A Pain In The Butt

At the local elections in May, voters in the Sparkhill area of Birmingham will be confronted with possibly the most disgusting candidate in British electoral history. A convicted terrorist is running for a seat on the council - and, thanks to the wonders of diversity, there’s an excellent chance he’ll win.

Shahid Butt - and there’s a hint of extremism problems in his background right there, because the name Shahid means “martyr” in Arabic - was born in Pakistan 60 years ago. His parents brought him to Birmingham as a child; by his early teens he had formed a violent Pakistani street gang, and spent time in prison for assault. And it all went downhill from there.

In the early 1990s Butt travelled to Bosnia as an “aid worker”, which may have been a front all along as he soon joined the Bosnian army as a foreign volunteer. I did two operational tours in Bosnia and I know exactly what kind of non-Bosnian muslims went there to fight. The country’s islamist president, Alija Izetbegovic (he actually gave Osama bin Laden a Bosnian passport in 1993), grouped the foreign jihadists into a unit named the Handzar Brigade, after the Bosnian Waffen-SS division Izetbegovic had tried to join as a teenager. That may give you a clue what they were like.

After the war, when most Bosnian soldiers just wanted to go home and get on with their lives, the foreign volunteers rapidly pivoted from fighting the Bosnian Serbs to oppressing the Bosnian muslims. A key fact about Bosnian muslims is that they’re not, on the whole, actually all that muslim. They drink beer and slivovitz. They eat pork. They’re as lackadaisical about religion as almost everyone else in Bosnia. As the late, great PJ O’Rourke put it in All The Trouble In The World:

“So the difference between Serbs and Croats is that the Serbs don’t go to Eastern Orthodox services and the Croats don’t attend Mass. And the difference between Serbs and Muslims is that five times a day the Muslims don’t pray to Mecca.”

This slapdash approach to Islam didn’t go down well with the foreign fighters, and as soon as the actual civil war ended in December 1995 the jihadis turned on the local population. I spent the first half of 1996 in the Bihać Pocket, a muslim area in northwest Bosnia, and it wasn’t long before stories started filtering in about intimidation by foreigners. Armed jihadis assaulted customers in bars and destroyed any alcohol they found. They machine-gunned hundreds of pigs on local farms. They ordered Bosnian women to wear the hijab - not something they traditionally do. In one spiteful incident in the city of Bihać itself, Arabs kidnapped a baby and refused to give it back until its mother changed out of the miniskirt she’d been wearing.

Jihadi thuggery actually had a peripheral impact on my own unit. I was part of a small team - six British and two Americans - based in Ćoralići, a village roughly twelve miles north-ish of Bihać. The locals were friendly and happy to have us there, and the threat was low enough that we could go out for meals in local restaurants. Our favourite restaurant, where we inevitably ended up if someone had a birthday or work went particularly well that day, was a pizzeria in Cazin, a small town three miles east of Ćoralići. It was owned by a muslim veteran of the Bosnian army, and it was excellent. My personal dinner favourite was the Pizza Amfora, a sort of mutant calzone with a ham and mushroom omelette in the middle. I just checked, actually, and I’m pleased to see it’s still on the menu:

It very nearly wasn’t still on the menu, though. and neither was anything else. One night in March 1996 foreign jihadis, outraged that the owner sold ham and his customers ate it, stuck a time fuse into a salvaged anti-tank mine and threw it through the front window of the (thankfully empty) restaurant. The blast demolished half the building and caused massive damage to the rest. Luckily the owner was unharmed, and managed to rebuild and reopen in about six weeks.

Foreign muslim volunteers didn’t go to Bosnia to fight for the Bosnian people. They went there to fight for Islam, and when they realised that Bosnians practiced Islam very differently from themselves they had no hesitation in trying to force their own values on them. Shahid Butt was one of those extremist thugs.

It seems that bullying Bosnians didn’t slake Butt’s appetite for violence, and his next trip was to Afghanistan. In the mid-1990s Afghanistan was being torn apart by a brutal civil war between the Northern Alliance - a coalition of the insurgent leaders who had fought the Soviets - and extreme islamists centred around the vile Hezb-i Islami Gulbuddin and the newly emerged Taliban. Obviously Butt didn’t go there as a tourist, and while I don’t have actual confirmation of what side he was fighting for I think we can all guess, can’t we?

