An OpEd piece by a Scottish professor in the U.K. Daily Mail points to some larger issues involved in the recent meeting between high-ranking Scottish officials from the Scottish National Party (SNP) and Muslim leaders including Osama Saeed, the Scottish spokesman for the Muslim Brotherhood affiliated Muslim Association of Britain (MAB). According to the piece, Saeed has been an SNP electoral candidate and the author, writing about an SNP leader, says
There is plenty of evidence that he sees the cultivation of Glasgow’™s Muslims as one of the ways in which he can achieve an electoral breakthrough in a city always resistant to the SNP appeal.
The author goes on to warn of the dangers of such an alliance:
My fear is that by reaching out to young Muslims on a simplistic anti-British agenda, all Salmond will succeed in doing is radicalising them and ensuring that the balance of power swings decisively towards militant voices in the Scottish Muslim community.
Tom Gallagher, the author of the piece, has been critical of Saeed before calling him “an unapologetic advocate of the hardline Islamism” and, in turn, was criticized by Saeed who accused Gallagher of “Islamaphobia” and of conducting a “witch-hunt”, two common themes used by Muslim Brotherhood organizations to attack their critics.