Dear atheists, secularists, humanists and freethinkers,
First of all, we wanted to say a big "thank you" to all members of the society. The support we have received in the past two weeks from you, the National Secular Society, Student Rights, One Law for All, and especially the British Humanist Association and the National Federation of Atheist, Humanist and Secular Student Societies has been amazing.
Many of you have written us personal emails and contacted the SU, expressing their concern about how the society is being treated. Your support has been tremendously helpful in getting us through the last two weeks, so thank you for that!
Now the most important thing is that you stay in touch with us and help us to protect the society and its members from unreasonable requests and defamation.
A lot of things have happened in the past two weeks. In order to keep you informed about what has been going on, we have made a chronological summary of the recent events:
January 19th
Contacted by the LSESU and invited to “a meeting to discuss some of the issues around recent postings on facebook etc.”
Friday 20th
In the meeting, the LSESU advanced that we were not providing a safe space for Muslim students to interact, as the pictures on our Facebook page were offending Muslims. Nevertheless, the SU told us expressly and repeatedly that we were not being accused of Islamophobia.
Monday 23rd
We received an email from the SU “officially informing you that you must take the cartoons down.”
This statement was sent to us just minutes before the Beaver went to print, so we did get a chance to respond to this request publicly.
In response to these email and statement, we were asking the SU under what regulations of the SU Constitution or bye-laws they were bringing these charges against us, what the 'the offensive nature of the content' was, and what threshold they use to make that determination.
January 24th
We sent an email to Nabeel Moosa, the president of the LSESU Islamic Society regarding her statement that we “have sought to marginalise a large proportion of the LSE student body while also causing harm to the welfare of Muslim students who have been subject to a hateful campaign against their beliefs and liberties.”
We asked her to “back up the allegations with evidence”, and if unable to do so, “withdraw her statements publicly so that they do not constitute slander”.
Until now, we have not heard back from Nabeel.
In the Beaver, there were comments reported to have been made that "Alex Peters-Day (LSESU General Secretary) condemned.....the calls from the LSE SU ASH Society to publish cartoons of the prophet Muhammad" and "there will be repercussions for their actions from both the SU and the LSE itself, but warned the LSE may take time investigating the matter" and Lukas Slothuus' (LSESU Community and Welfare Officer) reference to the "Islamophobic" actions of the ASH society in calling for a depiction of the Prophet Muhammad."
We wrote to Alex Peters-Day and Lukas Slothuus, making clear that we have not "called for" publication of the cartoons – members of the Facebook group have published them on our Facebook page. Also, we made clear that calling our actions “Islamophobic” alleges that we had engaged in any kind of anti-Muslim bigotry – which we have not, and never would allow any member of our Facebook page to do.
"Alex and Lukas denied having made these comments. Nonetheless, they refused at that time to write to the Beaver in order to retract or change the comments."
We also contacted the LSE directorate and they have confirmed to us that we are not being investigated by the LSE, but that this is considered a matter internal to the SU.
January 25th
In response to this, the SU replied:
“When activity comes under the banner of the Student’s Union it should be open to all members........ The images which are posted there present a clear barrier to entry for a large number of students at LSE....... the cartoons has caused not only reflects negatively on the LSE SU brand but more importantly has caused significance offence to our members.
There are no clear guidelines on what is and isn’t always offensive......Because of this it is down to the LSE SU exec to decide in times like this what stance and action to take.”
The SU asked also asked us to change the name of our Facebook group so that the cartoons posted there "do not only reflect negatively on the LSE SU brand".
January 26th
Our response to that was:
“Disagreeing and even being offended by some of the contents of a social space do not represent a barrier to entry.........We welcome the fact that you acknowledge that the ASH society is not in breach of any bye-laws or regulations of the LSESU.
We also temporarily changed the Facebook Group’s name to “Atheists, Secularist and Humanists at the LSE”. We pointed out that this was in no way an admission of guilt or that the SU had the right to ask us that given the lack of arguments they presented to argue their case. Rather, we complied temporarily with this request purely as a gesture of good will in order to maintain a good climate of discussion between the LSESU ASH and the LSESU. We made clear that once we considered this issue resolved, we would change our name back.
The motion “No to racism – no to Islamophobia!”
Two individuals proposed in a motion that the SU combat “the hatred or fear of Islam, Muslims, or Islamic culture, and the stereotyping, demonisation or harassment of Muslims, or attacking the Qur’an as a manual of hatred”.
In response to that, we rallied to re-propose the motion so that it protects the Muslim community, but not their religion:
“Believers (Muslims) are worthy of our protection, while beliefs (Islam) are worthy of our scrutiny, criticism and scepticism. This is a university, and it would be nothing without the free exchange of ideas.”
The LSESU passed its first blasphemy laws with the votes of the far left and Islamic society. However, we managed to garner a total of 179 votes against this motion (339 for, 24 undecided), which is a victory by itself.
January 30th
We asked the SU to “cite the relevant literature that shows conclusively that “Muslim students cannot look at pictures of the prophet Muhammad”.” No answers received.
The LSESU Socialist Workers Society posted the posters on campus that included the following statement:
"The Atheist Society's efforts to publish inflammatory "satirical" cartoons in a deliberate attempt to offend Muslims serve to highlight a festering undercurrent of racism.”