Butt next moved on to Kashmir, where Pakistan-based terrorists have been murdering people since 1989. Of course most Pakistanis in Britain originate from the Mirpur area, which is in Azad Kashmir, so it’s possible Butt’s trip there was innocent. His next one, however, definitely was not.

At some point during all this jihadist activity - probably in Bosnia - Butt came into the orbit of Abu Hamza al-Masri. You remember him; the one-eyed, hook-handed Egyptian imam and terrorist that took eight years to extradite to the USA, because an endless stream of human rights lawyers were worried the nasty Americans would do bad things to the poor lamb. Well, Hamza is now rotting in a supermax cell in Florida, but he caused a lot of mischief before we managed to send him there. One of the things he did was dispatch Shahid Butt, along with one of Hamza’s sons and half a dozen other scumbags, to Yemen in 1999 to take part in a terrorist campaign against government and western targets in the country.

By the time Yemeni police caught up with Butt his group had devised a plan to carry out bomb attacks on the British Consulate, an Anglican church and a hotel. Each of these planned atrocities had the potential to kill dozens of people. It wasn’t idle chatter, either; they had the bombs and other weapons, although naturally Butt claims these were planted on him. Despite his unconvincing denials a court convicted him of “associating with armed groups, plotting murder and destruction and possessing weapons”, and sentenced him to five years in jail.

Butt was released in 2003. At this point the Home Office should have decided that Butt’s presence in Britain was not conducive to the public good and removed his citizenship, but of course what they actually did was send a consular official to escort him back to this country and then turn him loose.

Since then Butt claims to be a reformed character who regrets his past, but I’m no more convinced than that Yemeni court was. Among other things, Butt called for “every muslim” to confront Israeli football fans, although in fact the game ended up being cancelled because West Midlands Police produced fake evidence to justify a ban. He also told an interviewer muslims shouldn’t be friends with jews or christians, which rather shoots down the idea that he’s opposed to bigotry and division. He’s praised muslims who went to fight for ISIS in Syria, claiming they’re “doing it out of compassion”, and of course he’s a vocal supporter of Hamas.

Now Butt is standing for the Sparkhill ward as part of the “Independent Candidates Alliance”, which of course isn’t made up of independent candidates at all. It’s an organised network of pro-Hamas lunatics, set up by Akhmed Yakoob and Shakeel Afsar. Yakoob is a lawyer - for now, at least; he’s been suspended and charged with money laundering - and achieved notoriety when he defended the Pakistani thugs who assaulted police at Manchester Airport in 2024. Afsar is an “activist” and homophobic bigot.

There are already four “pro-Gaza independent” MPs in Parliament - five, if you count Jeremy Corbyn - and we’ve all seen what a pack of squalid anti-British racists they are. Unfortunately similar people are likely to get elected in many council wards in May, because there are now plenty wards where a majority of voters will vote for an openly islamist candidate like Butt.

The Sparkhill ward is a perfect example of this: It’s around 70% muslim. No doubt Labour and the Tories will also run “community” candidates in an attempt to capture the sectarian vote, but that tactic is dying; when there are candidates like Butt, who don’t even pretend to care about British issues and just run as islamists, the old parties are helplessly watching their influence with the “community” slip away. Offered a councillor who will focus solely on muslim issues, a lot of people are going to vote for him.

Butt’s backers describe him as “well respected in the Sparkhill community” - and I have a horrible feeling they might be right.

The fact Butt is even able to run as a candidate - never mind that he’s likely to win - is the inevitable end point of decades of failures by the British state. It’s true that the law doesn’t disbar him from standing, but clearly it should. If the law says a lifelong troublemaker with a history of violence and a conviction for actual terrorism is allowed to run for elected office, it is a bad law and must be changed. Even that isn’t the real issue, though. Why was Butt allowed to come back to Britain after his conviction? What brain donor thought this country would be a better place with another convicted terrorist in it? He should have been stripped of his citizenship and left to either return to Pakistan or rot in Yemen. We don’t need him.

But now we’re stuck with him, and there’s an excellent chance that on 8 May he’ll actually be in a position of some power. This is insane. Shahid Butt should not be in Britain at all. We need a government with the courage to remove him from this country - and if the people of Sparkhill are vicious and bigoted enough to elect him, perhaps their future here needs to be re-evaluated, too.

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