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Malia Bouattia

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Malia Bouattia
Bouattia speaking at a Stop Trump rally in Westminster in February 2017
58th President of the National Union of Students
In office
1 July 2016 – 3 July 2017
Preceded byMegan Dunn
Succeeded byShakira Martin
Personal details
Born
Malia Mazia Bouattia

(1987-10-22) 22 October 1987 (age 37)
Norwich, Norfolk, England
Alma materUniversity of Birmingham

Malia Mazia Bouattia (born 22 October 1987)[1] is the former president of the National Union of Students (NUS) of the United Kingdom, elected at the National Conference in April 2016. She was the first female Black British[2][3] and Muslim leader of the NUS.[3][4][5][6] She attended the University of Birmingham. In March 2017, she was defeated in her attempt to run for a second term in office by NUS Vice-president Shakira Martin.

Bouattia is a contributor to several news outlets, including The Guardian,[7] Middle East Eye,[8] The New Arab[9] and the HuffPost.[10] She is currently a presenter on the British Muslim TV panel show Women Like Us.[11][12]

Early life

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Bouattia was born in Norwich, Norfolk, in October 1987.[13][14][15] Her father is an Algerian academic who now works for an international management consultancy. She has two younger sisters.[14]

The family fled their home in Constantine during the Algerian Civil War, and moved to Birmingham in England, where Bouattia attended school. While at school, she began campaigning on social issues, and took part in protests opposing the Iraq War. Bouattia attended the University of Birmingham where she read cultural studies with French, followed by an MPhil in post-colonial theory. While studying for her MPhil, she began to be active in the NUS.[15] In 2015 she talked about her early life in a speech titled "Against All Odds" at a MADE (Muslim Agency for Development Education) event.[16]

NUS career

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NUS Black Students' officership and racial identity

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Bouattia served two years as Black Students' Officer of the National Union of Students (NUS). While in this position, she campaigned against the UK government's Prevent strategy which she describes as "toxic and unworkable".[17] Bouattia also pushed for greater ethnic diversity amongst NUS candidates and campaigned for the establishment of a permanent officer for transgender students.[15]

While a member of the NUS Executive Committee, Bouattia opposed a motion condemning the terrorist acts of ISIS as she considered the wording of the motion Islamophobic.[17][4] She later supported a second motion condemning crimes by ISIS, as well as Islamophobia in general.[4]

Bouattia has spoken extensively about her North African (Algerian) ancestry and her racial identity as a black woman.[3] Anandi Ramamurthy and Kalpana Wilson have contextualized Bouattia's views as belonging to a tradition of "political blackness" intended to unite anti-racist and anti-colonial movements which had been widely accepted in the 20th century, although this had declined since. They argued that Bouattia's awareness of the simultaneous struggle against racism among immigrants to the UK in the post-war period and movements against colonialism internationally provided a framework to understand opposition to Islamophobia and racism domestically as part of an international movement, and stressed that it was not "an attempt to homogenise identity and experience".[18] In an article she wrote in 2015, Bouattia mentioned the British Black Panthers, the Organisation of Women of African and Asian Descent, the Southall Black Sisters and the United Black Youth League as organisations working in this tradition.[19]

In May 2016, Charlie Brinkhurst-Cuff in the New Statesman argued that Bouattia was not black, noting that her self-identification as black was based on the concept of "political blackness", which Brinkhurst-Cuff defined as part of a tendency by some people of colour to adopt "blackness" as an inclusive term for nonwhites generally. Whilst acknowledging the value of Bouattia's anti-racist work, and the relevance of political blackness as a historical term, Brinkhurst-Cuff suggested that this conflation of the variety of racialised experiences was "unwise and outdated". Brinkhurst-Cuff nonetheless welcomed Bouattia's appointment, and distinguished her case from that of Rachel Dolezal on the grounds that Bouattia was a woman of colour who was honest about her ancestry.[20]

Election as NUS president

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At the 2016 NUS conference Bouattia ran for the position of president against incumbent Megan Dunn with a campaign slogan of "For a strong transformative union".[21] She opposed Dunn's plans to end the NUS' relationship with the human rights organisation CAGE, which Bouattia had defended in July 2015 against David Cameron's accusation that it is an "extremist" group.[22] Bouattia has referred to the stance against CAGE as consisting of "baseless Islamophobic smears", while Dunn described its leaders as having "sympathised with violent extremism and violence against women."[17]

Bouattia won the 2016 election with 50.9% of the vote,[17] pledging to oppose government cuts to bursaries and the NHS. Bouattia stated that she would place greater emphasis on global politics.[15]

Allegations of antisemitism

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During her campaign attention was drawn to past comments she had made, that were criticised as antisemitic.[23] In a co-written 2011 University of Birmingham Friends of Palestine blog post, she described the university as "something of a Zionist outpost in British Higher Education" which has "the largest JSoc [Jewish student society] in the country whose leadership is dominated by Zionist activists".[24][25] For this she has been condemned by over 300 Jewish student leaders, the Union of Jewish Students and Oxford University Student Union.[17][26]

