The United Kingdom will not revoke the citizenship of an Egyptian activist who publicly approved of killing “Zionists,” U.K. Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood said on Monday.
Mahmood was responding to calls to strip Abd el-Fattah of British citizenship, which he acquired in 2021, shortly after his arrest in Egypt for voicing criticism online of the policies of President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi.
Separately, the Home Secretary last week barred an Islamist preacher, Shadee Elmasry, from New Jersey, from delivering a series of talks in the United Kingdom.
A day after Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023 attack on Israel, Elmasry tweeted: “They are all in this (fake or real) state of shock that the people of Gaza finally punched back (after 50 years). In contrast, the very same people would celebrate a similar kind of attack from Ukraine against Putin.”
The decision to bar Elmasry followed criticism over the naturalization of al-Fattah despite his endorsement of violence toward “Zionists.” Such calls have received considerable attention in the United Kingdom following a jihadist’s Oct. 2 attack on a synagogue in Manchester, in which two Jews died, and the murder of 15 people at a Chanukah party by two jihadists in Sydney, Australia on Dec. 14.
The calls to denaturalize al-Fattah followed the resurfacing of posts he’d made in 2012. In one tweet Abd el-Fattah wrote: “I am a racist, I don’t like white people.” In another, he wrote that he considers “killing any colonialists and specially Zionists heroic,” adding, “we need to kill more of them.”
Questioned on this in the House of Commons, the lower house of the British parliament, Mahmood replied: “Those tweets and those comments are absolutely abhorrent, and I share the horror and revulsion felt across the country by all who have now seen and read them.”
But, she added, denaturalization is “used in a very specific way to deal with those who pose the highest harm: offenders, particularly serious and organized criminals and those who pose a threat to national security. And I do not propose to change the basis on which those deprivation powers are used.”
Last month, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer faced criticism for saying that he was “delighted” at the return to the United Kingdom of al-Fattah.
The 44-year-old was convicted in Egypt in 2021 of “spreading fake news” for sharing a Facebook post about torture in the country following a trial that human rights groups said was unfair. He was granted British citizenship in December 2021 through his London-born mother. The United Kingdom had pressured Egypt to release al-Fattah.
