Criticism of Reading AHS Society & the pineapple, Mohammed
The first I heard of the Reading University AHS Society Pineapple related fiasco was when the statement they released was posted by a Facebook friend. I was a little bit outraged that something of this nature had happened again – to summarise, for those who don’t know, when the Reading University Atheist, Humanist, Secularist Student Society (RAHS) displayed a pineapple with a name badge on it that said Mohammed at a student fayre some people complained, and the Reading University Students Union (RUSU) ordered RAHS to remove the pineapple from display. When they refused they were told to leave, and later escorted away by security staff.
Out of curiousity I contacted the Student Union at Reading University to see if they really thought it was appropriate to place the religious freedom of some students above that of others, among other questions. In response to my email James Flectcher, the RUSU President told me
RUSU is dedicated to promoting an environment in which all students feel welcome and included in all of our activities, while at the same time being committed to our members maintaining a culture of free speech. Our Equal Opportunities Policy and our Behavioural Policy (which all clubs and societies agree to be bound by), state that RUSU will create a culture based on the principles of fairness, respect and of valuing difference. The events did not comply with these ideals and we took the action we felt necessary to maintain the culture that we exist to promote.
I didn’t feel this completely justified what happened, and I felt that the removal of RAHS didn’t help in ‘maintaining a culture of free speech‘. I then listened to an interview on The Pod Delusion Podcast with Sean Oakley, the president of RAHS, about what happened. In the interview Oakley talks about how the society were trying to promote an upcoming debate they were hosting called ‘Should we respect religion?‘, and how the pineapple was displayed in an attempt to draw attention to freedoms being restricted. In the interview he used the case of Gillian Gibbons as an example. Gibbons was arrested in 2007, interrogated and then held in prison in Sudan for allowing the pupils in her class to name a teddy Mohammed. She was found guilty of “insulting religion” and was sentenced to 15 days’ imprisonment and deportation while protesters called for her to be executed. Gibbons was later pardoned.
In the Pod Delusion interview Oakley also spoke of how he felt that the decision of RUSU was justified because of the behaviour policy they had in place for the event, but how he (Oakley) took issue with the policy because of the restrictions it enacted on people.
For the RAHS to display a pineapple with a name badge that read Mohammed after signing a behaviour policy suggests to me that they could only have known what sort of reaction it would provoke and I think they went ahead despite this, to highlight the absurdity of such a reaction from religious students. They weren’t disappointed by the crowd either, because those who took offense automatically attempted to censor the RAHS representatives rather than thinking about their offense rationally, or entering into a civil debate.
The displaying of the pineapple seems to have been a provocative move in order to easily gain attention. The displaying of the pineapple feels more like a PR stunt than unanticipated censorship, even though Sean Oakley denies it being a PR stunt on the RAHS facebook page. There’s nothing inherently wrong with attention grabbing stunts like this if they have the intended outcome – in this instance drawing attention to a debate focusing on the problem of censorship in the name of religious freedoms (in favour of the religious).
However, I do wonder if groups setting themselves up to offend Muslims has become the go-to action of those who want to highlight the already easily demonstrable problem of censorship and blasphemy laws, and whether that might just be a bit lazy.
Can you imagine how effective a campaign drawing attention to cases like Gibbons’ would have been if it had fallen within the policies enacted by the Reading University Student Union? Not only would it have highlighted a very important issue that we should be vocal about, but it would have meant that those who opposed what RAHS were saying wouldn’t have been able to censor them so easily. Instead the society have put themselves in a position where they can be portrayed as offensive rebels who hate the religious. PR Fail.
The pertinent questions are:
why should naming a pineapple Mohammed “piss off” Muslims? And why should we care if it does?
To equate a pineapple with a “prophet” is so irrational and surreal that no sane person could take it seriously.
No religionist has the right not to be offended – especially by such a harmless (to a sane person), if rather daft little student jape.
We have become so conditioned by Islamist violent reaction to any criticism of Islam (even in the shape of a pineapple) that we think of the consequences first. Of course, it’s all helped along by the PC crowd including the RUSU.
This is, of course, the purpose of the violent reaction: to reduce us to a state of dhimmified fear and eventually subjugate us to the Ummah.
We do not hesitate to examine, analyse, criticise, lampoon or satirise Christianity but different rules apply to Islam. That is gross hypocrisy. If we fail to treat Islam in the same way out of fear add cowardice to hypocrisy.