In her response to this criticism in April 2016, Bouattia rejected the accusation that she had a problem with Jewish societies on-campus. Daniel Clements, then president of Birmingham J-Soc, found her comments "completely unsatisfactory".[27]

Bouattia defended her comments claiming that they had been misrepresented and "that for me to take issue with Zionist politics is not me taking issue with being Jewish."[4][28] An October 2016 report by the House of Commons Home Affairs Select Committee, described her comments as "outright racism" and said that she was not taking issues of anti-Semitism on university campuses seriously enough.[29] However, a letter published in The Independent with signatories including Professor Norman Finkelstein and Professor Moshé Machover, defended Bouattia's record of fighting racism and anti-semitism.[30]

Critics of Bouattia also highlighted a video of her speaking at a conference on "Gaza and the Palestinian Revolution" in 2014, in which she said: "With mainstream Zionist-led media outlets ... resistance is presented as an act of terrorism."[31] Any peace talks, in her opinion, are a "strengthening of the colonial project".[32] Bouattia attracted criticism for appearing to suggest that non-violent resistance to Israeli occupation is a limited option.[31][33]

In January 2017, Al Jazeera broadcast footage purporting to show that the UJS (Union of Jewish Students) and the Israeli Embassy in London were involved in a campaign to discredit Bouattia with claims of antisemitism and of seeking to block her election and, later, attempting to remove her.[34]

The following month, an internal NUS inquiry concluded that Bouattia had made an antisemitic statement, although four other such claims were rejected. As she had expressed regret, the investigator said that Bouattia should not face any action so long as she apologised.[35]

Students' union disaffiliations

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In response to her election, students at Durham, Loughborough, Hull, Aberystwyth, Oxford, Cambridge, Manchester, Essex, York, King's College London, Nottingham, Leicester, Queen Mary University of London and Reading University began campaigning to disaffiliate from the NUS.[36][37]

On 9 May 2016 the University of Lincoln disaffiliated from the NUS. Within the same week, Newcastle University followed.[38] Hull University disaffiliated on 24 May 2016,[39] followed by Loughborough University on 7 June.[40] However, Queen Mary, Nottingham, Oxford, Surrey, Exeter, Warwick, Cambridge and Durham universities voted to remain affiliated to the NUS.[41]

Defeat in 2017 NUS election

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On 13 March 2017, Bouattia announced that she was running for a second term as NUS President.[42] The NUS Vice-president for further education Shakira Martin ran against her, as well as Durham student Tom Harwood, who stood on a conservative platform[43] and lampooned the NUS and Bouattia's "irrelevant grandstanding" in his somewhat satirical campaign literature.[44] Martin defeated Bouattia, winning 56% of the vote in the election at the national conference in Brighton the following month.[45] She gained 402 of the 721 votes cast by delegates, while Bouattia received 272 and Harwood 35.[46]

