Singapore Under Threat
A Straits Times article of November 28th 2023 reported on a speech given by the Home Minister K. Shanmugam, in which he warned that “anti-Singapore sentiments” were on the rise in regional social media, and that parallels were being drawn between Singapore’s purportedly being on “Tanah Melayu” (Malay Land) and Israel’s occupation of Palestine. The minister claimed there were online calls for “rocket” and “bomb” attacks in Singapore. He went on to say: “Global terrorist groups such as Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, as well as their supporters, have also used the current conflict to renew their calls for attacks… the threat is there, and it has gotten higher”. He further noted that on October 7th, Hamas had managed with “low-tech equipment” to catch “Israel, a high-tech society, completely by surprise”. He concluded that “an attack, like what happened to Israel, could happen anywhere, including here, and there will be people who will be encouraged to do copycat attacks.” The minister’s associations of Tanah Melayu with Palestine, of Palestinian resistance with global terror, and of Singapore with Israel were all unfortunate and can hardly be conducive to his country’s peace and prosperity.
Gaza
Exactly 8 months after the Home Minister gave his warning, we were told by Channel News Asia (CNA) of “an uptick in anti-Singapore rhetoric on social media from regional extremist elements”. What had changed between November 28th 2023 and July 28th 2024? The Lancet Magazine estimated that 186,000 people, around 8% of the Gazan population, overwhelmingly women and children, had been wiped out by Israel’s “high-tech” war on a defenseless “low-tech” civilian population. However, the actual number of dead cannot be known because so many corpses are incinerated, shredded to pieces, buried under rubble or “vaporized” under 2,000 lb. bombs, not to mention the innumerable dead from starvation, lack of medical care and the spread of communicable disease.
In the words of the UN relief agency UNRWA on July 26th, “more than 2 million people in Gaza remain trapped in an endless nightmare of death and destruction on a staggering scale. Their lives are dominated by fear, thirst, hunger, disease, dehumanization, lack of basic sanitation, and repeated displacement. It’s a relentless and often hourly struggle, day in and day out. Famine remains a risk, including in southern Gaza. Communicable diseases are on the rise. 625,000 deeply traumatized children are out of school. Prior to October 7th, half of them attended UNRWA schools. With this war coming so soon after the COVID-19 pandemic, we risk depriving an entire generation of girls and boys of formal education – sowing the seeds of hatred, resentment, and future conflict.”
Before the war, most children in Gaza received their education in 288 UNRWA-run schools. After the war began, the schools were converted into shelters for displaced people, but over 80% of them have been “severely damaged or destroyed” by bombing, so they can serve neither as shelters now nor as schools when the war finally ends. Nowhere in Gaza is safe. White flags, UN banners, co-ordination with the Israeli authorities are all useless for protecting civilians from death and maiming delivered by the full spectrum of Israel’s “precision” weaponry. The “Israeli Defense Forces” (IDF) routinely bomb, shell and strafe hospitals, schools, orphanages, mosques, cemeteries, bakeries, desalination plants, UN shelters, refugee camps and “safe zones” from F-35 fighter jets, Apache helicopters “quadcopter” drones and Merkava tanks. Israeli remote missile operators practice their skills on ambulance convoys, families piled atop donkey carts and children playing hide-and-seek on the beach or foosball in a school yard. Snipers test their marksmanship by aiming between the eyes of children. Men who aren’t killed are taken to Israeli prisons where they are beaten for falling asleep, kicked, waterboarded, sodomized by electric rod and handcuffed so tightly and for so long that their limbs require amputation.
To be seen as helping the Palestinians, Singapore has executed a few food “airdrops”, though this practice has been widely shunned because it is so amateurish and performative – the large, heavy boxes are dropped haphazardly and they can land in the sea, fall into the wrong hands or even crash on people and kill them. The food so delivered is never enough. Worst of all, the practice encourages Israel’s use of starvation as a weapon of war, and paints the famine in Gaza as some kind of natural disaster rather than a war crime, or as if the people in need were trapped in a forest gully with no road access, as opposed to the fact that supply trucks are lined up ready to reach them, but Israel does not let them through.
When Singapore congratulates itself on its virtue-signaling exercises while framing Israel’s yearlong annihilation of Gaza as “retaliation” against a single day of attack by Hamas, when it persists in maintaining a “balanced” approach to the most “massive human rights crisis and humanitarian disaster” in living memory, can one really be surprised that “anti-Singapore sentiment” is on the rise?
Propaganda as News
A newspaper is ideally a kind of universal classroom for adults seeking information to help them navigate the real world. But the Straits Times has always served as a megaphone for our political leaders, and hence it is a medium of indoctrination rather than information. In the ‘70s when I was a boy, the paper delivered the image of a sanitized society under the ontological guidance of the perfectly enlightened political party. To get real local news my father would read the Chinese papers, and for international news he relied on the International Herald Tribune. Today with the internationalization of Singapore, the Straits Times features a greater intertwinement of international news with local news, but the content is still guided by the goal of thought shaping, only now we are faithfully wedded to the Americans and hence there is a seamless blending of PAP narratives with US propaganda.
