How much effort should a country expend to rescue someone who appears to hate its values? That is the question posed by the case of Alaa Abd el-Fattah.
Abd el-Fattah is an Egyptian pro-democracy campaigner who has been in and out of prison since 2006 for opposing the regimes of Hosni Mubarak and Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, and for drawing attention to torture and other abuses. In 2021, he was granted British citizenship through a somewhat tenuous connection—his mother Laila was born in London while her mother was studying in the UK—which gave the British government greater standing to lobby Cairo on his behalf. It pressed his case under three Conservative prime ministers (Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak) and since June 2024, under Labour’s Keir Starmer. Six months ago, a government minister said the case had been “a top priority every week that I have been in office”.
At the end of December, these efforts finally paid off. Egypt lifted a travel ban on Abd el-Fattah, who had been released from jail in September, and Starmer declared he was “delighted” that Abd el-Fattah was “back in the UK and has been reunited with his loved ones.”
That delight was short-lived. Within hours, Abd el-Fattah’s tweets from the time of the Arab Spring, when he was around 30, resurfaced on X. In these, he reportedly wished violence on “all Zionists, including civilians”—read: Jews. He also called for the murder of police officers, and sarcastically described his dislike of white people. In a 2010 discussion of the death of one of the terrorists who tortured and killed Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics, he declared, “My heroes have always killed colonialists.”
The populist insurgent Nigel Farage could not have scripted a better attack ad against Britain’s two established parties. At best, both Labour and the Conservatives have spent political capital on an activist who has repeatedly expressed thoughtless and hateful views in public. At worst, the government has invited in a provocateur who will continue to spread poison and incite violence. “It is unclear to me why it has been a priority for successive governments to bring this guy over here,” the rank-and-file Labour politician Tom Rutland wrote on X, adding: “His tweets are impressive in how they manage to be vile in such a variety of ways.”
[Read: How not to hand populists a weapon]
In a statement of apology, Abd el-Fattah suggested that his statements were in keeping with the prevailing ethos on early-2010s Twitter—which was full of performative, deliberately offensive left-wing posturing. His posts, he said, were the “writings of a much younger person, deeply enmeshed in antagonistic online cultures, utilising flippant, shocking and sarcastic tones in the nascent, febrile world of social media.” In his offline activism, Abd el-Fattah maintained, he was known for “publicly rejecting anti-Jewish speech in Egypt, often at risk to myself, defence of LGBTQ rights, defence of Egyptian Christians, and campaigning against police torture and brutality.” However, Abd el-Fattah also questioned why the tweets had been “republished” now with their meanings “twisted.” On Facebook, he appears to have liked a comment suggesting that the culprit was—you guessed it—a “campaign launched by the Zionists.”
The situation is deeply embarrassing for Starmer, who welcomed Abd el-Fattah’s arrival in Britain so warmly. He now claims not to have known about the “absolutely abhorrent” old tweets, and is promising to “review the information failures in this case.” Apparently, despite years of campaigning for this guy, the combined might of the British civil service never thought to search his Twitter handle. If the authorities had conducted even a cursory background check, they would have found opinions such as this (now deleted) assertion from 2012: “I’m a racist, I don’t like white people so piss off.”
Nor did civil servants enter Abd el-Fattah’s name into a search engine, which would have revealed the 2014 reports on his controversial nomination for a free-speech prize. One of these, headlined “A Dissident for Hate,” observed that “Mr. Abdel Fattah may have been brave in confronting authoritarianism in his own country. But his rhetoric on Israel and moderate Arabs is another story.”
The British right is now arguing that Abd el-Fattah and his celebrity supporters—including Naomi Klein, Olivia Colman, and Mark Ruffalo—have made the British government look foolish. Why is Starmer loudly welcoming “back” a man who has never before spent a significant amount of time in Britain, who abhors its geopolitical alliances, and, apparently, dislikes the majority of its population? Farage, the leader of the right-wing Reform Party, has unsurprisingly called for Abd el-Fattah to be stripped of his British citizenship. So has Kemi Badenoch, the current leader of the Conservatives—the party in charge when he was awarded that citizenship in the first place.
[Idrees Kahloon: Political parties have disconnected from the public]
Former Conservative Prime Minister Liz Truss, who has lately joined the podcast circuit, says now that Abd el-Fattah’s case shows that “the human-rights/NGO industrial complex has completely captured the British state”. This is the same Liz Truss who, as foreign secretary in 2022, assured parliament that she was “working very hard to secure his release.” Was she then unaware of his tweets? Or was she then posturing as a policymaker, whereas now she is trying to make a living as a YouTuber? (Yes, she is Dan Bongino in reverse.) The Conservatives’ shadow justice secretary, Robert Jenrick, has also piled onto Abd el-Fattah’s story, condemning the celebrities who campaigned for his release as “useful idiots.” Jenrick covets Badenoch’s job—and his plan to win it relies on outflanking her on crime and immigration.
