This interview was meant to happen months ago, but was cancelled at the last minute, rescheduled and then cancelled again, and this carried on all summer. When at last we meet, Malia Bouattia apologises with consummate elegance, blaming pressures on a diary over which she has “no control at all”. I have a strong suspicion that this is not true. She offers it without a trace of unease, and I can’t decide whether the grace of what I’m sure is a deceit is really quite impressive, or offputting. In fact I can’t recall ever feeling so many powerful but contradictory emotions about someone I have only just met.

Bouattia’s manner can be almost glassily cool, but I think that’s to hide how nervous she is, and the vulnerability is very touching. But the next minute she can become formidably impressive, and fill me with admiration, and seconds later become maddening. By the end I’m so angry, I’m ranting at her like a lunatic. “For the record,” I yell, “this has never happened before! I am not in the habit of shouting in interviews!” I am dying of embarrassment when I leave, and at a loss to explain why this happened.

Bouattia, 28, has had to deal with so much anger by now that you might think she would be immune to it, but I don’t think she is. Before she became president of the National Union of Students (NUS) in April she served two years as the union’s black students’ officer, during which she rejected a motion condemning Isis. She was promptly branded a terrorist sympathiser by the press, who chose not to report that her only objection to the motion was its poor wording, which she wanted to correct. The deluge of death threats necessitated police protection, but still were nothing compared with the uproar her presidential election provoked. That Bouattia is the first black woman and first Muslim to be elected NUS president was lost in Fleet Street’s frenzy to dig up old comments she had made that “proved” she was antisemitic.

She had described the University of Birmingham as “something of a Zionist outpost” and on another occasion referred to “mainstream Zionist-led media outlets”. More than 300 Jewish leaders complained. “This was a few years ago and I was talking about quite a particular context where there were a lot of activists that were very vocally supportive of the state of Israel and its actions. I was part of the Palestine society that, for most of the years that I was involved in it, was just trying to exist as a society let alone actually build solidarity, so it was because of that opposition, the constant tension and having disruptions for events that were taking place … you know, holding solidarity demonstrations and having opposing ones with Israeli flags flying, speakers being heckled. I wasn’t being critical of the number of Jewish students or the size of the Jewish society at Birmingham. It was very much in relation to the opposition to any kind of Palestine solidarity efforts that were taking place.”

She clarifies that she simply meant that Birmingham’s student union had the biggest and most vociferously Zionist Jewish society, and that she was referring to media outlets that promote a heavily pro-Israeli line, not evoking the old conspiracy theory about Jewish control of the media.

Bouattia thinks the real reason for all the animosity is not antisemitism, but the radicalism of her leftwing politics. Though not a Labour member, she is a big fan of Jeremy Corbyn, and believes it was her promise of a bolder political agenda that won her the election. “We need action, and we need it now, and we need it differently to what we’ve had before. We can’t come to the table trying to compromise any more. That hasn’t worked.”

But Bouattia’s political ambitions go way beyond campaigning against education cuts or fee hikes. “We want a sense of international solidarity. We don’t sit in a bubble. We have international students, migrant communities, and we can’t sit by and be silent when spaces for education are for us to be critical of the systems, and of this country’s role in escalating international crises, and escalating oppression of other groups. Liberation campaigns relate their work back to global movements for justice and solidarity, and we’re much stronger when we’re united.”

Personally, I find this both quite touching and perfectly appropriate from a student politician. But judging from an average turnout in student union elections of just 18%, the majority of undergraduates don’t. I was a bit of a student political hack, and within that small world Bouattia is perfectly recognisable. To the overwhelming majority of seven million NUS members, however, her views and values, even the language she uses, are incomprehensible. If they don’t share her commitment to fighting global injustice, but care about how to pay their rent instead, shouldn’t their union leader confine herself to representing their interests?

But the NUS is fighting on all fronts, Bouattia says, and it campaigns just as hard on education issues as, say, Palestinian rights. I wonder how much time she has ever spent in the company of apolitical students who came to university for the football, beer and toga parties, and are bewildered and alienated by NUS motions calling for the abolition of all prisons. Why does she think, I ask, that student voter turnout is so low?

Malia Bouattia, speaking at an NHS demonstration. Photograph: Johnny Armstead/REX/Shutterstock

“I don’t know whether it’s necessarily low if we compare it with voter turnout more generally.” After I run through the average turnout for general, mayoral and devolved parliaments, she takes a new tack.

“OK, I think that when we think about the context in which we’re in, where there’s active demonisation of being politically active, you’ve got the Prevent agenda [the government counter-terrorism programme to combat radicalisation], which is, like, actually hunting down students that choose to be politicised, particularly those who are racialised. We’re at a time where things like the Prevent agenda quite explicitly target black and Muslim activists. I’m seeing the realities of that, which is a turn away from taking political action. There is a total fear that they’re going to be deported, and this is what they go home to. Their parents will tell them, ‘You’re going to end up in Guantánamo. You could end up deported to a homeland you’re linked to, but have never even visited. You could end up having all your doors shut. You could end up being thrown out of university.’ These are very real questions that people have to think about.”

Whether or not this is true, it still fails to explain why more than 80% of NUS members don’t even turn out to vote. But I am struck by the scale of influence Bouattia accords to Prevent. Even if it frightened every single Muslim student away from politics, that would still only account for about 5% of NUS members.

