Turmoil in Britain: calls for the deportation of the anti-Semitic “political hero”.

The Egyptian democracy activist Alaa Abdel Fattah apologized in recent days for his old tweets that were republished, including calls to kill Zionists and policemen. The affair flared up shortly after his return to Britain, about three months after his release from prison in Egypt, and led to a widespread political storm and calls from right-wing politicians to revoke his citizenship and expel him from the country.

Abdel-Fattah, a dual British-Egyptian citizen, said after reviewing his old posts that he “realizes how offensive and shocking they are,” and that he “unequivocally apologizes for them.” According to him, he is shocked that precisely at the moment when he was reunited with his family for the first time after 12 years, his tweets from the past were re-shared and used “to challenge his integrity and values”, to the point of calling for his citizenship to be revoked.

The storm arose after Abdel Fattah’s tweets from 2012 reappeared on social media, in which he wrote, among other things, that he “considers killing colonialists and especially Zionists an act of heroism”, as well as harsh statements against police officers. In another tweet he wrote that he is a “racist and does not like whites”. Abdel-Fattah stressed that he “takes accusations of anti-Semitism very seriously”, but claimed that some of the words were twisted and taken out of context.

The leader of the conservative party, Kami Badanuk, and the leader of the “Reform” party, Nigel Farage, called on the Minister of the Interior, Bana Mahmoud, to examine whether it is possible to revoke Abd al-Fatah’s citizenship in order to remove him from the country. Farage wrote that “a person who holds racist and anti-British views should not be allowed to enter Britain”. According to reports, some senior Labor MPs have also expressed support for such a move.

The storm did not escape the top of the government in London either: Prime Minister Keir Starmer was criticized after he said that he was happy about Abdel Fattah’s arrival in Britain, but those around him claimed that he was not aware of the old tweets. The British Foreign Office said that the release of Abdel Fattah and his reunification with his family had been a major goal of British governments over the years, but condemned the content of the tweets and called them “abhorrent.”

More cautious voices were also heard from the other side. The chair of the parliament’s foreign affairs committee, Emily Thornberry, said that Abdel Fattah is a British citizen by law, and that the government has been working for years to get him out of prison and back to Britain. She accused his critics of throwing out ideas that are not based on the law, and mentioned that Britain is bound by international law not to leave a person stateless.

Abdel-Fattah, 44, was imprisoned in Egypt after being convicted in 2021 of spreading fake news following a Facebook post about torture in the country, in a trial that human rights organizations described as unfair. His British citizenship was granted to him in December 2021 through his mother who was born in London. After a presidential pardon and his release from prison in Egypt, the restriction on his leaving the country was also lifted, and he was reunited with his 14-year-old son who lives in Brighton.

Despite the apology, the organization of representatives of British Jews expressed deep concern about the affair and claimed that the extreme rhetoric of the past threatens Jews and the general public. Abdel Fattah, for his part, repeated and said that some of the tweets were “misinterpreted”, and added that he paid a heavy price for his support of LGBT rights in Egypt and around the world.