Call me an old cynic, but I knew from the moment that the Alaa Abd el-Fattah affair blew up what the next stage would be. The single most predictable thing in the entire farce – a Whitehall farce indeed, albeit very much not in the old Brian Rix mould – was that when el-Fattah made his first comment, it would be that far from hating Jews, he was in fact deeply, passionately, preternaturally opposed to anti-Semitism in all its forms. Lo and behold, it came to pass:
I take accusations of anti-Semitism very seriously. I have always believed that sectarianism and racism are the most sinister and dangerous of forces, and I did my part and paid the price for standing up for the rights of religious minorities in Egypt.
Does Kearns really think that if el-Fattah said sorry, it would change anything?
A veritable warrior against Jew hate, indeed! How lucky we Brits now are to have such a man in our midst. And how right Sir Keir Starmer is to proclaim it such a wondrous triumph. How, after all, could it cross the mind of anyone that someone who wrote these tweets could have any sort of issue with Jews? ‘I consider killing any colonialists and specially Zionists heroic, we need to kill more of them.’ ‘Dear zionists please don’t ever talk to me, I’m a violent person who advocated the killing of all Zionists including civilians, so fuck off.’ ‘I’m telling u that I hate white people.’ ‘Now my real criticism of these post police murder riots is the wrong focus, go burn the city or downing street or hunt police u fools.’
el-Fattah’s statement is a model of its kind. Whilst he apologises and accepts some of the tweets are ‘shocking and hurtful’, nowhere does he concede that anything he has written was wrong, merely that his words have either been taken ‘completely misunderstood, seemingly in bad faith’ or, even more hilariously, that they were part of an ‘online insult battle’ and never intended to offend a wider public – as if posting on Twitter is private.
I have translated his statement to save you the bother of reading it:
When I wrote that I hated all whites and wanted the police and Zionists killed, it never crossed my mind that one day I would have to go and live in a country full of white people, which also had a load of Jews. So here is a statement which the idiots who campaigned for my release when they didn’t know the first thing about me can use to try to pretend they aren’t the buffoons everyone how realises they are. Fingers crossed, eh!
You may have seen a video that’s been circulating on social media of some of those very idiots. It’s priceless. Brian Cox, Emily Watson, Harriet Walter, Bill Nighy and Joseph Fiennes are all brilliant at reading the products of other people’s brains, but it’s clear from their campaigning for el-Fattah that they are, ahem, somewhat less brilliant when it comes to using their own brains.
But they at least have the excuse that no one expects them to be anything other than frivolous fools. Less so, the politicians who willingly signed up to the campaign and now think that they can absolve themselves by saying that they didn’t know about his views when they signed up. The likes, that is, of Alicia Kearns – a former chair of the Foreign Affairs select committee and a former FCO official, no less. Yesterday she wrote:
Those of us who campaigned for Alaa Abd el-Fattah’s protection and release as a British citizen plainly were not aware of his grotesque tweets, and at no point had anyone raised them with me until yesterday. I trusted the process to give Alaa citizenship, and then supported the campaign for his release. I feel deeply let down, and frankly betrayed, having lent my support to his cause which I now regret.
In other words, she didn’t have a clue about him and didn’t think it worth the bother of checking who he was before joining in his campaign. And yet she presumably still thinks the rest of us should consider her a voice worth listening to. And, for good measure, Kearns had the gall in her statement to demand that ‘Alaa must unequivocally apologise’ – as if that would make the least difference to her own demonstrable inadequacy or, more importantly, to the threat of having another raging Jew hater in the UK. Does she really think that if he said sorry, it would change anything? Given how idiotically she has behaved so far, the answer to that is probably yes.
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