“Oh, but you see the Prevent agenda is not just simply targeting Muslims – as though an incredibly racist policy could even distinguish between the Muslims and non-Muslims. One black man with a beard and another, they all become Muslims, so, by extension, any racialised person becomes a target. And actually the agenda is targeting far more than that. It’s a wider-reaching attack on politicised people and groups, anti-austerity activists, anti‑fracking activists, there’s a whole host of people that this extends to now.” Does she think Prevent’s intention was always to target all forms of activism, and to use radicalisation as a convenient excuse to conceal grander ambitions?

“Yes, I do believe that. I do believe that is has incredibly racist intentions, and intentions to crack down on people’s civil liberties. I do believe that.”

If she could abolish Prevent today, what would she do to combat radicalisation? “I would propose looking at the state of our foreign policy. And we’ve cut every space of constructive engagement, like youth centres. Cost of living’s increased, employment prospects are low, access to university is becoming ever harder. Even if people have accessed higher education, they’ve accumulated vast amounts of debt. And have they had a positive experience, being forced to engage with content that doesn’t relate to them, and perhaps is psychologically destructive? When we look at the incredibly Eurocentric curriculum, where people don’t see themselves in what they’re studying, and can’t relate to it, and feel that their European counterparts hit the ground running, they can’t see themselves advancing in the subjects.”

Bouattia says she has no ambitions for a political career, and sees her future in academia instead, which may be for the best, as I’m not sure how her anti-radicalisation strategy would go down on the doorstep. But if her politics would strike most British voters as extreme, they make more sense from the perspective of her own life experience.

Until the age of seven, she had a blissfully happy childhood in Algeria, but in the civil war academics became targets for abduction and murder, and the family fled to Birmingham. Taken in by Christian ministries, they found themselves in an alien world of brussels sprouts and a language Bouattia could not speak. She was fluent within two months, but remained desperately homesick, and consoled herself by drawing the Algerian map all over everything at school.

After studying a degree in culture studies she read an MA in postcolonial theory at the University of Birmingham, before becoming the NUS black students’ officer and then president. “But I think the sense of displacement is still with me. When Daily Mail articles are written, and quite racist, Islamophobic trolls come after you over social media, you’re very much reminded that people don’t feel you belong here. My parents took us out to access a better space of education, to be better equipped to go back to Algeria and give back.” Her election was widely celebrated in Algeria, and she goes on: “That made me more at ease with all that I do here, and how it feeds into the bigger picture, because at times when you’re so intricately involved in something locally, you start to wonder how does this fit into the bigger picture? How does this fit into the wider struggle?”

I ask if she worries that the antisemitism row has diminished her power as president. “Not necessarily. Not so far,” is a surprising answer, but she says that she thinks the controversy raised the profile of the NUS, and provided new platforms for her “to put out our vision of the future”.

Does she think she has ever said anything antisemitic? “I don’t. I don’t, and if my words were misinterpreted, then in future I’ll take the time to make sure I break them down and explain them.” Are there any comments she has made in the past that she would not now say?” She shakes her head. “It’s not about not saying it again, it’s about just breaking them down to explain what I meant.”

Students at Cardiff university prote against a planned lecture by Germaine Greer in 2015. Photograph: Gareth Phillips/Gareth Phillips for the Guardian

Some Jewish critics still maintain that she is antisemitic. Others argue that anti-Zionism is antisemitic. Bouattia maintains that they have misunderstood and misinterpreted her, and are wrong. I think this would be a perfectly defensible position for her to take if only she applied the same principle when student unions invoke the NUS’s no-platform policy. I want to talk to her about Germaine Greer, who Cardiff University students’ union demanded be no platformed last year, owing to her views on transsexuals. This is when the argument begins.

Most graduates of my age, I say, are appalled by a campus culture that no-platforms a speaker for holding opinions some students might find offensive. If someone cannot bear to be exposed to challenging views at university, what are they doing there? “It’s a case of seeing those ideas as spreading forms of hatred.” Does she think that Greer spreads hatred? “I support the union’s right to no-platform her. To hold transphobic views spreads hate.”

But Greer has repeatedly stated that she does not hate transsexuals, is not critical of their choices, and couldn’t care less if anyone wants to reassign their gender. She simply does not share the belief that a man who decides to live as a woman was female all along, or that surgical procedures can wholly reassign gender.

Now a woman sitting at what is known as the liberation desk in the office, who works on campaigns for LGBT, black, female and disabled students, gets involved. What Greer thinks she means is not the point, she says; the trans community consider her a “fascist”, the NUS respects their view, ergo Greer is a fascist.

But Bouattia doesn’t accept that just because some Jewish people consider her antisemitic, that means she is. Why, then, does she not accord this principle to anyone else? “This is the NUS policy,” she repeats. It’s like talking to a speaking clock. I suggest that when a policy ends up branding Greer a fascist, it’s time for an urgent policy review. Universities exist as places where people engage with ideas, and learn; they are not meant to be sealed panic rooms, are they? “This is the NUS policy.”

While I get more and more worked up, Bouattia just smiles placidly. I ask her to call her parents the next day and ask them if they, as senior academics, agree that Greer is too dangerous to be allowed to talk to students. When I email Bouattia later in the week, she doesn’t respond, and the press officer tells me she is out of the country and uncontactable.

I get the impression that Bouattia is more fragile than the persona she presents. But perhaps, if one’s own academic parents have been targets for assassination, the concept of safety on campus holds something different to mine.