No. That’s an entirely different point. Also, the irrationality of the response from the Muslim students was briefly touched upon in the artice. I am fully aware of the ridiculousness of it. That doesn’t make it any less of a piss poor effort.
This doesn’t look like a PR fail to me. Drawing attention to unfair rules is a legitimate objective, and breaking them is a good way to do it. That doesn’t amount to ‘setting yourself up to piss off Muslims’.
Few of us need reminding of the eagerness of some muslims to be offended, and stunts like these won’t make any difference to that situation. But I think what RAHS did is rather clever, perhaps intentionally, perhaps not, in a way that Everybody Draw Mohammed Day, for instance, is not.
Drawing an unflattering cartoon of the prophet is clearly insulting to Islam but I can’t imagine all that many muslims will be up in arms over a pineapple. Some observers might say the act is provocative, but it’s the sort of gently mocking Pythonesque silliness that stops short of challenging sincere religious belief, yet provokes the authorities into displaying their utterly craven and ridiculous instinct to censor.
I think there’s at least 2 elements about mockery of Muhammad that someone might conceivably protest about. 1. Muslims getting overupset about mockery of their prophet 2. Attempts to silence such mockery whether simply by demanding, or by law, intimidation, Student Union policy etc.
I think protesting about 1 is a bit strange (there are related issues such as violence during riots, vandalism, but I didn’t list everything). Protesting about 2 seems most reasonable.
The problem with the pineapple protest (or stunt) is that it seems to an observer to blur the two motivations. Maybe it’s actually very hard to design a protest that has a clear distinction between them. You might protest against 2 by breaking such laws or defying such attempts or demands to be silent. But you might also protest agaist 1 by means of a protest that deliberately upsets Muslims.
Forgive me if this is quite a long reply, but the article deserves one.
First of all, where I’m coming from; I’m the Secretary of RAHS, and the purchaser of the pineapple (£1 at the Co-op, unfortunately not Fairtrade). So I know the situation fairly well, and I have an unrivalled insight into the thought processes of at least one of the people behind it, i.e. me.
The first point to make is that we definitely did not display the pineapple “to gain attention in the easiest way possible” or “to piss off Muslims”. We displayed the pineapple to provoke thought, discussion, and debate on the topics of liberty, blasphemy, and free speech.
Did we know that this would cause offence? Well, quite frankly, no. When the idea came up, I thought that no reasonable person could possibly take offence at a fruit. Either I’m unreasonable or the people who complained are; I’ll leave it up to you to decide. But the target of the display, the ‘victim’ if you will, was the kind of people who think that locking someone up for naming a teddy bear is a valid course of action. It was the sort of people who killed the US Ambassador in Libya, it was the sort of people who firebombed Charlie Hebdo and sent death threats to Jyllands-Posten.
The pineapple was displayed as an analogy- to the teddy bear, to the newspapers, to the UCL/LSE cartoon. It was there to make people think about free speech and overreactions. It was not there as an attack or insult to Islam or any student at the Fayre, and they were free not to engage with the display at all. (It’s worth mentioning that the text on the label reading “Mohammed” was about 1cm high, and the stall was clearly labelled, right below that, as “Atheist, Humanist, and Secularist Society” in text 4 or 5cm high.)
Then, everything changed when the (fire nation attacked) students’ union demanded that the pineapple be removed. Suddenly, we went from having a discussion piece to being the subject of censorship. (And remember, we *did not know* there were objections to the pineapple until the SU demanded its removal- nobody complained to us until the SU had already made its demands).
And everything really did change. We didn’t plan to be kicked out; we didn’t plan to be censored. We planned to display a pineapple and talk to people about it. If it was a ‘stunt’ then it was a stunt in the same way that the Tory soc offering port wine was a stunt, in the same way that the full-size Dalek at the Sci-Fi soc was a stunt. In other words, it was a routine, commonplace bit of self-promotion, for the Freshers’ Fayre alone.
Why didn’t we plan to be kicked out? Because it is, if you’ll pardon my Klatchian, fucking ridiculous to be kicked out because of causing offence, for a whole host of reasons. I’ll limit myself to two, though: firstly, the right to free speech trumps the ‘right’ not to be offended any day, and secondly, even if the union does have a ban on offence, it’s never been applied. Homophobes can’t force the exclusion of the LGBT society, as offensive as they might find it; I can’t (and wouldn’t want to) force the exclusion of the Tory society or the members of the Armed Forces who were strolling around in uniform all day.
