Starmer’s Abd el-Fattah misstep

OPINION:

President Trump should love it: The Britons are going nuts over the arrival of a refugee from Egypt who has long declared his hatred of Israel and the English.

If this man, British-Egyptian citizen Alaa Abd el-Fattah, had arrived in the U.S. (legally or not) and his vile background of racist, antisemitic taunts had been discovered, Mr. Trump would have seized on his case as exemplifying all that’s wrong with indiscriminately opening doors to anyone supposedly in search of a haven.

The acceptance of Mr. Abd el-Fattah into the arms of mother England after he posted online 16 years ago that “killing any colonialists and especially Zionists” was “heroic” and then, two years later, declared himself “a racist” who disliked “White people” is a scandal that Britain’s beleaguered Prime Minister Keir Starmer is having trouble living down.

Mr. Starmer’s claim that he didn’t have a clue about Mr. Abd el-Fattah’s past is hardly credible. If Mr. Starmer personally did not know what the guy had written while the Egyptians clamped him in prison for 12 years for his role during and after the Arab Spring, which swept the Arab world, including Egypt, 15 years ago, we can be pretty sure the bureaucrats responsible for granting him British citizenship had more than an inkling.

Looking at the record of his activism, how can we accept Mr. Abd el-Fattah’s expressions of penance after his remarks burst into the British media amid demands for the revocation of his citizenship? British conservatives, led by the Reform UK star Nigel Farage, see Mr. Starmer’s woke empathy for the likes of Mr. Abd el-Fattah as an easy target to exploit. Members of Mr. Starmer’s Labor Party are calling for his resignation as party leader, seeing his form of liberalism as inviting a conservative reaction similar to that of the MAGA movement, which lofted Mr. Trump to the U.S. presidency.

Labor is already in deep trouble for rising prices and economic malfeasance. The ruckus over the stupidity that impelled Mr. Starmer and his party mates to make a hero of Mr. Abd el-Fattah before having to stammer apologies for failing to conduct an elementary background check is a bonus for the conservative camp, especially for Mr. Farage, whose Reform UK leads the Conservative Party at the polls.

The fact that Mr. Abd el-Fattah is not one of the tens of thousands of “illegals” who get into Britain by crossing the English Channel every year in small boats is beside the point. The lesson is that flooding the country with immigrants, legal or not, presents security risks that undermine the principles of democracy and the rule of law.

The American case is far more severe than that of the British. Mr. Trump’s campaign to close America’s porous borders and send the illegals home only scratches the surface. More than 13 million people, by minimal estimate, are living illegally inside the U.S. Britain’s population of nearly 70 million is 20% of America’s nearly 350 million, but the percentage of illegals in Britain, about 1 million, is far lower.

You don’t hear Britons praising Mr. Trump for his hard line against illegal migration. Nor is Mr. Trump pointing at Mr. Abd el-Fattah as exemplifying the evils of open borders and woke liberalism. Still, the lesson is that Britain faces the same problems that peaked during Joseph R. Biden’s presidency, when the southern U.S. border was open to all comers — not just to desperate masses from Central and South America but also to people from China, India and elsewhere who went to Mexico and then made their way northward knowing they too could join the party feasting on American largesse.

The British may have considerably fewer illegals to worry about, but Mr. Starmer’s enthusiastic acceptance of Mr. Abd el-Fattah shows how poorly he grasps the whole issue of who is getting into Britain, legally or not. The British, like the Americans, worry about the impact of immigration on crime, including big-time scamming and petty theft, and, in the case of Mr. Abd el-Fattah, open hostility to the democratic system that millions are happy to exploit when in need of a free and open environment in which to seek refuge.

Mr. Abd el-Fattah has gone through the motions of apologizing for his youthful indiscretions, for writing and posting stuff that showed his “immaturity.” Still, he was a grown man at the time, an adult who had already infuriated Egyptian authorities by campaigning for their demise. Who’s to say he wouldn’t bring his revolutionary impulses to Britain? In the hullabaloo of front-page denunciations in the British media, he will for now remain silent, knowing Mr. Starmer is not likely to rescind his British citizenship and deport him for whatever he posted all those years ago.

Like thousands of others from the Middle East and Central Asia, Mr. Abd el-Fattah will survive by keeping his mouth shut while working quietly for what he believes, a beneficiary of the same wokeness that has opened America to penetration by those whose goals are antithetical to the values that form the bedrock of American democracy.

• Donald Kirk is a former Far East correspondent for the Chicago Tribune and the old Washington Star.