Is there any “progressive” organization more misguided, more Authoritarian Leftist, and yes, more bigoted, than Britain’s National Union of Students? Their pervasive policy of “no-platforming,” their authoritarian attempts to censor views they don’t like, their coddling of Muslim groups that are anti-feminist and anti-gay—all bely their claim that they’re “progressive.” In reality, the organization is fascistic, but pretending to be Leftist.

If you had any doubt about that, get a load of the bigot they’ve just elected as NUS President, Malia Bouattia. You can read about her either in the Guardian or The Jewish Chronicle (see also here; people will discount the second source so I include the first)

Here are some comments that Bouattia made in 2014—speaking in her official capacity as NUS Black Students Officer—at a Tricontinental Anti-imperialist Platform and Invent the Future conference in September 2014. The video was subsequently removed (why is that?), but was leaked and is now back online:

Here is some of what she said:

“The notion of resistance has been perhaps washed out of our understanding of how colonised people will obtain their physical emancipation…With mainstream, Zionist-led media outlets …resistance is presented as an act of terrorism.

“But instead of us remembering that this has always been the case throughout struggles against white supremacy, it’s become an accepted discourse among too many…

“Internalised Islamophobia has also enabled our obsession with convincing non-Muslims of our non-violent and peaceful nature, so we’re taking things a step further and dangerously condemning the resistance, branding groups and individuals as terrorists to disassociate from them, but at the same time supporting their liberation which is a very strange contradiction.

“There’s a need to change how we think about these things. After all, the alternative to resistance is what we’ve been observing over the last 20 years or so, which is ‘peace talks’… essentially the strengthening of the colonial project.

“To consider that Palestine will be free only by means of fundraising, non-violent protest and the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement is problematic… My issue is that whilst at time it’s tactically used, or presented as the non-violent option, it can be misunderstood as the alternative to resistance by the Palestinian people…

“We also need to remember the Palestinians on the ground… who are actively sustaining the fight and the resistance against occupation and perhaps there’s a need to …take orders if we are to really show some form of solidarity”.

Note the reference to the “Mainstream, Zionist-led media outlets.” Haven’t you heard that before? It’s coded anti-Semitism, just as “states rights” was American code for “segregation” in the Sixties. Bouattia is raising the trope of “Jews controlling the world,” as in the forged Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

The phrase “the resistance” is also a euphemism, often used by pro-Palestinians, to mean “the violent assault and killing of Israeli civilians.” I believe she is justifying that here, and that’s supported by her claim that non-violent resistance is ineffectual, and that we should stop branding those who kill innocents as “terrorists.”

Bouattia has a long history of not only pro-Palestinian views, but also “anti-Zionist” views, which are views that Israel has no right to exist as a state or as a homeland for displaced Jews. But arguing that Israel has no right to exist at all, as many BDS supporters do, is a non-starter: it will not facilitate a two-state solution, or help remove settlers from the occupied areas. Nor will approving the killing of civilians—the “the resistance”. Those who kill unarmed Israeli civilians, including women and children, are celebrated as heroes in Gaza. That’s reprehensible. Yet when an Israeli soldier recently killed a wounded Palestianian, he was charged with manslaughter. Why is this difference ignored? It’s the bigotry of low expectations.

Besides no-platforming, the NUS has a history of coddling Muslim organizations, even those who are homophobic and misogynistic. This is also bigotry. The NUS—or at least freedom of speech—is in for a hard time under Boutattia’s tenure,

The Chronicle also reports this (my emphasis):

The warning signs have been there for years for all to see. It was Malia Bouattia who led the charge at the NUS to block a motion that sought to condemn ISIS and show solidarity to the Kurds fighting them, because it was deemed “Islamophobic.”

At this same meeting the NUS did pass a motion to boycott UKIP, and agreed to email every student in the country on polling day telling them to do likewise. Thus, in a sign of the terrible times in which we live, Britain’s student leadership found it easier to condemn UKIP than ISIS.

. . In 2011 Ms Bouattia co-authored a blog which lists a “large Jewish society” – by which she now insists she meant “Zionists” – as being one of the challenges at Birmingham University. But she even considers the UK government’s beleaguered Prevent strategy against extremism to be a result of the ‘Zionist lobby’.

Her bid for president was endorsed by the Muslim Public Affairs Committee (MPACUK), a group that has been banned by the NUS since 2004 after publishing material on its website originally published on neo-Nazi and Holocaust Denial websites, as well as their own post entitled “Take your holocaust, roll it nice and tight and shove it up your (be creative)!” MPACUK’s endorsement of her candidacy would be less concerning if she hadn’t appeared to welcome it, by replying “Thank you :-))”.

The new NUS president insists her concerns revolve around Zionism, not Judaism, and that her arguments are political, not faith based. But in an atmosphere in which the far-left and far-right are competing for people’s increased anger, is it any surprise that the same conference that saw her elected president applauded a speaker who argued that the NUS should not commemorate Holocaust Memorial Day, because “it’s not inclusive.”

