“I’m the ghost of [Arab] spring past.”
"Many of the attacks on Abd el-Fattah invoke the hideous antisemitic crimes at Bondi beach on the first night of Hanukkah and at a synagogue in Manchester on Yom Kippur, implying, outrageously, that this pro-democracy, anti-sectarian, human rights activist is somehow a similar danger. And it works: many do feel vulnerable and frightened, because these are frightening times. That fear is what this campaign is all about: trying to make people afraid of Abd el-Fattah, and by extension, Muslims and migrants. Like so much in this political moment, in the UK and elsewhere, they are tightening the circle around what is considered a “real” citizen.The people who curated the posts to achieve maximum fear and shock don’t want us to know about other tweets Abd el-Fattah posted in this same period. Such as the times he confronted people who blamed Jews for the actions of the Israeli state, writing: “We stand against zionism never against a religion, and there are many brave anti zionist jews.” Or when he lifted up the voices of young Jewish descendants of the Arab and Islamic world living in Israel who, he wrote, were “demanding a just solution to the Palestinian cause that includes them”.They also skipped over the many times that Abd el-Fattah spoke out against terrorism that targets civilians, including attacks committed in the name of Islam. In one post he wrote: “To me the context never justifies killing civilians”; in another, “I’m saying killing civilians is never justified”; and one more: “It doesn’t matter at all who started it; there’s no reason in the world that justifies raising an automatic weapon against civilians in front of their homes.” He also wrote, in 2013: “Islamic terrorism is really ramping up its efforts these days, and … all the victims are unarmed civilians.”Do these posts cancel out the ones that say the exact opposite? No. But they do make it harder to turn Abd el-Fattah into the unrecognisable menacing “anti-white Islamist” figure currently flooding the internet. Further complicating that caricature are the staunchly anti-sectarian, egalitarian actions he took as a human rights advocate, in the real, non-online world.For instance, in October 2011, the Egyptian military violently attacked a peaceful protest of the Coptic Christian minority, killing 28 people and injuring hundreds more. To cover up those crimes, state media tried to foment a religious war, and “turned neighbours against each other, Muslims against Christians and transformed the hospital into a sectarian site under siege,” as the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy reported.Abd el-Fattah, who is Muslim, stood with his Christian comrades, spending the night rushing from morgue to hospital, desperately trying to make sure that evidence of the military’s crimes was not buried with the bodies of the fallen. He comforted families, and argued with clerics. “I smell of morgues, dead bodies and coffins, I smell of dust, sweat and tears,” he wrote the next day. “I don’t know if I can wash it all away.” For these acts of solidarity, he was thrown in jail, not for the first time, or the last.""In 2013, he was imprisoned for allegedly organising a peaceful demonstration (earning him a five-year sentence), then for sharing a Facebook post about the torture of another prisoner (another six years for “fake news”). Everyone knew that Abd el-Fattah’s real crime was always the same: being the most prominent reminder of the dream of a non-sectarian, decolonial, democratic Egypt. As he once tweeted: “I’m the ghost of spring past.”Keir Starmer appears surprised by the attack, and embarrassed that he and his staff failed to go through every single one of Abd el-Fattah’s social media posts before advocating for his release from unjust imprisonment and welcoming him to the UK. The prime minister said the government was “taking steps to review the information failures in this case”.That will prove to be a very big task. Back in the day, Alaa Abd el-Fattah was what is known as extremely online. He posted 280,000 times on Twitter alone. When his colleagues set out to compile the anthology of his writing, they calculated that his social media posts could have filled one hundred books, each of them 300 pages long.Or maybe the government could skip the retroactive surveillance and judge Alaa Abd el-Fattah neither by his best tweets nor his worst ones. Rather, he can be judged by the dignity and steadfastness with which he has fought for freedom – both the Egyptian people’s and his own. Maybe they could even trust that they did the right thing in the first place.Alaa is not a saint. He is, however, a hero of a stolen revolution, and a potent symbol of hope for millions still living under brutal dictatorship. His freedom is a hard-won victory for justice, at a time when those are few and far between. He deserves to enjoy it in peace."(Naomi Klein, Gdn.)https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/dec/31/alaa-abd-el-fattah-tweets-british-right-citizenshipSomebody has used some powerful computers for that search. Probably some disinterested friend of MI5. Waited for the right moment for their helpful deed.Perhaps now Starmer, scurrying around in a scared tizz, knows how it feels.
David Ainsworth ● 11d5 Comments