In response to this, we filed a complaint against the LSESU SWS society:
“After being portrayed in this manner by an LSESU society, we no longer feel the university to be a safe space for the society and our members. We feel that we are being targeted and marginalized. We must emphasize the gravity of the matter as these actions make us the target of defamation and disrepute.”
January 31st
The Beaver publishes a statement that Alex Peters-Day and Lukas Sloothuus had been misquoted in the last issue of the newspaper. The statement said that Lukas had “simply condemned Islamophobia on a wider scale”, without mentioning the LSESU ASH society and that Alex Peters-Day had said that “the SU will take a ‘zero-tolerance” stance over Islamophobia and antisemitism.”
Alex Peters-Day has until now failed to provide us with the recordings of the UGM, which would enable us to establish what exactly has been said about the society.
February 1st
We asked for a formal response from the LSE SU detailing their request and the applicable laws pertaining to such a request (we are yet to see any bye law which could be considered relevant to this issue). We said that should we not receive this letter, stating explicitly the effective and binding bye-laws on which your request has been based, the prefix will be reinstated on the Facebook page.
We received the official letter from the SU to either remove the cartoons or remove the “LSESU” prefix from our Facebook group. They recognised our “human right” to post the cartoons but stressed that it is not allowed on the LSE campus.
In consideration of this answer, we have now changed the name of the Facebook group back to “LSESU Atheist, Secularist and Humanist Society”.
During the two weeks of the on-going investigation, the LSESU has not been able to justify their request to remove the ‘Jesus and Mo’ cartoons from our website and their request to change the name of our Facebook group with reference to the LSESU constitution or bye-laws.
The SU answered our letter, but was still unable to state explicitly the effective and binding bye-laws on which their request has been based. Therefore, we are back to our old name, and will stay with our name until the SU can prove to us that we are in violation of any of their regulations or bye-laws.
February 2nd
Given that Nabeel Moosa was not able to justify her libellous and inflammatory remarks about the members of our society (see January 24th), we filed a complaint against her with the SU.
Although the libellous and derogatory posters of the LSESU SWS (see January 30th) were posted right in front of SU office, the SU did not act to have these posters removed. We sent the SU another email urging them to take action in order to protect the reputation of our society and its members.
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Commenting on the recent events surrounding our society, Elizabeth Fraser (LSESU ASH secretary) and Marshall Palmer (LSESU ASH PR officer) said:
"Unbeknownst to LSESU ASH, a number of students complained to the LSE SU about the cartoons on the grounds that they were offensive. The first the Society heard about this was when officers of the LSESU mentioned ‘an incident of Islamophobia’ at a Union General Meeting (UGM). After some protest, this allegation was retracted, but the LSE SU has disassociated itself with the Society’s Facebook page because of LSE SU ASH’s refusal to take down the ‘offending’ images.
So far so bad, but then came another blow to freedom of speech. A motion was proposed titled ‘No to Islamophobia’ and while on the surface this seems like just the kind of rally against religious hatred that we should fully endorse, the text of the motion was highly problematic. Islamophobia was in part defined as ‘a form of racism expressed through the hatred or fear of Islam… (and) attacking the Qur’an as a manual of hatred.’ The rest of the motion was sound in its efforts to protect Muslims from harassment and demonisation, but these specific lines amount to introducing blasphemy laws on campus, and restricting what one can say about the ideas of Islam. Two members of LSE SU ASH (including Marshall, one of the authors) offered a spirited and eloquent defence of our freedom of expression, and freedom to criticise ideas, but the motion passed.
Returning to the cartoon controversy, we can find no appropriate reason for banning the expression of the LSE SU ASH. This brings us to our second point. Even if LSE SU ASH has a right to publish an image of Mohammed, should it do so, and should it rely on continued LSE SU affiliation? Immediately the accusations against the ASH Society of hate speech must be dismissed. The cartoon in question (which may be seen on our Facebook page), does not call for the incitement of violence against Muslims; it does not make any claim about the moral status of a Muslim and it does not attempt to act as a legitimate interpretation of the Islam.
A key criticism of the ‘No to Islamophobia’ motion, which relates also to the publication of the cartoon, was that while people are worthy of our protection, beliefs ought to be subject to scrutiny and scepticism. This applies to religious belief also. A line is crossed of course when one proceeds to incite violence against people because of their beliefs, but so long as we refrain from doing this, there are no grounds on which to curb how we chose to express our beliefs or ridicule others’.
We firmly believe that the LSESU has no right to ban freedom of expression and if anything is deserving of ridicule, satire, and contempt religion is a sure candidate. If we are to restrict our action by what might offend others a dangerous precedent would be set. To quote the late Christopher Hitchens’ response to the Danish Cartoon controversy: ‘we cannot possibly adjust enough to please the fanatics, and it is degrading to make the attempt.’
Please help your committee to defend the ASH society against unreasonable requests and defamation.
Send SU General Secretary Alex Peters-Day an email expressing your opinion about how the society and its members are being treated by the SU and other SU members: su.generalsecretary@lse.ac.uk
Thank you for your continued support!
Your LSESU ASH society committee