Convicted Terrorist Running in Birmingham Election With “Support of Allah”

America, glimpse your future. If we continue down the path of islamization as the UK and Europe, this is the inevitability. Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Zohran Mamdani … this is next. Nothing is static, everything is fluid. It’s advances and this direction leads only one way – to hell.

In Birmingham, a convicted terrorist with a documented history of jihadist violence, criminality, and incendiary Islamist rhetoric is now standing for local office, presenting himself as a “unifier.” Shahid Butt, jailed for his role in an armed terror plot and openly advocating violence, religious segregation, and confrontation with “disbelievers,” is being normalized as a legitimate political actor. This is what a fading civilization looks like: one afraid to name its enemies, willing to rebrand extremism as activism, and mistaking intimidation for representation. Nothing is static; everything moves. And when societies refuse to draw lines, the direction of travel is unmistakable—and downward.

An Autopsy of a Fading Civilization Afraid to Name Its Enemies

Convicted terrorist standing in Birmingham election ‘to unite Sparkhill’

Former jihadist Shahid Butt says his controversial past and life experiences would make him an ideal councillor

Shahid Butt, talking about his ‘colourful life’ including his conviction over a terror plot in Yemen.

By: Jane Haynes, Birmingham Live, 27 Jan 2026

A Birmingham Muslim activist who was jailed for his part in an armed terror plot is seeking election to represent Sparkhill on the city council.

Shahid Butt, 60, says he believes he is the ‘ideal candidate’ to unite a divided community and city, push back against the far right and defeat Labour in one of its traditional strongholds.

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His candidacy has come under immediate fire online amid claims he advocates violence, pushes a strongly Islamist agenda and has a significant history of criminality that should bar him from sitting on the council.

READ MORE: Veteran Birmingham city councillor quits Labour Party after selection anger

He has openly encouraged the city’s Muslim youth to ‘work out at the gym and learn to fight’ in readiness for potential attacks, and urged Muslims to stand together and hold their ground against people of other faiths, who he describes as ‘disbelievers’.

He also advocates turning away from gangs, drugs, dangerous driving and anti social behaviour.

Ahead of the Villa match against Maccabi Tel Aviv last November he had called on Muslims from around the country to head to Birmingham to show solidarity for Palestine and prevent the Israeli team’s fans from ‘desecrating’ and ‘dirtying’ the city, claiming ‘IDF babykillers’ were set to be in the city.

He also posted a video from a protest at the match saying: “Muslims are not pacifists…if somebody comes into your face, you knock his teeth out, that’s my message to the youth.”

In a launch video for his campaign with the two men, he tells people that he will be relying on the ‘support of Allah, these guys and you’ to win the seat.

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The post has been slated on social media, with one response claiming: ‘Birmingham is on the cusp of being lost forever.’ Others responded to the news with clips of controversial comments made by Butt on podcasts and in interviews about Israel, Muslims and Birmingham.

Butt was convicted on terror charges in 1999 amid claims he was part of a terrorist enterprise conspiring to terrorise Yemen. He was found guilty of forming an armed gang and conspiring to bomb the British consulate, an Anglican church and a Swiss-owned hotel in Yemen.

The group was supposedly linked to Islamic radicals who kidnapped 16 Westerners in 1998, four of whom were killed. They were accused of being sent to Yemen by radical cleric Abu Hamza.

Butt always proclaimed his innocence and says that he confessed under severe torture. He was later jailed for five years.

Before that he had been jailed in Birmingham for violence and was in trouble regularly through the 1980s linked to his role in the notorious Lynx gang, a street gang of mainly Pakistanis who took on the racist far right, skinheads and National Front.

Asked about his violent past, he said: “I am not a pacifist. If someone attacks me…I am not just going to turn the other cheek, I am going to defend myself. I will (also) be pre-emptive, as the law advises me, if I feel like my life is threatened, or my family, I will do a pre-emptive strike.

“But does that mean I go around oppressing or bullying people, no, I think that is disgusting.”

He added: “I’m not saying that I’m perfect. I can make mistakes as well. Sometimes in the heat of the moment I say something that I may later regret…but I’m not an AI robot, I’m a real person, I have had a very colourful life and had my ups and downs but that’s what gives me credibility in my community. People see me as a real person, with all my faults and shortcomings.”

[…]Specifically asked if he was antisemitic, he said that ‘as a Muslim I cannot be antisemitic, the Jews are my cousins, we both have the same Father.’

However, he said he had ‘no love’ for Zionism – the belief in the right for Israel to exist as a Jewish homeland – and had been outspoken about Israel’s war on Gaza and the plight of Palestinians.

“I’m against any kind of apartheid behaviour, whoever is doing it, but no, I am not an antisemite. I am happy to sit with them, break bread, have a coffee with them, I have no issue whatsoever.”

Still from a video posted by Shahid Butt outside the Villa ground during the Maccabi Tel Aviv protest