Written by Sherkan Sultan
“It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong,” Voltaire wrote. One might add, though spared the ordeal of a university risk-assessment committee, that it is fatal to be right when a university is desperate to appear neutral.
On 16 October, the London School of Economics hosted a closed-door event titled A Quest for Justice – October 7 and Beyond. The name has the bureaucratic fragrance of something already embalmed. The gathering is based on the Dinah Project Report, which purports to document sexual violence committed by Hamas on 7 October, in part funded by the British government. A document that would struggle to meet even undergraduate research standards. The lead author on the report, Halperin-Kaddari, couldn’t substantiate any of the cited cases or a verified case from over 1000 witnesses’ testimonies.
LSE’s own Middle East Centre declined to host it, and many academics from Gender Studies who were approached to chair or serve as discussants also refused. When these scholars declined involvement, management pressed the Centre to relent, then shifted the event to the School’s Communications team. Senior management repeatedly encouraged the Centre to reconsider despite staff objections about the report’s credibility and optics. No academic department or research unit was associated with it.
The Manufacture of a Moral Alibi
The report’s core claims face serious evidentiary hurdles. The UN Commission of Inquiry said it could not verify several specific allegations and found no evidence of orders, noting that Israel’s non-cooperation impeded verification. (United Nations) The UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women later added that no independent mechanism had established sexual or gender-based violence against Israelis as a systematic tool of war or genocide. (UNOG Newsroom) Even coverage of the report’s launch by Reuters noted that key assertions could not be independently verified. (Reuters)
The gap between claim and proof has been bridged, not by evidence, but by repetition and emotional theatre. There is nothing novel here. The coloniser has always sexualised his enemy. The myth of the “savage rapist” justified lynchings in the American South. Fanon saw it clearly: “The colonist fabricates the colonised like a monster he must slay.”
Here, the fabrication is institutional. It borrows the vocabulary of human rights whilst hollowing it out. The Dinah Project does not study alleged sexual violence; it weaponises it. It is a sermon meant to reassure the bombers that they are chivalrous.
When Neutrality Becomes Complicity
Orwell taught that political language exists to make “lies sound truthful and murder respectable.”
Picture the meeting: administrators murmuring about “balance” while ignoring every scholar qualified to judge the evidence. They speak the grammar of procedure: minutes, memos, reputational risk, where morality becomes a rounding error. A school that advertises a “space for all perspectives” quietly moved this one off the calendar and into a communications back room; that is not neutrality but stage-management. An LSE spokesperson said this was an academic-led event. It is incorrect to suggest it was initiated by any “administrators”. Likewise, in line with the statement above, LSE has a legal duty to enable events that academics wish to put on. The expression of views that are unpopular, controversial, provocative or cause offence does not, if lawful, constitute grounds for the refusal or cancellation of an event or an invited speaker. The spokesperson also said that this event was organised by a group of academics; it was not hosted by the School’s Communications team. Nor was it moved to a “communications back room”.
Across the sector, the choreography is now familiar: statements on “community” and “respect”, a gestural meeting or two, then legal notices, fencing, and a possession order. Oxford had arrests and fences. Cambridge now has court-drawn protest maps. UCL won summary possession; Birmingham, Nottingham, and Queen Mary followed suit, the last clearing tents with bailiffs. The result is not scholarly scrutiny but administrative erasure: the protest disappears, the investments remain, and the university congratulates itself on neutrality. Many of 30 plus campus encampments were removed in the summer of 2024, many through court orders, while numerous Palestine-related events were cancelled or postponed “for safety reasons” under the new IHRA-aligned policies.
Since adopting the IHRA definition of antisemitism, universities have treated discussions of Zionism as reputational hazards, a policy that chills scholarship more effectively than censorship ever could. “Safety” and “balance” have become the vocabulary of avoidance.
The Weaponised Language of Feminism
Particularly obscene is how this report hijacks feminist language, even as well-documented evidence shows Israeli forces employing sexual violence. The Dinah Project flips that script, casting the occupier as protector and the occupied as predator. Empire has long borrowed feminism when it suited. The pattern repeats: feminism as flag, not conviction. Susan Sontag warned that compassion without action withers; this is worse, compassion repurposed as cover fire.
It is bitterly ironic that the department most fluent in feminist analysis refused to lend its name to this distortion.