References

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  1. ^ "Malia Mazia BOUATTIA – Personal Appointments (free information from Companies House)". Beta.companieshouse.gov.uk. Retrieved 17 October 2018.
  2. ^ Malia Bouattia elected first black female NUS president. Times Higher Education, 20 April 2016
  3. ^ a b c Elgot, Jessica (20 April 2016). "NUS elects first female black Muslim president after tense contest". The Guardian.
  4. ^ a b c d "National Union of Students elects Malia Bouattia as president". BBC News. 21 April 2016. Retrieved 20 April 2016.
  5. ^ Glum, Julia (21 April 2016). "Who Is Malia Bouattia? Black Muslim British Student Union President Accused of Anti-Semitism". IBT. Retrieved 6 June 2016.
  6. ^ "Why the National Union of Students is in trouble". The Economist. 20 May 2016. Retrieved 22 May 2016.
  7. ^ "Malia Bouattia". The Guardian. Retrieved 14 February 2019.
  8. ^ "Malia Bouattia". Middle East Eye. Retrieved 14 February 2019.
  9. ^ "Malia Bouattia". alaraby. Retrieved 14 February 2019.
  10. ^ "Malia Bouattia". HuffPost UK. Retrieved 14 February 2019.
  11. ^ Bouattia, Malia. "Women like us: British Muslimahs resist". alaraby. Retrieved 14 February 2019.
  12. ^ "Why this filmmaker is putting Muslim women on mainstream television". Metro. 12 September 2018. Retrieved 14 February 2019.
  13. ^ Interview with Malia Bouattia. The Times, 20 September 2016.
  14. ^ a b Brown, David (23 April 2016). "NUS leader rages against white supremacy". The Times. London. p. 17. Retrieved 24 April 2016. (subscription required)
  15. ^ a b c d Elgot, Jessica (22 April 2016). "Malia Bouattia's election as NUS president proves deeply divisive". The Guardian. Retrieved 22 April 2016.
  16. ^ Malia Bouattia: Against All Odds. Made in Europe, 22 April 2016. Retrieved 23 January 2019.
  17. ^ a b c d e Gilligan, Andrew (20 April 2016). "Malia Bouattia elected NUS President after causing controversy over 'anti-Semitism and refusing to condemn Isil'". The Daily Telegraph. Retrieved 20 April 2016.
  18. ^ Ramamurthy, Anandi; Wilson, Kalpana (2017). "'An act of struggle in the present': History, education and political campaigning by South Asian anti-imperialist activists in Britain" (PDF). Reflections on knowledge, learning and social movements: History's schools. Abingdon-on-Thames: Routledge. ISBN 9781315163826. Retrieved 3 July 2020.
  19. ^ Bouattia, Malia (29 September 2015). "Celebrating Black History in Britain". NUS Connect. Retrieved 3 July 2020.
  20. ^ Brinkhurst-Cuff, Charlie. Malia Bouattia and the murky world of political blackness. The New Statesman, 17 May 2016. Retrieved 17 May 2016.
  21. ^ Malia for president. Archived at the Internet Archive 27 April 2016.
  22. ^ Gani, Aisha (22 April 2015). "Cage 'seeking legal advice' on whether it was defamed by David Cameron". The Guardian. Retrieved 23 April 2016.
  23. ^ Dervla Murphy,'Hasbara in Action,' Irish Pages Vol. 9, No. 2 2015, pp. 181-212.
  24. ^ Bowden, George (14 April 2016). "NUS President Election Candidate, Malia Bouattia, Responds To 'Anti-Semitism' Claims". Huffington Post. Retrieved 23 April 2016.
  25. ^ Lindley, Daniel; Bouattia, Malia (28 March 2011). "University of Birmingham & Israeli Apartheid Week: Mock Israeli Checkpoint". The London School of Emancipation Blogspot. London: The London School of Economics Student Union Palestine Society. Retrieved 31 January 2017.
  26. ^ Ali, Aftab. "The NUS has elected its new president for the next academic year". The Independent. Retrieved 20 April 2016.
  27. ^ Khomani, Nadia (23 April 2016). "NUS president must address concerns over antisemitism, say Jewish students". The Guardian. Retrieved 23 April 2016.
  28. ^ Bouattia, Malia (24 April 2016). "I'm the new NUS president – and no, I'm not an antisemitic Isis sympathiser". The Guardian. Retrieved 24 April 2016.
  29. ^ Dysch, Marcus (16 October 2016). "Jeremy Corbyn, Baroness Chakrabarti and Malia Bouattia criticised in MPs' antisemitism report". The Jewish Chronicle. Retrieved 17 October 2016.
  30. ^ "Parliament should move to the Heathrow flight path – and see if they can get any work done". The Independent. 26 October 2016. Retrieved 29 December 2017.
  31. ^ a b Nawaz, Maajid (20 April 2016). "Malia Bouattia is symbolic of the poison of the regressive Left". The Jewish Chronicle. Retrieved 23 April 2016.
  32. ^ Firsht, Naomi (20 April 2016). "Student leader made comments about 'Zionist-led media', video reveals". The Jewish Chronicle.
  33. ^ Lloyd, Will (19 April 2016). "Watch future NUS president Malia Bouattia endorse violent struggle". The Tab. Retrieved 21 April 2016.
  34. ^ "Exclusive: Israel lobby infiltrates UK student movement". Al Jazeera. 11 January 2017. Retrieved 13 January 2017.
  35. ^ Yorke, Harry (17 February 2017). "NUS in turmoil after internal report rules its President should not be punished despite making anti-Semitic remarks". The Daily Telegraph. London. Retrieved 19 February 2017.
  36. ^ "Students threaten to split from NUS over new president". BBC News. 22 April 2016. Retrieved 23 April 2016.
  37. ^ "Lincoln SU disaffiliates from National Union of Students". The Linc. 9 May 2016. Retrieved 10 May 2016.
  38. ^ Slater, Tom. The backlash against the NUS has begun. The Spectator, 12 May 2016. Retrieved 13 May 2016.
  39. ^ Ali, Aftab (24 May 2016). "Hull University Union becomes latest to disaffiliate from National Union of Students". The Independent. Retrieved 24 May 2016.
  40. ^ "Loughborough University students vote to split from NUS". The Jewish Chronicle. 8 June 2016. Retrieved 16 September 2022.
  41. ^ Burns, Judith. Student unions split on leaving NUS in row over president. BBC News, 13 May 2016. Retrieved 24 May 2016.
  42. ^ Bouattia, Malia. "Re-Elect Malia For NUS President". Retrieved 15 April 2017 – via Facebook.
  43. ^ Bernstein, Jordan (6 April 2017). "Harwood and Bouattia clash over NUS vision". Cherwell. Retrieved 15 April 2017.
  44. ^ Burgess, Kaya (17 December 2016). "Manifesto of mockery wins student election". The Times. Retrieved 26 April 2017.
  45. ^ NUS (26 April 2017). "Shakira Martin elected as NUS National President". NUS. Retrieved 26 April 2017.
  46. ^ Topping, Alexandra; Marsh, Sarah (26 April 2017). "Divisive NUS president Malia Bouattia defeated in election". The Guardian. Retrieved 26 April 2017.
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