So we certainly had no reason to expect that we’d be banned for displaying an object that was not intended to be offensive. I personally think that Sean (Oakley) said a lot of rubbish in the Pod Delusion interview, and the most important thing he got wrong was that RUSU were not justified in kicking us out. Why? Firstly, because a ban on offence is not a ‘just’ policy; it is censorship, plain and simple. Secondly, because RUSU’s ban on offence is not enforced against anybody but RAHS.
I want to take issue in particular with your last four paragraphs. We did not “know what sort or reaction it would provoke”. We didn’t do this immediately after signing the behavioural policy, either; that was signed way back in March, and was only seen by Sean. It wasn’t even available on the RUSU website at the time of the Freshers’ Fayre, something for which we haven’t yet heard a good explanation.
I can’t force you to believe me, but I can say quite simply; you are mistaken to think that “[we] went ahead despite this”. What can I say? We weren’t expecting a strong reaction from religious students. We weren’t expecting RUSU to act to enforce Islamic beliefs upon non-Islamic students. We, quite simply, weren’t expecting a Pineapple Affair.
Were we “disappointed by the crowd”? I wasn’t- I was scared. Intimidated. I wanted rational discussion and peaceful debate. Having five or six people complaining at you, while RUSU stood by and shouted, isn’t nice. Being excluded from an event run by an organisation that is supposed to represent and support me, and facilitate societies for groups of students with common beliefs and interests, was disappointing.
I can’t deny I was pleased at the debate on free speech that resulted, though. The national media coverage was both scary and exciting, but basically irrelevant; it’s the debate on campus that I’m really pleased to see. To a certain extent, that’s what we hoped for, but because of the pineapple, not because of the exclusion.
Fundamentally, I think that’s where your mistake comes from. You seem to be assuming that we engineered this whole thing; that we planned a provocative stunt to get us banned and get media attention. On the contrary, we planned a small display to get people talking, and it all went way beyond our wildest dreams.
Finally, I would like to hear you suggest a better alternative. No, seriously, I would. I’ve heard a lot of people say “you could have done this better”, but nobody saying how. I can’t think of a simpler way of publicly raising the blasphemy issue than by blaspheming. And if we’d foreseen it causing offence, and decided not to do it, would we have had the same impact? I think not.
I want to ask you what the last campaign at Reading that you heard about was, before the pineapple. I will be genuinely amazed if you can name even one. So yes, I can “imagine how effective a campaign … would have been if it had fallen within the policies enacted by RUSU”. It would barely have been heard about on campus, let alone outside the university. In contrast, this has gone around the world- and that’s without even *deliberately* breaking the rules.
I apologise for the wall of text. But I think I’ve said most of what needs to be said. (The Society has already said some of it in our *other* statement, available at blasphemouspineapple.com). To summarise; we didn’t plan a PR stunt of being kicked out of the Fayre; we planned a display on a stall. It caught us entirely by surprise, and the expulsion, followed by the media attention, followed by the fact that RUSU have now told us they are going to be taking disciplinary action against us, are a nuisance at least as much as they are an opportunity.
We didn’t plan to piss of Muslims, but so what if we did? Free speech is more important anyway; the right to criticise, to ridicule, to challenge beliefs is a fundamental part of a progressive society.
And as for it being a PR fail? Well, apart from you, and an Indonesian newspaper, I’ve not seen a single critical media report. The only real negativity has been from RUSU, who have themselves received complaints from around the world.
I’d say we’re winning this one so far. And because I believe in free expression, and I believe in the right to believe what you want but not to force those believe on others, I’m willing to continue fighting RUSU censorship, and to stand up for the right to freely name fruit.
I totally accept your explanation of your motivations for the pineapple prop. It sounds like you put some care into nuancing the discussion piece in order to isolate the variables, so to speak, yet keep it interesting. The more nuanced a thing like this is, the better for highlighting distinct questions and stimulating discussion. My congratulations for doing so!
There’s some nuanced points of principle to be said about the right to deliberately offend (I accept you didn’t intend to offend in this case). My thoughts are:
Deliberately, directly insulting someone without provocation (rather than polite criticism) should always be a right, though generally should be frowned upon.
Mocking a historical figure or idea, knowing that it will upset people is not only a right but shouldn’t even be frowned upon (unless you are intending to upset them for no beneficial purpose).
What if you are at someone else’s venue or event? They are in their rights to ask you to take your mockery elsewhere in both cases, their right trumping yours since it’s their event. But in the 2nd case they should be frowned upon, especially so if the event is one for free expression of ideas and interests. And with a SU event, even the right of the organisers to decide what goes on is blurred with that of the members.
