irhabist”— words derived from the Arabic word for “fear” or “dread” and used to refer to terrorism and terrorists in modern Arabic —as well as “anti-Western Terrorism” and “right-wing terrorism.”
Kabbani ignores an inconvenient fact. Islamic scholars have acknowledged the relationship between Islam and political violence in the modern era. Stressing the legitimate use of the term, Mehdi Mozaffari, a Muslim scholar from the University of Aarhus, defines “Islamism” as “a religious ideology with a holistic interpretation of Islam whose final aim is the conquest of the world by all means.” Several Muslim authors have used the term “Islamism” to denote political Islam, Mozaffari writes, naming the Sudanese Hasan al-Turabi, the Tunisian Salwa al-Sharaf, and Aziz al-Azmeh, the author of Islams and Modernities.
Policy Paper Demonizes Zionism
Kabbani, who struggles to obscure the connection between Islamism and political violence, is however, quick to demonize Zionism which he claims strips Muslims of their humanity and portrays them as “human animals,” “monsters,” and “Amalekites.”
While Judaism’s teachings are inclusive and compassionate, Zionism engages in “acts such as killing, raping, engaging in ethnic cleansing, and constructing settlements in Palestine and Lebanon over the past 75 years and beyond,” Kabbani argues.
He also insists that “the misuse of the Holocaust by any ideology, including Zionism, for justifying actions that lack compassion and empathy contradicts the ethical and humane principles inherent in Judaism.”
U.K. Jewish Groups Blast Paper’s Antisemitism
Stephen Silverman, Director of Investigations and Enforcement for Campaign Against Antisemitism (CAA), told Focus on Western Islamism (FWI): “The people responsible for publishing this extremist screed on the official police.uk web domain are unfit to be police officers and must be immediately investigated by their respective forces’ professional standards departments and dismissed.”
“This is every bit as scandalous as the West Midlands Police debacle and even more so—this is not police acquiescence to Islamist extremism, it is evidence that a major national policing association has been infiltrated by or is controlled by Islamists,” Silverman warned.
“We are writing to the Home Secretary to ensure that this clear threat to British policing results in a clear message being sent. This cannot pass with the document being quietly deleted. Not one of the people involved in publishing this document can remain as a police officer,” he noted.
“Furthermore, the National Police Chiefs Council must show leadership by immediately denouncing the National Association of Muslim Police for bringing policing into further disrepute in this manner. If they do not, that is perhaps more alarming than the publication of this document in the first place,” he added.
“British Jews have long suffered two-tier policing that sees antisemitic crime go unpunished. Saying that the movement for Jewish self-determination contributes to anti-Muslim hatred and that even talking about Hamas’ 7 October atrocity should be stopped is the kind of extremism we would expect to read in the opening of the prosecution case against an antisemite, not on the national police web domain,” Silverman emphasized.
The Board of Deputies of British Jews has condemned the document, describing it as containing “falsehoods” about Jewish identity, history, and antisemitism, warning that any circulation among serving officers would raise serious questions about the integrity and impartiality of policing.
Following the public outrage, NAMP has distanced itself from the report authored by Kabbani—who has yet to respond to queries from FWI sent via LinkedIn and NAMP’s contact email. “We understand that the publication of this document has affected several communities, and we regret any concern, discomfort, or misunderstanding it may have caused,” the organization said in a statement. “The author of the paper no longer works within the police service and is no longer associated with NAMP.”
“NAMP categorically does not ‘defend’ Hamas or any other proscribed organization,” the statement noted. Nevertheless, it insisted that its “longstanding position has been to highlight the risks of linking religion with terrorism and the use of terms such as ‘Islamist terrorism,’ which can contribute to the stigmatization of Muslim communities and fuel hostility towards Muslims.”
