Why were police given lectures on Nigel Farage’s ‘Islamophobia’?

Having abandoned the streets to thugs, gangsters and drug addicts, England’s police have left many of us wondering what they do with their time. Well, now we know. They analyse speeches by Nigel Farage at ‘Islamophobia’ conferences hosted by Muslim charities and attend lectures on the ‘myths and misconceptions about Islam’.

Recent reports concerning North Yorkshire Police have given us another reason to despair over the state of the nation’s law enforcers. Late last year, at the ‘North Yorkshire Hate Crime Conference’, officers were shown footage of a Sky News interview with Farage, the leader of Reform UK. In the interview, he said that a ‘growing number of young people in this country do not support British values – in fact, loathe much of what we stand for’. Farage said this included British Muslims and attendees of the pro-Palestine marches. He also cited a survey from the Henry Jackson Society, a conservative think-tank, which found that close to half of British Muslims supported Hamas.

West Yorkshire Police were then shown a video of a man abusing a Muslim bus driver. They were asked by former police officer Abbas Najib, who was hosting the seminar, to ‘draw [their] own conclusions’ about Farage’s speech, and to ‘think about whether this commentary [had] any influence on something like [the verbal attack on the Muslim driver]’. ‘Ask yourself, who is going to get into trouble between those two gentlemen?’, Najib said. ‘Who did the most harm?’

Farage wasn’t the only public figure targeted in Najib’s seminar. He also drew attention to Reform MPs Robert Jenrick and Suella Braverman, as well as Matthew Goodwin – a Reform member and former parliamentary candidate. Former Conservative cabinet minister and now Spectator editor Michael Gove also got a mention. The implication was clear: mainstream conservatives who are critical of Islam should be treated as hate criminals.

The indoctrination didn’t stop at treating the political opinions of senior British politicians as potential crimes. Officers were also told to view the pro-Palestine rallies as protests against ‘genocide’, rather than ‘hate marches’. It should go without saying that the police shouldn’t have any official view at all on the message of the marches. They should just be enforcing the law if it’s broken.

All too often, it seems as if police forces in England are being encouraged to bend to Islamic sectarian interests, even if that comes at the expense of other members of the community. We saw this in Birmingham last year when the city’s Muslim politicians and activists effectively strong-armed West Midlands Police into banning supporters of Maccabi Tel Aviv – an Israeli football team – from attending a match against Aston Villa. It was later revealed that Birmingham’s police consulted eight Muslim organisations – including three mosques with a record of promoting anti-Semitism – before agreeing to turn part of the city into a Jew-free zone.

A recent report by the think-tank Policy Exchange unearthed the views of the National Association of Muslim Police (NAMP). In a ‘policy paper’ published last year, the NAMP labelled Zionism as ‘one of the manifestations of anti-Muslim hatred’, and called the Israel Defence Forces a ‘Zionist terrorist group’. The NAMP even went into bat for Hamas, defending it against ‘unverified stories about acts of violence’ – a reference to Hamas’s pogrom in southern Israel on 7 October 2023.

It is clear that Islam now possesses a uniquely protected status in the eyes of the British state. We have a government so determined to placate hardline Muslim sentiment that it has introduced a definition of ‘anti-Muslim hostility’ – a privilege denied to any other religion. Police will go out of their way to protect a march mourning the death of the Ayatollah Khamenei, the leader of Iran and the world’s foremost Islamist, while sending the riot squad to break up anti-immigration protests and swiftly jailing its participants. And now we have police mulling over the speeches of Nigel Farage before playing games of ‘spot the hate crime’. It is chilling.

This is not the sign of a healthy democracy or society. The police should be enforcing the law without fear or favour. As it stands, they seem incapable of doing either.