Race hate website man jailed

A SINGAPOREAN man behind a defunct website that published madeup articles stirring hatred against foreigners in the city-state was yesterday jailed for eight months for sedition.

Prosecutors had pushed for a strong deterrent sentence on Yang Kaiheng, owner of website The Real Singapore (TRS), saying the articles were designed to provoke hatred against foreigners in Singapore.

Yang, 27, had earlier denied the charges but pleaded guilty later to six charges of sowing discord between residents and foreigners in a series of articles, three of which prosecutors said contained “blatant falsehoods designed to insert prominent xenophobic” references.

One article falsely said a Filipino family had instigated a fracas at a Hindu festival last year.

Another article claimed that a Chinese woman had made her grandson urinate into a bottle while on a metro train.

The articles were designed to inflame hatred against Filipino, mainland Chinese and Indian nationals working in labour-starved Singapore, prosecutors said. They called Yang a “calculating opportunist, who realised that by generating a groundswell of resentment towards foreigners, he could attract readers to [his] website and generate advertising revenue”.

Yang’s Australian wife, Ai Takagi, who wrote or edited the articles, was sentenced in March to 10 months in jail, also for sedition.

Takagi’s sentence is the stiffest yet imposed for sedition in the citystate, which clamps down hard on any activity seen as promoting racial and class hatred. – AFP