Alaa Abd el-Fattah’s tweets were wrong, but he is no ‘anti-white Islamist’. Why does the British right want you to believe he is? | Naomi Klein

What is the proper punishment for hateful social media posts? Should you lose your account? Your job? Your citizenship? Go to jail? Die? For the people who have launched a campaign against the British-Egyptian writer and activist Alaa Abd el-Fattah, no punishment is too great.

I have no interest in defending the awful tweets in question, which Abd el-Fattah posted in the early 2010s. Many are indefensible and he has apologised “unequivocally” for them. He has also written movingly about how his perspective has changed in the intervening years. Years that have included more than a decade in jail, most of it in Egypt’s notorious Tora prison where he faced torture; missing his son’s entire childhood – and very nearly dying during a months-long hunger strike.

None of this suffering seems to be enough for Abd el-Fattah’s accusers. They want this man and this family to suffer yet more punishment. They are calling for him to be stripped of his British citizenship, to which he is entitled because his mother was born in the UK, and for him to be deported back to Egypt, the country that already robbed him of 12 years of his freedom. It’s a fate that could be a death sentence.

I do not believe that piling torment on top of torture is what decent British people consider justice, let alone proportionate punishment.

Alaa Abd el-Fattah came to global attention because he was a leading figure in the 2011 pro-democracy revolution that turned Cairo’s Tahrir Square into a surging sea of young people. The demonstrators chanted “Down with corruption”, “Down with autocracy” and “Down with dictators.” When the uprising succeeded in toppling Egypt’s dictator Hosni Mubarak, the world rejoiced, including Europe and North America. Abd el-Fattah was all over the media, a voice for the part of the movement that was committed to building an accountable, participatory democracy from the ground up.

But the Tahrir Square victory was short lived. The military seized power and violently turned on the young protesters. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, were killed and tens of thousands were thrown in jail. Alaa Abd el-Fattah was among them, and it soon became clear that keeping him behind bars was a top priority for the generals who ultimately replaced Mubarak. #FreeAlaa became a global rallying cry and remained so for well over a decade – until this past September, when Alaa finally walked free.

A travel ban imposed by Egypt still prevented Abd el-Fattah from leaving the country and reuniting with his son in the UK. Then, on Boxing Day, he landed at Heathrow, soon to celebrate his son’s birthday for the first time in 12 years. But that joy wouldn’t last long either: the calls for his deportation were unleashed less than 24 hours after he landed.

Abd el-Fattah’s tweets surfaced online on 27 December, and were quickly picked up by British far-right activist Tommy Robinson and Reform UK leader Nigel Farage. The next day, the Sunday Telegraph led the campaign with a front page reading “Starmer welcomes ‘extremist’ to Britain”. Robert Jenrick, the shadow justice secretary, had spoken to the Telegraph for this story, saying: “This awful extremist should never have set foot in the UK again.” By Monday, the Tories were reported as calling for the deportation of “scumbag” Abd el-Fattah and revocation of his citizenship, with Conservative party leader Kemi Badenoch saying that citizenship decisions “must take account of social media activity, public statements, and patterns of belief”. (Which sounds very much like Donald Trump’s United States.) Reform UK had also set up a website with a petition calling for Abd el-Fattah’s removal from the UK.

Many people tuning into the manufactured storm know little of Abd el-Fattah, and less about his role in a historic revolution for democracy and human rights. They see only the ugly screengrabs, designed to paint a picture of a religious sectarian who must hate Jews and white people, and who celebrates terrorism that targets civilians. 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.

When hasty elections briefly brought the Muslim Brotherhood to power, and a new wave of repression began, Alaa Abd el-Fattah again raised his voice against the thwarting of the revolution’s dream of real democracy. Again, he was arrested. But the real nightmare began when the military, led by Gen Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, overthrew the Muslim Brotherhood in a military coup in 2013.

The top priority of the al-Sisi regime, still in power to this day, has been to crush the liberatory dream of the Arab spring. This meant keeping Abd el-Fattah behind bars almost continuously, mostly under maximum security. Even when the world descended on Sharm el-Sheikh in 2022 for a UN climate summit, and #FreeAlaa became the conference’s rallying cry, even when film stars and Nobel laureates called for his release, the regime would not relent.

The rationales changed, the charges shifted. 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.