Singapore Bloggers Charged Under Sedition Act

ChannelNewsAsia is reporting that for the first time in at least 10 years Singapore has invoked the sedition act and charged two local bloggers for posting racist comments on an online forum. From the article: 'Said Singaporean blogger Benjamin Lee (Mr Miyagi):" A lot of them will be looking at their blogs and wondering if they made any legally seditious remarks. I think because of the way this will be played up, it's negative publicity for the Singapore blogging community."'

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some background

[circletimessquare]

for non-southeast asian slashdotters:

singapore is an outpost of chinese in a malay region

it is a country independent of malaysia simply because the chinese there feared dilution of their power by malays

there is a history of friction between the chinese merchant class and the local malay population throughout the region, actually very similar to the resentment europeans had for the jewish merchant class that led to so much racially motivated nastiness there for centuries

malays and filipinos to this day complain of how they are treated by the chinese in singapore, who they say view them as little more than domestic servants or coolies

in the 1960s, under the guise of fighting communism, indonesians slaughtered thousands simply for having chinese ancestry... and confiscated their businesses

so maybe some of you who are very idealistically attached to the concept of free speech, without any mitigating conditions, perhaps you can at least understand why singapore would be so interested on clamping down on hate speech in its territory: it's not a big country, and it must remain at peace with its huge malay neighbors, at whom this hate speech is directed by some really stupid chinese bigotted bloggers