The deluded PM has alienated Israel and moderate Islamic countries with his virtue-signalling decision-making, says Tim Newark.
British-Egyptian activist Alaa Abd el-Fattah (Image: AP)
Visiting Cairo earlier this year, I was told by local taxi drivers that Britain is notorious for harbouring Islamist radicals. This poor view of Britain from the average Egyptian up to the higher echelons of their government, has been only reinforced by Sir Keir Starmer giving sanctuary to Alaa Abd el-Fattah who has called for the death of police and Zionists and clearly hates Britain.
We are not winning any friends in the Middle East by continuing to harbour enemies of the Arab world and the West. In fact, we are seen as the dupes of Islamists who use Britain as a safe base for encouraging attacks on legitimate governments in Muslim countries while, at the same time, loathing the nation that gives them sanctuary.
The desperate Tory and, latterly, Labour campaign to get el-Fattah out of jail served only to embarrass the Egyptian government and shows how poor we are at understanding the reality of Middle Eastern politics. Deluded Starmer prefers to alienate Israel and moderate Islamic countries in order to satisfy some perverted sense of human rights.
Again and again, Labour likes to put Islamist activists above our own international interests. Human Rights law is used to protect dangerous individuals at the cost of our own domestic and international security.
We are, frankly, the laughing stock of the Middle East, allowing US President Donald Trump to play a far more sophisticated game of diplomacy, bringing on-side rich moderate Arab states alongside Israel. By doing this he has secured peace in the Middle East and made the US chief beneficiaries of any international business deals.
Instead, Britain gets nothing, just a whole load of dangerous activists who despise our way of life in exchange for some abstract notion of virtue. When will Labour grandees – and left-leaning Tories – understand that virtue doesn’t protect us or make us wealthy?
Many Labour MPs are quite rightly furious at being deceived by their supposedly more informed senior figures, such as government foreign advisor Jonathan Powell, who think they are some latter day Lawrence of Arabia, ingratiating themselves with extremists bringing only hatred to our shores.
The last thing we need in this country is more anti-Semitism and yet open borders and granting citizenship to activists like el-Fattah only makes Jews feel less at home in the UK.
Tweets from el-Fattah have now emerged in which he says: “I am racist, I don’t like white people,” explaining “killing any colonialists and specially Zionists [is] heroic, we need to kill more of them”.
Alaa Abd El-Fattah and his mother Laila Soueif (Image: Getty Images)
Why are we granting British citizenship to people like that? Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper is now saying that ministers were ill-informed by civil servants about the extent of his social media history. But this is the same Foreign Office that has been notoriously Arabist for years, welcoming the Muslim Brotherhood’s disastrous brief reign in Egypt in 2012, despite it decimating the Egyptian tourist industry and impoverishing ordinary citizens.
Egyptians I met earlier this year are baffled at why we allow revolutionary extremists into our country. Not only that, but we apparently positively rejoice at it.
Earlier this week our Prime Minister declared he was “delighted” and “we welcome the return of a British citizen unfairly detained abroad”. “El-Fattah was imprisoned in September 2019 on charges of “spreading false news” after sharing a Facebook post about torture, but he also played a key role in the 2011 Egyptian protests that ousted former president Hosni Mubarak from power and which brought the Muslim Brotherhood to power.
This diplomatic farce just reinforces the appalling judgment of this Labour government. These are the same people giving away our Chagos Islands base that only benefits our rivals in the world. We are, plainly, being led by politicians who do not have our best interests at heart and would always prefer to suck up to any anti-Western foreigner just so long as it impresses their human rights buddies.
Our once respected position in the world is now rapidly dissipating as we alienate Israel and moderate Arab countries by continuing to grant safe haven to virulent Islamists. Yet again, senior Labour figures, such as Emily Thornberry, say it is impossible to now deport el-Fattah, using the law to bind our hands.
When will Labour politicians ever consider British interests first? Clearly, we are now second-class citizens in our own country and will only continue to welcome malign figures so long as it pleases the twisted values of the Labour party.
