UK Student Association to Leave National Student Union Over Sacking of President Accused of Anti-Semitism

British media is report­ing that, in ear­ly Decem­ber 2022, a motion was passed at the Stu­dents Union at London’s Queen Mary Uni­ver­si­ty for it to dis­af­fil­i­ate from the Nation­al Union of Stu­dents (NUS) over what it sees as “anti-Pales­tin­ian racism” in the sack­ing of NUS Pres­i­dent-elect Shaima Dal­lali. Accord­ing to the arti­cle:

Decem­ber 6, 2022 A motion has been passed at the Queen Mary Stu­dents’ Union for it to dis­af­fil­i­ate with the Nation­al Union of Stu­dents (NUS). Jus­ti­fi­ca­tions giv­en by the motion’s pro­pos­er include the NUS’s alleged con­tri­bu­tion to “the spread of anti-Pales­tin­ian racism,” cit­ing its recent dis­missal of ex-pres­i­dent Shaima Dal­lali over claims of antisemitism.

Read the rest here.

The motion’s pro­pos­er also accused the nation­al union of defy­ing its demo­c­ra­t­ic nature by sack­ing NUS Pres­i­dent-elect Shaima Dal­lali.

In March 2022, Dal­lali had been elect­ed as NUS Nation­al Pres­i­dent for a two-year term but was stood down after an inves­ti­ga­tion was launched into alle­ga­tions of anti-Semit­ic posts on social media. Among oth­er things, she was accused of label­ing a Jor­dan­ian cler­ic crit­i­cal of Hamas a “dirty Zion­ist” and pen­ning an arti­cle that called Glob­al Mus­lim Broth­er­hood (GMB) spir­i­tu­al leader Youssef Qaradawi the “moral com­pass for the Mus­lim com­mu­ni­ty at large.” Ulti­mate­ly, on 1 Novem­ber 2022, the NUS pub­lished a state­ment that an inde­pen­dent pan­el had found “sig­nif­i­cant breach­es of NUS’ poli­cies” and had ter­mi­nat­ed Dallali’s con­tract. Sub­se­quent­ly, sev­er­al GMB groups in the UK came out in sup­port of Dal­lali, includ­ing the Mus­lim Coun­cil of Britain, among the UK’s most promi­nent GMB groups. In Sep­tem­ber 2022, the Fed­er­a­tion of Stu­dent Islam­ic Soci­eties, a nation­al umbrel­la orga­ni­za­tion rep­re­sent­ing Islam­ic soci­eties at uni­ver­si­ties through­out the UK, promised to launch dis­af­fil­i­a­tion cam­paigns against the NUS.

An April 2022 inves­ti­ga­tion by the Glob­al Influ­ence Oper­a­tions Report (GIOR) found that Dal­lali has had addi­tion­al prob­lem­at­ic ties. This includ­ed serv­ing as Project Man­ag­er for the pro-Pales­tin­ian advo­ca­cy group Europal Forum (aka Euro­pean Pales­tin­ian Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Forum), whose lead­ers have his­tor­i­cal­ly been close to the GMB and the Euro­pean Hamas sup­port infra­struc­ture. In Novem­ber 2022, the GIOR report­ed Dal­lali had accept­ed an award from a British Hamas sup­port group.