Both liberals and conservatives have politicized this story. Starmer—and the previous incarnation of Liz Truss—treated Abd el-Fattah as a kind of mascot, a living totem of Britain’s enlightened attitudes to political dissent in comparison with those of Middle Eastern dictatorships. Today’s version of Truss, and the rest of the populist right, are now holding him up as Exhibit A in their argument that the West needs to be tougher on Muslim immigration to Europe.
As ever, the challenge is to look beyond this ideological point-scoring and consider the case on its own merits. I was deeply unimpressed that one of Abd el-Fattah’s first public statements after his longed-for deliverance was to repost a complaint that Starmer had not publicly condemned Sisi’s dictatorship while announcing his release. Welcome to the grubby reality of international diplomacy! But if I had missed many of my child’s birthdays in detention, I might also find it hard to be gracious.
Still, British Jews have every right to question their state’s extraordinary efforts to free someone who has called for violence against them, and who has recanted only in the vaguest terms. The Jewish community is under threat here: The aftermath of October 7 and the war in Gaza have led to more visible anti-Semitism in Britain, in many cases from self-declared Islamists. On Yom Kippur, a militant Islamist called Jihad Al-Shamie (in retrospect, the first name was a clue) killed one person and injured others in a stabbing attack on a synagogue in Manchester. In December, two men were convicted of plotting what authorities described as an “ISIS inspired” atrocity in the same city. “Here in Manchester, we have the biggest Jewish community,” one of the plotters told an undercover police officer whom he believed to be a co-conspirator. “God willing we will degrade and humiliate them (in the worst way possible), and hit them where it hurts.” Social media is one of the key drivers and reinforcers of anti-Semitic extremism; tweets like Abd el-Fattah’s are not just harmless letting-off steam.
Still, if he repeats such sentiments again now that he lives in Britain, Abd el-Fattah could be subject to prosecution for incitement to violence, or hate speech. The British state has pursued people for less: See the recent prosecution against the gender-critical campaigner Graham Linehan—the case was eventually dropped—or the conviction of a woman named Lucy Connolly for posting that hotels housing asylum-seekers should be set on fire.
Taking away Abd el-Fattah’s British passport is another matter. Once granted, citizenship is citizenship, no matter how stupid or evil or thoughtless its holder turns out to be. I don’t want to live in a country where naturalized or joint citizens are treated as second-class Britons, forever on probation. Now that he has a UK passport, Alaa Abd el-Fattah is entitled to the protection of the British state, just like Liz Truss—or like Kemi Badenoch, for that matter, whose British citizenship rests on the coincidence of her Nigerian mother having given birth to her in London.
Yet you can take an inclusive view of British citizenship and still believe that people should be vetted before receiving it. Starmer’s post gushing about Abd el-Fattah’s arrival was catastrophically ill-judged, both in his assessment of this particular case and as a representation of his wider governing philosophy. Starmer, a former human-rights lawyer, approaches every problem with an arid obsession with process rather than outcome—as if, when people follow every dot and comma of the rules, nothing bad can happen and no one should complain.
The Abd el-Fattah decision follows this pattern. Starmer celebrated the bureaucratic machinations of this case—granting automatic citizenship by descent and then securing the end of Abd el-Fattah’s travel ban—without enough attention to the politics. Yes, he was failed by his officials and their lack of briefing. But he also suffered a personal failure of imagination: Is it such a stretch to ask whether a Middle Eastern activist raised among members of the Egyptian communist intelligentsia has any worrisome opinions on Israel or Jews? Part of Starmer’s pitch to succeed Jeremy Corbyn as leader of Labour was that his predecessor had turned a blind eye to anti-Semitism. (He eventually kicked Corbyn out of the party altogether for this offense.) But in the past two years he has struggled to identify and police the line between legitimate criticisms of the Israeli government and wider animus against Jews, often camouflaged as attacks on “Zionists”.
At the same time, populists on the right have begun to insist, in more and more explicit terms, that Muslims cannot be integrated into Europe because their values are too different—the grooming-gangs scandal is offered as evidence here—and because they feel more loyalty to the ummah than to the countries to which they have immigrated. That view ignores the many followers of moderate Islam, such as London Mayor Sadiq Khan, who have found no contradiction between their faith and Western liberalism. But the views of Abd el-Fattah punch that bruise.
Another case like this may not arrive again—not least because Britain’s current appetite for enforcing its values abroad is low. In June, Starmer cut the foreign aid budget, and some of what remains is spent domestically anyway, on housing asylum seekers. Starmer’s home secretary, Shabana Mahmood—herself a British Muslim—has announced a drastic tightening of eligibility requirements for citizenship.
Starmer—and his Conservative predecessors—were right to call for Abd el-Fattah’s release. What was absurd, however, was to frame his arrival on British soil as an unalloyed blessing. Starmer was thinking like the procedure-obsessed human rights lawyer he used to be, not the political and moral leader that Britain needs right now.
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