I’ve put that video below. The message is “we should just have a day in which we condemn every genocide.”

Fine. Then if we condemn Israeli misdeeds, we should condemn Palestinian misdeeds as well. And, if we’re going to decry the oppression of Muslims, we must also decry the oppression of gays and women by Muslims—and Muslim student societies.

There’s a fat chance that the NUS will do that! I find it amusing, in the following video, that the NUS applauds a call to commemorate every genocide, but won’t extend that philosophy to condemning every form of oppression and bigotry. And really, there’s no need to condemn everything at once: you just call out all malfeasances, case by case, as they come up. The NUS, of course, doesn’t do that: they’re “selective.” They are an organization marinated in identity politics and virtue signaling: the most obstructive and useless traits of the Authoritarian Left.

As Hannah Weisfeld notes in the Guardian:

Perhaps Bouattia does not know that significant numbers of Jews in this country have friends and close family in Israel and therefore she doesn’t realise why saying that “boycott can be misunderstood as the alternative to resistance by the Palestinian people” makes many Jewish students recoil. When she says “non-violent” resistance is not enough, she is endorsing violent resistance against their friends and family. Will Jewish students want to participate in broader student politics knowing the president of their union thinks the potential killing of their friends and family is a legitimate “act of resistance”?

Bouattia is well within her rights to criticise the policies of the Israeli government. Indeed, many British Jews do. She is perfectly entitled to say she is not a Zionist. But it seems she is unable to understand why invoking antisemitic tropes and supporting armed resistance against Israelis causes deep offence. And when she says, “For me to take issue with Zionist politics, is not me taking issue with being Jewish”, she shows a deep lack of understanding of Jewish identity.

What we can expect—and what I predict—is that under Bouattia the NUS will become the poster child for the Authoritarian Left. Our proper response to its shenanigans is not only to criticize it, but to mock it and satirize it.

UPDATE: I’ll add a comment from a Spiked piece criticizing the NUS; reader Jay gave the link in the comments below. Two excerpts from the piece:

No Platform, Safe Spaces, microaggressions, trigger warnings – whatever form it comes in, campus censorship is borne of a barely veiled contempt for students. The NUS’s byzantine regime of speech codes, blacklists and disciplinary policies is fuelled by a view of students as either easily upset babies or goose-steppers in-waiting. Worse still, censorship makes you dumb. Spend half an hour in the NUS echo chamber and you’ll see what I mean. To hone your ideas, you need to be free to argue and test them. To find out about new ones, you need to be free to listen.

. . . NUS politicos like to pose as radicals. Nothing could be further from the truth. Aside from passing the odd motion condemning Israel (I’m sure that made Netanyahu blink), the NUS’s stock-in-trade is micromanaging campus life. It believes students are too delicate to deal with the world, let alone try to change it. Student politics has never been perfect. But in the past it at least provided an outlet for students’ radical ambitions. Insisting on being treated like adults is the first step toward making history. A union that harnesses that spirit, is the union that students need.

This story, from reason.com, is a few weeks old, having languished in the queue of stuff I have to post. But it’s still timely, for it demonstrates clearly how the Left is beginning to eat itself as various groups vie for the title of Most Oppressed.

On March 22 the site reported that the “LGBT+ Campaign” of Britain’s National Union of Students—that most ridiculous of Authoritarian Leftist groups—has decided that gay males aren’t as oppressed as the rest of the LGBT contingent, and passed a resolution that gay men should no longer be represented on their committees. (See also the report on PinkNews.)

The motion, which you can find here (it’s #408) says this:

That is, the committees are there to ensure not that bigotry based on sexual behavior or identity is eliminated from society, but from the groups themselves, and apparently gay men on the committees perpetuate bigotry. Therefore, they have to go.

Here’s the resolution (see #4):

As Pink News noted, this resolution is in fact at odds with assertions in the rest of the NUS document:

Pink News noted the irony of the motion—other approved motions stressed that gay men were at increased risk of HIV infection, and even violence, relative to other marginalized groups.

Other motions were just as absurd. One asserted that the ‘A’ often found in the LGBT+ acronym should and must always stand for “ace” (as in, asexual), rather than “ally.”

It’s easy to laugh at these developments, though they speak to a real sickness on the left: hysterical obsession with group identity. In the eyes of the NUS LGBT Campaign, no one is an individual—everyone must be labelled according to their sexual preference, skin color, and gender expression, and then assigned a grievance based on the collective wisdom of their similarly marginalized peers.

In Resolution 210, the NUS instructs local LGBT+ groups on the proper use of acronyms:

There’s really nothing to add to this; all we can do is sit on the sidelines and watch people who are basically on the same side ingest each other.