To think that Kier Starmer shouldn't be welcoming extremists into Britain?

[Twiglets1]

Reported in The Telegraph today that Sir Keir Starmer has welcomed an alleged Islamist extremist, who labelled British people “dogs and monkeys” and called for Zionists to be killed, into the UK.

The Prime Minister said he was “delighted” that Alaa Abd el-Fattah had arrived from Egypt on Friday evening after a travel ban imposed by Cairo was lifted following lobbying by ministers.

Mr Abd el-Fattah, an activist with dual British-Egyptian citizenship, previously said that it was heroic to kill Zionists “including civilians”. He urged Londoners to burn Downing Street, told his supporters to kill police and said he hated white people.

Ministers are facing calls to revoke his British citizenship, which he was granted in 2021 while imprisoned in Egypt, where campaigners described him as a “prisoner of conscience”.

Sir Keir’s tweet yesterday said how “delighted” he was that Alaa Abd El-Fattah is back in this country. Does that seem a reasonable stance to take for someone who has claimed at the same time to be committed to "eradicating antisemitism in the UK"?

@PandoraSocks Hansard has a lot of references going back years about him, which makes it even more absurd that nobody knew of his online presence and tweets. There should be a public enquiry but as neither Labour nor the Tories come out of this well that's highly unlikely to happen.

Many politicians who have been in office will tell you that Yes Minister and Yes Prime Minister are uncomfortably close to reality, despite being comedies. A lot of the incidents shown are things that actually happened. Even when the writers made things up, they were often found to have real life counterparts. For example, one episode features a hospital with 500 administrative staff but no doctors, nurses or patients. One of the writers said that, after they came up with this absurd idea, they discovered that there were six such hospitals in the UK.

But government ministers don't have to take civil servants recommendations or advice.

Was going to reference Yes Minister myself although younger Mumsnetters won't get the meaning!

Many ministers do accept what they are told. Even when they don't, the civil service don't necessarily give them the information they want, particularly if they want the minister to make a particular decision. See, for example, the Horizon scandal where the Post Office and civil service conspired for over a decade to hide from ministers and MPs the truth that Horizon was unreliable, and that nearly 1,000 subpostmasters and Post Office staff had had their lives ruined based on faulty information from Horizon.

Agree completely. The complete and utter irrelevance of these ‘what abouts’ make me think the posters have basically no critical thinking skills at all. Their sheer desperation to destroy the UK and prove their allegiance to wokery by doggedly defending anything that plainly hates the West is just incredible.

There are entire websites dedicated to ‘uniting the Muslim vote’ to ensure the UK’s politics is swayed to act in the best interests of Islam and the Middle East. This isn’t a conspiracy, just search for them, they’re all there.

I agree. I do not believe that over the years not one politician of any stripe knew about the tweets which caused the award nomination to be withdrawn. I think el-Fattah even wrote some thing about that incident?

The whole thing just beggars belief and I think there is something more going on here, but we will probably never know what.

Totally unrelated but was surprised just having logged into my Nest pension portal. There is a section for having your pension dealt with according to Sharia principles. Mind boggling.

It shouldn’t be mind boggling to anyone who has pushed for virtually uncontrolled mass immigration from the Middle East and Pakistan, and called anyone who raised concerns ‘racist’.

What did they think would happen?

This is ridiculous. Most people on the thread are appalled, including me and you would probably class me as a "woke" lefty.

But there’s no point ‘being appalled at high risk people being let into the country’ while aggressively advocating for instant asylum for anyone who rocks up and no further tightening of the immigration system, is there?

Well, quite.

Eh? You think everyone on the left thinks that? And you accuse others of lacking critical thinking. The irony.

What that means is that your pension won't be invested in alcohol, tobacco, gambling, weapons and defence, pork products, adult entertainment, banks or insurance companies, nor will it be invested in interest-bearing activities such as bonds. It will be invested in funds that generate wealth through profits from trade and asset growth. Not sure what is mind boggling about that.

Please tell me about a left wing philosophy that advocates for tighter immigration control, very selective asylum processes and the idea that immigration policy is not intertwined with ‘racism’?

Yes, in other words, it's an exclusive service offered to one religion. Thanks for seeing my point.

it seems likely that civil servants were aware of his social media activity and chose not to alert politicians.

That sounds rather serious, in that they also apparently didn't tell anyone else who needed to know. Could it invalidate his citizenship? Surely he shouldn't have been granted it in the first place when he's been inciting and encouraging this stuff. Who has final sign off?

You don't have to be Moslem to take advantage of that service. So no, it is not an exclusive service for one religion.

Why would anybody else take advantage of that service which caters to those specific principles?

@ThatCyanCat the final sign off would be the Home Secretary I'm thinking.

Why not? In general it is ethical investment. The only things there that you wouldn't find in a typical ethical fund are avoidance of investment in pork products (Islam is not the only religion that bans pork - Judaism and some Christian denominations spring to mind) and avoidance of interest-bearing investments (again, frowned on by a number of religions including Judaism, some Christian denominations, Hinduism and Buddhism).

1970s police drama. The kind of cops we need nowadays. They would clear up the crime rate in a week 😀😀

people don’t like ‘old school’ cops, they film them undercover and grass them up on Panorama.

Goodold ethics. Well I'm not seeing many on those on show with this extremist's tweets. His ethics yes, but not everyone's, which is rather my original point about the pension. If those ethics were generically held, they wouldn't need to be categorised as Sharia.