Here’s the deal on speech laws in Singapore

DEAR Buzzfeed writer, so you wrote about Amos Yee. Thanks. It was enlightening.

I’m used to Western media writing about Singapore, and Asia as a whole, as a bizarre and dangerous place.

The thing is – I expected more from you, Buzzfeed. You’re the alternative media. You are the alternative to the writers who use the same old tired cliches.

We have all the contradictions and inconsistencies that you have, only in different amounts. Like jelly in a mould, our democracy has grown to fit the shape of its container. It’s a container shaped by a history in which people died because a few spoke carelessly. Our jelly doesn’t look like yours. I hope that’s okay with you.

That’s why we have laws that stop people from using speech to stir the pot, for personal ambition, for a sincere cause, or for kicks, or because whatever.

You tried to figure out which of these angles Amos Yee was coming from. You got confused. See? You’re more like us than you think. Moan about the MRT and we wouldn’t be able to tell you apart from the average Singaporean.

The thing to remember, Buzzfeed, is that speech laws here cut both ways: The religious conservative right, as well as lefty Internet atheists like Yee, are equally constrained. The law doesn’t care why a punch was thrown; all it cares about is that it was thrown, and someone was hit.

Buzzfeed, I get that you are left-leaning, and present a levelheaded alternative to right-wing sites, so I guess it’s in your DNA that when you think “Singapore”, your fingers reflexively spell “draconian”, as if the ghost of George Orwell rushed into you and pushed you onto the battlements to defend freedom against the armies of darkness.

That’s your programming, and there’s nothing wrong with that. We have ours too.

By the way, I love how you hint that Amos Yee is like a cloud – everyone looks at him and sees something different. Mostly, they see what they want to see.

That’s true when you look at his American supporters. A couple of them have something in common: a deep streak of Islamophobia.

How can I put this to you in terms you might understand? Well, to do as Yee did would be like me standing on a lawn in small-town Texas with a burning American flag declaring that Elvis is terrible and the best cars come from Germany, Japan and South Korea.

And your final comment, that Yee will be “infamous” should he be forced to come back to Singapore. He would be socially ostracised, you imply, as if Singapore were a Pixar movie and he was that oddball artistic irritating ant and we would all go out of our way to tsk-tsk at him to drop his artsy ways and be a good ant.

But if we are all grey, drab workers living in an authoritarian state, wouldn’t that tsk- ing be a free expression of our speech? You shouldn’t be denying us that.

You know what’s more likely to happen? We’d simply ignore him. — The Straits Times/Asia News Network