Scottish Police Cadets Receive Islamophobia Awareness Training by MEND

On Feb­ru­ary 1, 2023, the Police Scot­land Col­lege in Kin­car­dine, cen­tral Scot­land, invit­ed a rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the British Mus­lim advo­ca­cy group Mus­lim Engage­ment and Devel­op­ment (MEND) to hold an Islam­o­pho­bia aware­ness train­ing for its cadets. Accord­ing to a tweet by the College:

Yes­ter­day Course 03/22 received its final input from staff asso­ci­a­tions, includ­ing the Scot­tish Police Mus­lim Asso­ci­a­tion. #Life­O­fAPro­ba­tion­er @SPMAinfo @mendcommunity

Read the tweet here.

The Kin­car­dine facil­i­ty serves as both Police Scotland’s Cor­po­rate Head­quar­ters and a key train­ing venue pro­vid­ing train­ing for new­ly pro­mot­ed Scot­tish police offi­cers in var­i­ous spe­cial­ist areas, includ­ing crim­i­nal inves­ti­ga­tion, road polic­ing, and intel­li­gence analysis.

MEND, a UK Islam­ic NGO close to the Glob­al Mus­lim Broth­er­hood (GMB) in Britain, thanked the col­lege for the invi­ta­tion, say­ing they were hon­ored to have been part of the ses­sion. MEND has a his­to­ry of under­min­ing and dele­git­imiz­ing the British government’s Pre­vent Strat­e­gy, part of a com­pre­hen­sive pol­i­cy frame­work aimed at stop­ping peo­ple from being drawn into ter­ror­ism. MEND lead­er­ship has includ­ed British Mus­lim activist Azad Ali, who has praised al-Qae­da ide­o­logue Anwar al-Awla­ki and said that “democ­ra­cy, if it means at the expense of not imple­ment­ing the Sharia, of course no-one agrees with that.”

Accord­ing to the Police Scot­land Col­lege, as part of the train­ing, staff also received input from the Scot­tish Police Mus­lim Asso­ci­a­tion, a part­ner of the British Nation­al Asso­ci­a­tion of Mus­lim Police (NAMP), a rep­re­sen­ta­tive body for Mus­lims work­ing with­in polic­ing and that is tied to the GMB in the UK. In Novem­ber 2022, the Glob­al Influ­ence Oper­a­tions Report (GIOR) report­ed that the NAMP had cam­paigned to have the term “Islamist” dropped from counter-ter­ror­ism polic­ing over con­cerns it unfair­ly stig­ma­tizes Islam.

Coun­ter­ing gov­ern­ment action against Islamist rad­i­cal­iza­tion and counter-ter­ror­ism poli­cies has long been an essen­tial pil­lar of GMB activ­i­ty in the UK. In August 2021, the GIOR report­ed that a Scot­tish par­lia­men­tary Cross-Par­ty Group had pub­lished an inquiry into Islam­o­pho­bia that rec­om­mend­ed the scrap­ping of Pre­vent and to which sev­er­al British GMB groups contributed.