Controversial comments made by the new President of the National Union of Students have led to some student unions across the country starting a campaign to disaffiliate themselves from the NUS.
The election of the new NUS president, Malia Bouattia, is one of the few times in recent memory that the internal politics of the NUS has received national media coverage.
Bouattia is the first female Muslim president of the National Union of Students, but it is some of her controversial past comments which have flung her into the spotlight.
Bouattia has been accused of making anti-semitic comments, particularly in a 2011 blog post in which she described the University of Birmingham – where she was studying at the time – as “something of a Zionist outpost”. She has also previously spoken of “mainstream Zionist-led media outlets”.
Bouattia has also been criticised for opposing a motion before the NUS condemning the IS terrorist group, but she and others have made clear that this was to do with ambiguous language, and not in any way in support of islamic extremism.
A number of universities across the UK, including Oxford, Cambridge, Manchester and Birmingham, already have groups campaigning for disaffiliation from the NUS. This isn’t just down to Bouattia’s recent comments, but also due to what a lot of people see as the lack of democratic accountability of the NUS leadership. A number of groups want to reform the NUS, which doesn’t currently operate a system of ‘one-member, one-vote’.
Bouattia has vehemently denied allegations that she is anti-semitic, and insists that her comments referred to Zionism as a political movement, and not in any way to Judaism as a religion.