Jewish groups in the U.K. on Friday lamented the fact that a man who was convicted of Islamist terrorism, and who has inveighed against Jews, is running for public office in Birmingham.
“A convicted terrorist who advocated for confrontation with Israeli fans and players at the Maccabi Tel Aviv soccer match [against home team Aston Villa on Nov. 6] is running for a seat on Birmingham City Council,” the Campaign Against Antisemitism, a prominent Jewish community group, wrote in a statement on Friday about Shahid Butt’s bid as an independent.
“What is happening in Birmingham?” the campaign demanded in the statement about the U.K.’s second-largest city, where the share of Muslims rose from 14% in 2001 to 30% in 2021, according to official censuses.
In 1999, a Yemeni court convicted Butt of participating in a plot to bomb the British consulate and an Anglican church in Yemen. Butt, 60, who served five years in prison, denies the charges and has said his confession to them was under duress.
In November, Butt called on “all Muslims” to descend on Villa Park to protest the presence of Maccabi Tel Aviv players at a match where police banned their fans from attending.
“This should shock every voter in Birmingham,” the Hertfordshire Friends of Israel group wrote in a statement last week about Butt’s candidacy. “It’s astonishing that someone with Shahid Butt’s history is even eligible to stand for public office.”
Electing Butt “would be a profound error of judgment by any community that values safety, cohesion, and public trust,” the group added.
Danny Stone, CEO of the Antisemitism Policy Trust, a group that aims to educate parliamentarians, policymakers and opinion formers to address anti-Jewish hatred, told TalkTV on Thursday that Butt’s role in the Maccabi Tel Aviv saga showed that his focus has “becomes a kind of foreign policy issue on sectarian discourse, [and] then the results will be bad for all of us.”
On Jan. 16, the chief police officer for the Birmingham area, Craig Guildford, retired amid a scandal over his force’s alleged lies and manufacturing of evidence to justify the ban on Maccabi fans at the expense of local Jews and would-be Israeli visitors, to threats of violence by Muslim and other anti-Israel agitators.
Butt’s candidacy has provoked vivid reactions from local politicians in Birmingham, especially from the Reform UK party of Nigel Farage.
“A terrorism conviction abroad. A council seat at home. This should alarm us all. This should worry people,” Stuart Davies, a city council member for the party, said in a statement on Friday. “Councils exist to serve everyone equally, not to represent factions or proxy conflicts.”
