‘Top priority.’ Those two words in Keir Starmer’s tweet about Alaa Abd el-Fattah stung the hardest. What an affront to the country. On Boxing Day, as people came down from Christmas revelry that they could ill-afford, here was their prime minister prioritising the wellbeing of an Egyptian loudmouth most Britons couldn’t name. Rarely has the PM’s remoteness been so starkly exposed.
‘I’m delighted that Alaa Abd el-Fattah is back in the UK,’ Starmer wrote on X, following the arrival of the Egyptian activist who was jailed by the Sisi regime for spreading ‘fake news’. He will come to regret this gushing tweet. Abd el-Fattah is the author of racist tweets about Jews and whites, and he once called Brits ‘dogs and monkeys’. We fret over the economy and our broken borders; Sir Keir proudly announces that a ‘top priority’ has been to bring an Egyptian man to Britain. There is no fixing this gaping chasm that separates the concerns of everyday Britons from the luxury activism of our rulers.
Even if Mr Abd el-Fattah was a morally spotless activist, his closet skeleton-free, it would have been crackers for Starmer to describe his arrival in Britain as a ‘top priority’. You were elected to improve the lives of Britons, Keir, not to ponce about on the world stage as the saviour of foreign-born campaigners who’ve landed themselves in hot water.
But Abd el-Fattah is far from morally spotless. Old tweets from what appear to be his account are astonishing. ‘I’m a violent person who advocated the killing of all zionists, including civilians, so fuck of [sic],’ he said in one. ‘We need to kill more of them.’ He appeared to deny the Holocaust and advocated ‘killing police’. He said he didn’t like white people. People have been cancelled for far less than this. In Starmer’s Britain, people have been jailed for less.
None of this was hidden; it was widely known that Mr Abd el-Fattah held extreme and hateful views. In 2014, his nomination for the EU’s Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought was withdrawn after his tweets came to light. In September 2014, the Wall Street Journal branded him ‘a dissident for hate’, slamming his ‘violent rhetoric against Israel’.
In the same month, the Times of Israel documented his tweets calling for the assassination of Egyptian officials and the murder of Israelis. That report cited his view that there are a ‘critical number of Israelis that we need to kill’ in order to solve the ‘problem’ in the Middle East. Little wonder he was yanked from a prize that rewards ‘respect for international law’.
Who benefits from his presence in Britain?
If Sir Keir thinks he can just ride this out, he’s in for a rude awakening. This feels like a turning-point scandal. It speaks to the staggering aloofness of Starmerism. These people are so high on their own supply of self-righteousness that they don’t even bother with due diligence anymore. A quick google would have confirmed that Abd El-Fattah has expressed truly obnoxious views. Yet the Starmer set is so blinded by self-regard they can’t even be arsed with a web search.
Abd el-Fattah has a tenuous link with Britain. He was not born here. He was granted British citizenship in December 2021, when he was in an Egyptian jail, based on the fact his mother was born here. Who benefits from his presence in Britain? He does, of course. And Starmer thought he would too, by posing as the virtuous rescuer of the oppressed. In the end the prime minister only signalled his vast moral detachment from everyday Brits, and his preference for the luxury causes of the human rights lobby over the hard task of making life better for the people of this country. If we lived in normal, decent times, this would be a resigning matter. But I won’t hold my breath.