The Closed Door and the Bureaucracy of Fear
What drives LSE’s persistence is not malice but timidity – a dangerous vice. The modern university administrator defends image, not ideas. The institution has become a nervous system wired to fear controversy. Founded by the Webbs and George Bernard Shaw to champion reason and equality, the School now hides behind the sophistries they once lampooned. Popper, who lectured here, warned that “those who promise us paradise on earth never produced anything but a hell.” Today, LSE’s managers labour in a smaller hell, where dialogue and academic freedom are anaesthetised into respectability.
From Rhodesia House marches to anti-apartheid divestment, LSE’s conscience once faced outward; today it faces Legal and Comms. A university that once defined dissent now consults branding guidelines before exercising it. According to UNESCO, more than 600,000 students in Gaza have been left without functioning schools or universities.
Sanitation, Not Censorship
Hosting that event was not an act of openness; it was an act of sanitation deferred. The right to speak nonsense does not include the right to do so under institutional endorsement. However, an LSE spokesperson stated that, as per its policy, LSE does not “endorse” speakers or views at our events, and the above statement is incorrect. Karl Popper warned that tolerance, if extended to those who despise reason itself, becomes a weapon against the very freedom it protects. A university cannot be neutral between knowledge and propaganda; to host what is known to be false is not tolerance but dereliction.
“Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them… As long as we can counter them by rational argument, suppression would be unwise; but we must claim the right to resist when they denounce all argument and teach their followers to answer with fists or pistols.”
– Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945), Vol. 1, p. 581
LSE scholars have themselves written about “scholasticide” and the techniques of genocide denial. Gaza’s Islamic University, Al-Azhar University and the University of Palestine were among those levelled by airstrikes, memorials to what UNESCO has described as an assault on knowledge itself. Having published such work, the institution now rehearses those very techniques under its own crest. A university’s duty is not to power but to reason, that stubborn Enlightenment conviction that evidence must outweigh ideology, however inconvenient. When a university refuses that duty, it becomes an advertising agency with better stationery.
The Fire Next Door
According to the Palestinian Ministry of Health, more than 67,000 people have been killed in Gaza since 2023. Every university in the territory has suffered catastrophic damage; entire faculties have been erased in the name of self-defence, now memorials to what UNESCO calls an attack on knowledge itself. If this sounds bombastic, remember that ideas, like ordnance, have trajectories. When universities sanctify falsehood, the fallout lands far from campus. Propaganda does not stay in lecture halls; it travels to parliaments, to courts, to battlefields.
The martyrs of free thought, from Giordano Bruno to Shireen Abu Akleh, the Palestinian journalist killed in 2022, knew that truth demands its defenders. The Dinah Project will fade, as do all such cheap documents. What remains to be seen is whether LSE chooses to stand among the defenders of truth or among its temporary landlords. If none of its stewards will risk a career to say so, the students must – the unreasonable ones who still believe the university exists not to flatter power but to confront it. Because if neutrality becomes the new virtue, the next atrocity may march in wearing a university crest.
Reply from LSE:
“Freedom of academic enquiry, thought, and speech underpins everything we do at LSE. Our Code of Practice on Free Speech is designed to protect and promote lawful freedom of expression on campus, including the right to peacefully protest.”
“This is enshrined in UK law by the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act 2023, to which LSE has an obligation to adhere.”
“The Act includes a legal duty to secure and promote freedom of speech within the law as well as academic freedom for faculty. If an academic wants to host an event, showcase research, or enable other forms of engagement for the free and frank exchange of views lawfully, we must seek to assist them to the best of our ability while ensuring our health and safety responsibilities.”
“A range of events happen at LSE each day, covering many viewpoints and positions, including on controversial current issues. LSE does not, however, endorse speakers or views at our events. As outlined on every LSE event listing online: ‘LSE holds a wide range of events, covering many of the most controversial issues of the day, and speakers at our events may express views that cause offence. The views expressed by speakers at LSE events do not reflect the position or views of the London School of Economics and Political Science.’”
“The event to which the author refers was organised by a group of academics from different departments. It was not hosted by LSE Communications nor was it moved into a back room. It was a ticketed event and took place in a lecture theatre in the CKK building. It was chaired by an LSE academic and featured a Q&A session with the audience after the main lecture.”
“As an institution, LSE does not take a formal position on political or international matters. Instead, we aim to provide a platform to enable discussions and critical debates, within the law, where the views of all parties are treated with respect. This includes the expression of views that are unpopular, provocative, or cause upset, as long as they are not unlawful.”
