Malia Bouattia

Early life

Bouattia was born in Algeria, and her birth was registered in Norfolk after emigrating. Her father is Brahim Bouattia, an Algerian academic who now works for an international management consultancy, and her mother is Latifa Bouattia. She has two younger sisters, Hannah and Yasmin.

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.

NUS Black Students' Officership and racial identity

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.” Bouattia also pushed for greater ethnic diversity amongst NUS candidates and campaigned for the establishment of a permanent officer for transgender students.

Whilst 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. She later supported a second motion condemning crimes by ISIS, as well as Islamophobia in general.

Bouattia has spoken extensively about her North African (Algerian) ancestry and her racial identity as a black woman. In May 2016, Charlie Brinkhurst-Cuff in the New Statesman argued that Bouattia was not black, and that her self-identification as black was part of a tendency by some people of colour to adopt "blackness" as an inclusive term for nonwhites generally, a trend Brinkhurst-Cuff derisively called "political blackness." In Brinkhurst-Cuff's view, this conflation of the variety of racialised experiences was "unwise and outdated".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.

Campaign for NUS presidency

At the 2016 NUS conference Bouattia ran for the position of president against incumbent Megan Dunn. She opposed Dunn's plans to end the NUS' relationship with the humans rights organisation CAGE, which Bouattia had defended in July 2015 against David Cameron's accusation that it is an "extremist" group. 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."

Bouattia won the 2016 election with 50.9% of the vote. She has pledged to oppose government cuts to bursaries and the NHS. Bouattia has stated that she will place greater emphasis on global politics.

Allegations of Antisemitism

During her campaign attention was drawn to past comments she had made, that were criticised as anti-Semitic. 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". For this she has been condemned by over 300 Jewish student leaders, the Union of Jewish Students and Oxford University Student Union.

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". The NUS has also been accused of "not doing enough" to combat anti-semitism by the Labour member of parliament John Mann.

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." 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.

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 - because once again we're dealing with the population of the global south - resistance is presented as an act of terrorism." Any peace talks, in her opinion, are a "strengthening of the colonial project". Bouattia attracted criticism for appearing to suggest that non-violent resistance to Israeli occupation is a limited option.

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.

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.

Student union disaffiliations

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

On 9 May 2016 the University of Lincoln disaffiliated from the NUS. Within the same week, Newcastle University followed. Hull University disaffiliated on 24 May 2016, followed by Loughborough University on 7 June. Nottingham, Oxford, Surrey, Exeter, Warwick, Cambridge and Durham universities, however, voted to remain affiliated to the NUS.