The British government has become embroiled in a repatriation scandal of its own making, after championing the cause of an Egyptian activist for years, described as a “top priority,” only for his troubling social media history to emerge hours after his release was finally secured.
On Friday, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said he was “delighted” Alaa Abd el Fattah was back in the United Kingdom after spending the better part of a decade in and out of Egyptian prison. But on Monday, he changed his tune, describing old tweets as “absolutely abhorrent.”
“With the rise of antisemitism, and recent horrific attacks, I know this has added to the distress of many in the Jewish community in the U.K.,” he said. “We are taking steps to review the information failures in this case.”
In posts made around the time of the Arab Spring, Abd el Fattah had written of his approval for killing “all Zionists, including civilians,” adding that “we need to kill more of them.”
In other posts, he describes his hatred for white people — who he called a “blight on the earth” — and says “my heroes have always killed colonialists.” He also called British people “dogs and monkeys,” and said police — who he believes are “not human” — should be killed.
The pro-democracy activist has been in and out of Egyptian prisons since 2006 for his opposition to President Abdel Fattah el Sisi and his predecessor, Hosni Mubarak.
Abd el Fattah was granted British citizenship in 2021 on the grounds that his mother had been born in London while her own mother was studying in the U.K., allowing the British government to pursue his release more aggressively.
Starmer is now supporting an investigation into how the British government came to consider the Arab extremist so valuable.
Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper wrote in a letter on Tuesday to the Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee that “it is apparent not only that current and former ministers were never briefed on these tweets when they spoke publicly about this case in the past, but also that civil servants in charge of this case were also unaware.”
Cooper said the situation was particularly distressing “in the context of rising antisemitism and recent horrific attacks against Jewish people in this country and around the world.”
Abd el Fattah has apologized for some of his past statements since arriving in the U.K., writing on Monday that “looking at the tweets now — the ones that were not completely twisted out of their meaning — I do understand how shocking and hurtful they are, and for that I unequivocally apologize.”
“They were mostly expressions of a young man’s anger and frustrations in a time of regional crises (the wars on Iraq, on Lebanon and Gaza), and the rise of police brutality against Egyptian youth,” he said. “I particularly regret some that were written as part of online insult battles with the total disregard for how they read to other people. I should have known better.”
The apology might have been perceived as more believable if not for the fact that, within hours of making it, Abd el Fattah was liking posts describing the public scandal as a “relentless smear campaign” led by “the richest man in the world [X owner Elon Musk], a couple of Middle East intelligence services, and a few Zionist organizations.”
Shadow Justice Minister Robert Jenrick is among those officials demanding that the Egyptian activist be deported immediately.
“He was liking posts which people had made, in which they presented him as the victim of a Zionist conspiracy, saying that Jews and billionaires and all the usual tropes were involved to blacken his name and that he was actually innocent,” Jenrick told British outlet GB News.
“It suggests that the apology he put out in the U.K. was insincere, scripted, and fake. In reality, he stands by the extremist and antisemitic comments that he made in the past,” he said. “It all presents a picture that this man needs to be removed from our country because he is not conducive to the public good here.”
Mann, a government adviser on antisemitism, and former conservative defense secretary Penny Mordaunt published a report earlier this year alleging an “onslaught of antisemitism” since Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
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Two people were killed, and four were hospitalized at a Manchester synagogue in October when an assailant drove into bystanders and stabbed civilians on Yom Kippur.
Starmer has made repeated promises to treat combating antisemitism in the U.K. as a priority of his government.