Alaa Abd el-Fattah belongs in Britain
JVL Introduction
Naomi Klein lays out why the Farage and Badenoch led mob are wrong to to demand the expulsion of human rights defender Abd el-Fatteh. His tweets were wrong but he has taken responsibility for them and offered a clear apology for them. This is in marked contrast to Farage who continues to deny his well-evidenced Nazi-embracing past.
Tweets are not unimportant but they are far less significant than his repeated non-violent actions in confronting repression in Egypt at the cost of his harsh imprisonment and his record of defending the non-Muslim communities there.
When senior Tory, Chris Philp calls el-Fatteh a ‘scumbag’ and wishes him out of his country we see an ignorant bully hard at work competing with Farage in the racism Olympics.
MC
This article was originally published by The Guardian on Wed 31 Dec 2025. Read the original here.
Alaa Abd el-Fattah’s tweets were wrong, but he is no ‘anti-white Islamist’. Why does the British right want you to believe he is?
I have no interest in defending his social media posts, but calls to strip the newly freed activist of British citizenship pile torment on top of torture
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Quite a cottage industry run by the CAA (perhaps a little shy after the Hunter case) in scraping the barrel of the internet for dirt
I agree passionately.
JVL editors, is it safe for me to share a link to this statement on the Mirror’s Politics Comments section? Or – since all the other comments there seem to come from Reform supporters – would it just make JVL and Naomi Klein targets for online harassment or worse?
I’ve not read or been able to read any of the texts that he wrote but I can’t believe that they could be any worse than the statements coming almost daily from Israeli politicians calling for the Genocide of Palestinians.
And I suspect that not one person has been killed as a direct result of any of his comments unlike the comments by those politicians who are not just calling for a Genocide but using their words to defend their Genocidal Actions.
And the majority of our MPs, on both sides of the house, repeatedly defend the Israeli Governments and its ‘rights’ if not directly but by their silence (sins of omission).
If they’re not familiar with that concept, perhaps they can ask Tony Blair to enlighten them when he emerges from his confessional. 😡😡😡
Some years ago, whilst undertaking some study of language in use, I heard the view that if you analysed the slide of many couples into deciding to end their marriage with divorce, you would find that, often, it was what was said by the one partner to the other that punched the final nail home, and not the deeds that had been done.
In our age of tweets, this seems relevant. So, ill-advised as Alaa’s words were, they are seized on with far greater vehemence than are those guilty of killing real, actual, human beings – especially if this was in Gaza, where human life, as we know, has been worth very little.
Words indicate how something is framed: Shamima Begum had her citizenship removed – currently the punishment preferred by the righteous patriots – though she was still a schoolgirl when she took the decision to move to Syria and had been “lured and deceived for sexual exploitation”, in the words of her lawyers.
The mainly white girls who were abused by “grooming gangs” are regarded by Shabana Mahmood and others as hapless victims of rapacious men and are spared the opprobrium that was heaped on Ms Begum.
What accounts for the different treatment?
As “a Government Source” explained, “The Home Secretary will always put this country’s national security first.” Ah! That’s it!
An excellent article – and one which (unusually) found a orominent position in a widely read and broadly respected newspaper.
One important thing it does is to allow for change of heart where the writer acknowledges error. A striking contrast to the approach of the shadowy trolls, whether of the CAA or the Labour Party or both, who unrelentingly demand punishments for – often innocent – social media activity of years past.
Of course, the newspapers leading the campagn against Abd El-Fattah did not report a judge’s condemnation of the CAA by for making “vexatious” ckaims and “abusing” the justice system (see JVL 28th December).