As an imam, I’ve seen too many younger males radicalised. We ought to strip this Egyptian hothead of his passport and ship him packing: TAJ HARGEY
When Keir Starmer this week bizarrely welcomed the hardline Egyptian radical Alaa Abd El-Fattah to Britain with open arms, he made the classic mistake of a naive and unworldly man – he assumed that the enemy of his enemy must be his friend.
For the Prime Minister and the rest of the Labour Party’s increasingly out-of-touch front bench, the arrival in this country of a man who was imprisoned in Cairo for opposing Egypt’s authoritarian president Abdel Fattah El-Sisi was a welcome opportunity to signal their liberal credentials to the disgruntled Left of the party.
So they rolled out the red carpet for a writer and activist who had risen to prominence during the Arab Spring uprisings of 2011 and paid a high personal price in the military clampdown that followed.
What they didn’t do was, to their eternal shame, take a good look at Mr El-Fattah’s revolting personal views.
Pro-democracy, hardline Egyptian radical Alaa Abd El-Fattah, who was in prison for almost 12 years
Despite his mealy-mouthed attempts since arriving on these shores to suggest his words had been twisted or taken out of context, the Egyptian’s public pronouncements – as have been widely reported – quite clearly show he is no friend of Britain, or of liberal, tolerant societies in general.
It has emerged that, in the hours following his purported ‘apology’, the oh-so contrite Mr El-Fattah liked and endorsed a Facebook post claiming the political storm surrounding his arrival in Britain is a ‘Zionist campaign’.
Why on earth, then, should we believe he regrets the 2010 tweet in which he wrote: ‘I consider killing any colonialists and especially Zionists heroic, we need to kill more of them,’ adding, ‘There was no genocide against Jews by the Nazis – after all, many Jews are left.’
Not content with that, he cheerfully described himself as ‘a violent person who advocated the killing of all Zionists including civilians’ and wrote: ‘Police are not human, they don’t have rights, we should just kill them all.’ The British, who have since so warmly welcomed him are, he added, ‘dogs and monkeys’.
It should be stressed, of course, that the Tories are responsible for awarding Mr El-Fattah citizenship in 2021 while still in jail in Egypt.
Nevertheless, how strange it is that given the scale of problems Britain currently faces, Starmer’s government said securing the release of Mr El-Fattah from the Egyptian prison where he was on hunger strike had been one of its ‘top priorities’.
Despite Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper’s launching last night of an inquiry into ‘serious information failures’ surrounding the case, our Prime Minister’s priorities are twisted – and hypocritical. His praise for Mr El-Fattah comes just a fortnight after a British 36-year-old, Luke Yarwood, was jailed for 18 months for ‘inciting racial hatred’ in two social media posts that were viewed just 33 times.
Keir Starmer’s government said securing the release of Mr El-Fattah from the Egyptian prison where he was on hunger strike had been one of its ‘top priorities’
It has, meanwhile, been reported that police are making more than 12,000 arrests each year over offensive posts on social media and other online platforms –more than any other country, including Putin’s Russia.
As a Muslim scholar, academic and an imam for more than 20 years at my local mosque in Oxford, I believe the Government’s top priority now should be to strip Mr El-Fattah of his British citizenship and deport him to his native Egypt – or, failing that, to any third country that will have him.
Because in truth, welcoming him ‘home’ to Britain is a disgusting farce. He has no connection to Britain, save the convenient loophole that his mother was born here while his grandmother was briefly a student in the UK. Neither he nor his mother has spent any meaningful time in this country and Mr El-Fattah evidently has not been influenced by Britain’s traditions of free speech, tolerance and the rule of law.
I, too, am an immigrant to this country, having been born in Cape Town during South African apartheid. I had to jump through innumerable hoops before being allowed to settle here, including proving that I was a bona fide academic who is fully integrated into the UK with no threatening and toxic opinions.
I like to believe that, since being here, I have made a significant contribution to my adopted country. I have tirelessly advocated for a tolerant form of Qur’anic Islam compatible with Britain’s way of life, sometimes having to have serious talks with young men at my mosque radicalised by extremist propaganda they have seen online or by radical home-grown Islamic preachers in this country.
I know from my own experience as an imam that we already have a surfeit of firebrand Islamic clerics in this country. The last thing we need is another Middle Eastern hothead stirring up hatred with his visceral dislike of Jews, gays and other minorities and advocating the killing of police officers.
It is already clear that Mr El-Fattah will become a cause celebre. This is not a man who has come here to become a part of Britain, writes Taj Hargey
It is already clear that Mr El-Fattah will become a cause celebre.
This is not a man who has come here to become a part of Britain. He has no interest in meaningfully integrating into our society because he is unwilling to compromise or see others’ points of view. He only wants to use his place of safety here as a platform to agitate for change back in his real home, Egypt.
There is almost no chance that he will any time soon celebrate, as I recently did, the end of Hanukkah with Jewish friends. Indeed, he is on record as saying all Jews are Zionists and all Zionists should be killed.
He seems to see no irony in the symmetry between his smearing of all Jewish people as his mortal enemies, with identical political views, and the stereotype that all Muslims must sympathise with al Qaeda and the Taliban. Both, of course, are nonsense.
Yet this is the man that Labour – and the Conservative government before them – has invested so much in bringing to our country; a man who was winkled out of an Egyptian prison by Britain’s sustained diplomatic effort and the high-level intervention of Jonathan Powell, Tony Blair’s former chief of staff who is now Britain’s National Security Adviser.
At least Nordic Europeans rescinded Mr El-Fattah’s nomination for a peace prize after his ‘progressive’ mask was stripped away.
In the spirit of British tolerance, I defend the right of Mr El-Fattah to hold views I may disagree with. He may be justified in his opposition to a despotic Egyptian regime that seized power in a military coup.
But all that doesn’t make him British, and a long-ago accident of birth doesn’t change that one iota, whatever the right-on flag-wavers may say.
Surely the Government should be delivering on its promises to the electorate – including slashing immigration – rather than awarding the precious prize of British citizenship to an Egyptian rabble-rouser who will surely make trouble here just as he did in his home country.
The only sensible way to resolve this whole mess is to rescind the passport he did nothing to earn and to deport him to any country that will have him. Britain does not need another rabid agitator.
Dr Taj Hargey is Provost of the Oxford Institute for British Islam.
