UK university to cut ties with student union over ‘anti-Semitic’ president-elect
Citing ‘disillusionment,’ Lincoln U becomes first to disaffiliate from the NUS since election of Malia Bouattia
Students from Britain’s Lincoln University on Monday voted to sever ties with the National Union of Students after the umbrella student body last month elected a woman accused of anti-Semitism as president.
In a close referendum vote, Lincoln students decided by 88 votes to disaffiliate from the NUS, around 50.8 percent of the 1,734 ballots cast.
The move comes on the heels of the controversial election of Malia Bouattia as president the NUS, the inter-university group’s first black female Muslim leader.
Bouattia, an activist in the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, has previously advocated for Palestinian violence against Israelis, and has refused to condemn the Islamic State terrorist group. Her April 21 election sparked allegations of anti-Semitism and widespread criticism of the NUS.
But a statement posted on the University of Lincoln website denied Bouattia’s appointment or her controversial remarks were the driving force behind the decision to hold a referendum, saying instead its representatives were “disillusioned with the direction ” the union was headed.
“The fact that it is a national union and the officers themselves aren’t working in unity lost their confidence on whether they will do anything of benefit to our members and not just actions for their own political gain,” the statement said.
The university will officially disaffiliate from the NUS on December 31, 2016.
According to British news reports, a series of decisions taken by the union’s national conference in Brighton last month prompted students from Durham, Edinburgh, Westminster, Aberystwyth, Manchester, York, Exeter, London South Bank, Oxford and Cambridge universities to consider disaffiliating from the NUS through a referendum vote on their campuses.
If other universities join Lincoln in severing ties with the NUS, the organization could lose hundreds of thousands of pounds in membership fees and commercial revenues, throwing the national student union into a funding crisis.
In 2011, Bouattia wrote an article in which she described Birmingham as “something of a Zionist outpost in British higher education,” and, in a 2014 speech, even suggested that British student activists should “take orders” from Palestinian terrorists.
In that address, Bouattia protested that in “mainstream Zionist-led media outlets… resistance is presented as an act of terrorism” and complained that this has “become an accepted discourse amongst too many.”
She went on to say it was “problematic” to view efforts to boycott Israel as an alternative to Palestinian “resistance,” and appeared to encourage engaging with terrorists, raising the possibility of “taking orders” to show solidarity.
In the wake of Bouattia’s election, some 57 Jewish student leaders penned an open letter to the president-elect voicing worry that she is “creating an element of suspicion towards Jewish students on campus.”
The NUS is a confederation of some 600 UK students’ unions, representing over 95% of all British higher and further education unions. It claims to speak for seven million British students.
