Meet the convicted terrorist running for Birmingham council

Tired of Israelis ‘desecrating’ your city? Sick of having to treat the ‘Jews and Christians as your friends’? Fed up with ‘pacifist’ Muslims who don’t ‘fight back’? Residents of Sparkhill, Birmingham, your local champion has arrived… His name is Shahid Butt.

Butt has formally thrown his hat in the ring for a council seat in May’s local elections. The 60-year-old, father-of-five’s promise to run as an independent has raised more than a few eyebrows. This isn’t only because of his nasty comments about ‘Jews and Christians’. It is also because he is a convicted terrorist.

Butt was released from a Yemeni prison in 2003, where he spent five years for organising an ‘armed terror plot’. The plan included blowing up the British consulate, an Anglican church and a Swiss-owned hotel. Butt, who was born and raised in Birmingham, migrated to Yemen after falling under the influence of the notorious Islamist cleric, Abu Hamza, at the Finsbury Park Mosque in the 1990s. He also ventured to Bosnia and Afghanistan to fight alongside militant Muslims against Western forces.

Butt has always claimed to be innocent of the terror plot and maintained that he only pleaded guilty after being tortured by police. Still, he hasn’t denied having a violent past. He was also jailed in the UK for violence, before his Middle Eastern excursions.

Butt now claims to be a changed man. He says he simply wants ‘safer and cleaner streets in Sparkhill’, and to ‘turn [the youth] away from drugs and anti-social behaviour and dangerous driving’. He says he is the man to ‘unite’ Sparkhill.

A closer look at his recent public statements, however, would suggest his concerns are not limited to tackling drug use and car racing. He is certainly no fan of the presence of Israelis (a term he was careful to use) in Birmingham. In November, when Maccabi Tel Aviv were due to play Aston Villa, he played a prominent role in protests against Israeli fans – already banned from attending thanks to the shameful actions of West Midlands Police. Butt urged Muslims to converge on Birmingham to ensure the city was not ‘desecrated by these vermin and these filth’ – a reference to the citizens of the world’s only Jewish State. ‘Muslims are not pacifists’, he said, ‘if someone comes into your face, knock his teeth out’.

His claim to be running on a platform of safety and ‘unity’ looks even shakier in light of an interview he gave in January last year. Speaking to the Muslim Collab podcast, Butt favourably quoted a passage from the Koran in which Muhammed warns Muslims: ‘Do not take the Jews and the Christians as your friends and providers.’ And in a later panel discussion hosted by 5Pillars, a hardline Muslim media organisation, Butt was warmly welcomed as a ‘former mujahid’ – an Arabic term for someone engaged in jihad. Hamza would be proud.

All of this is enough to make you nostalgic for the council elections of yore – those indescribably dull affairs that often passed without notice. Where once Sparkhill would have been contested by people concerned about littering or the lack of pedestrian crossings, it now has convicted terrorists, and even a lawyer awaiting trial for money laundering, battling it out for office.

Shahid Butt’s candidature is bad news. Coming so soon after the Maccabi Tel Aviv scandal, it is a further sign of the second city’s potential descent into vicious sectarianism. Let’s hope Sparkhill’s residents send him packing.

Hugo Timms is a staff writer at spiked.