Bravo, Tim Rouse. If I had been wearing a hat when I finished reading your comment, I’d have thrown it in the air.
If you didn’t think this would cause offence then that was a bit naive. The problem lays with those who were offended and not the pineapple and I’m not claiming otherwise, but the fact that some Muslims have been offended by cartoons and teddy bears in the past should be an indication that it’s likely that anything of this nature is more likely to cause a negative reaction than a positive one. Religious people seem to look for anything that they can use to cry ‘religious persecution!’. Yes it’s ridiculous for people to be offended by a piece of fruit with a name badge, but that’s the reality we live in. I haven’t stated anywhere in my blog post that atheists shouldn’t be offensive, but actually the opposite.
I also wasn’t stating that your group were intending to ‘piss off Muslims’, just that it feels as though there have been a lot of similar incidents recently, and I don’t know if I’m being optimistic here, but I thought that’d give people a hint at what’s probably going to happen if they start making physical representations of Mohammed like that. My impression, gained from the president of your society, was that despite the policy being signed the display went ahead. That’s why I felt the group were aware of the reaction it would gain.
If Sean Oakley talked crap on the Pod Delusion interview and created a wrong impression then I’d suggest the society reconsiders their spokesperson situation, and if Oakley was the only one who saw the behavioural policy which might have indicated at what sort of things would justify complains from attendees, I’d suggest maybe reviewing the way people are pepped for events the society attends so everyone’s aware… I can’t imagine being a representative for a group at an event and not knowing what my society had agreed to.
I also think you need to remember that I wrote above that the RUSU weren’t justified in throwing you out. I wrote:
“I didn’t feel this completely justified what happened, and I felt that the removal of RAHS didn’t help in ‘maintaining a culture of free speech‘.”
I also didn’t state you were disappointed by the crowd, just that they didn’t disappoint at proving your point – which IS a good thing for the dialogue being created. My opinion of what happened, from the word of your societies president may I add, was that the Pineapple display went ahead despite him signing the behaviour policy because the dialogue about censorship was wanted, and that’s why you ‘went ahead despite this’. I didn’t write that as a negative criticism of that decision, so please read what I wrote in context.
I’m also wouldn’t be bothered if I were the only person in the world who felt this way about what happened.
Haha Hayley – I hope Tim’s explanation has embarrassed you into never writing such shit again. BTW if you want a world-class anti-theist’s view of free speech YouTube Hitchens in Canada. Then ask yourself why don’t we censor the hate-filled, homophobic, genocide-inciting and pro-slavery passages in the Bible? I find them very offensive.
The reason we don’t censor ‘the hate-filled, homophobic, genocide-inciting and pro-slavery passages in the Bible’ is because, you know, to defend free speech and then censor those we don’t like just because we find them offensive would be ridiculous.
I think the only reason you’d raise such a point though is because you haven’t read this post properly at all, and you think I’ve somehow suggested atheists should censor themselves for fear of offending others. If that’s what you think I’ve written I’d suggest you take more time to read things before you comment upon them. Especially as in the post I specifically say:
‘There’s nothing inherently wrong with attention grabbing stunts like this…’
“However, one has to wonder if setting yourself up to piss off Muslims has become the go-to action of those who want to highlight the already easily demonstrable problem of censorship and blasphemy laws, and whether that might just be a bit lazy.”
I don’t think anyone seriously thinks that “pissing off Muslims” is done lightly or “lazily”. (I’m reading Nick Cohen’s “You Can’t Read This Book” at the moment, so my thinking may be skewed towards his arguments in the first chapter.)
He uses Salman Rushdie’s experience to show that not enough people were prepared to stand up to Islamists and their aggression, taking the stance that Rushdie was foolish to write what he did and knew what the consequences might be. This, instead of calling out state-sanctioned calls for his assassination. As a result some 25 years on, many in the UK are not prepared (or at least think very hard) about doing something to irk Islamists as the consequences are not slight – from the least of feeling that you might be on the same sideas some anti-Muslim EDL type rightwing nutjobs, to much more sinister and dangerous outcomes.
I look forward to the day when it does become the go-to action of the “lazy”, because it’ll probably coincide with a time when the reaction from Muslims is meh.
People from the AHS group have said they didn’t think it would offend people, which I think is naive. Maybe my use of the word lazy was wrong.