By Helen Lewis
Tuesday, December 30, 2025
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, had been born in London while her mother
was studying in the United Kingdom—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
that the case had been “a top priority every week that I have been in office.”
Last week, those efforts finally paid off. Egypt lifted a
travel ban on Abd el-Fattah, who had been released from jail in September, and
Starmer declared that 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 had 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.”
In a statement of apology, Abd el-Fattah suggested that
his statements were in keeping with the prevailing ethos of 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 it 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” 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 who 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 Abd el-Fattah 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, wrote on X 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 policy maker, 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 on
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.
Liberals and conservatives have politicized this story.
Starmer—and the previous incarnation of Truss—treated Abd el-Fattah as a kind
of mascot, a living totem of Britain’s enlightened attitudes toward 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. Earlier this
month, 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 of
steam.
Still, if he repeats such sentiments 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 criticism 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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