Singapore has assimilated not just the substance, but the form of Western indoctrination, which plies its trade in the subliminal part of consciousness. The November 28th article, which simply repeats the main points of the minister’s speech, first implants a resonance between “anti-Singapore sentiments” and anti-Israel sentiments, following which numerous other “parallels” between Israel and Singapore are adduced so that the reader may accept the final conclusion of the speech, which is that a “copycat attack” to October 7th could take place in Singapore. But there is a subtext to this conclusion, which is that we must expect certain people to feel the same way about Singapore that Palestinians feel about Israel, because Singapore long ago made a decision to “follow in the footsteps of Israel”, and it isn’t about to change course anytime soon. Our government wants you to register this esoteric reality deep in your unconscious, even as your conscious mind hears our leaders paying lip service to impartiality.
Tanah Melayu and Palestine
On July 19th, 2024, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) declared that Israel’s occupation of Palestine was illegal, and that Israel's legislation and measures violate the international prohibition on racial segregation and apartheid. The ICJ ordered Israel to end its occupation, dismantle its settlements, provide full reparations to the Palestinian victims and facilitate the return of displaced people. Incredibly, the Home Minister would have us believe that there are Malaysian nationalists who view Singapore in the same way that Palestinians view their Israeli oppressors.
Contrary to the minister’s suggestion, “Singapore is Tanah Melayu” is not a meme, it was rather an off-the-cuff remark made by former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, from which he has since assiduously distanced himself. The phrase never gained any traction, and it has only aroused bemusement or derision amongst Mahathir’s countrymen, not “anti-Singaporean sentiment”.
Hamas and Al-Qaeda/ISIS
Al-Qaeda and its successors, the Islamic State in the Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), the Islamic State in Syra (ISIS) etc. are “internationalist” militant organizations which espouse a global struggle against “apostasy”, where fundamentalist Sunni Islam is orthodoxy. Of the two organizations, the Islamic State is the more extreme in its views and wantonly violent in its acts. It attacks not only Westerners and Shi’a Muslims, but even Sunni Muslims practicing non-fundamentalist acts such as worshipping at the shrines of Islamic saints. Al-Qaeda and ISIS are known for celebrating the killing of civilians. Although there is no legal definition of “terrorist”, these organizations probably deserve to be branded as such.
By contrast, Hamas is a national liberation organization composed of a political party that governs Gaza, and a military wing known as the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades (IQB). The latter’s raison d’être is armed resistance against illegal military occupation, and the legitimacy of its cause is enshrined in UN General Assembly Resolution 45/130, which “reaffirms the legitimacy of the struggle of peoples for independence, territorial integrity, national unity and liberation from colonial domination, apartheid and foreign occupation by all available means, including armed struggle.”
Hamas has never conducted or advocated armed conflict outside Palestine. Though it espouses Islamic principles, it does not consider Jews, Christians or adherents of any faith its enemy. It does not celebrate the killing of civilians. But the Singaporean public will be excused for thinking that Hamas is a terrorist organization. According to Mr. Shanmugam, “Singapore has always supported Israel’s right to exist, whereas Hamas wants to wipe Israel off the map.”
Unfortunately, the minister has made himself a conduit of Israeli propaganda which seeks to demonize Hamas by the fiction that the destruction of Israel is enshrined in the “Hamas Charter”. The truth is that Hamas dropped the destruction of Israel from its 2006 Manifesto after winning the Palestinian legislative elections. In 2017, Hamas further modified its position in its “Document of General Principles and Policies”, which supported a Palestinian state based upon its 1967 borders, and emphasized that Hamas’ fight was not with the Jewish people, but with “the Zionist Project” of illegal occupation. The 1967 borders include both the state of Israel and the state of Palestine, and recognition of them is incompatible with “wiping Israel off the map”. However, it must be noted that this was Hamas’ position pre-October 7th. No one should be surprised if it has hardened after Israel embarked on its ongoing campaign of slaughtering civilians, made Gaza unfit for life for those it did not kill, and assassinated Hamas’ moderate political leader Ismail Haniyeh.
Al-Qaeda and Islamic State have never carried out attacks against Israel, nor have they ever provided military, financial or ideological support to Hamas. Palestinian rights have no place in their goal of a fundamentalist Caliphate. They are opposed to Hamas’ non-global agenda and its failure to institute Shari’a law in Gaza. Hamas for its part has eradicated all radical Islamist factions from Gaza and views Al-Qaeda and Islamic State as threats to itself. These facts are so well known that when Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu declared after October 7th that “Hamas is ISIS”, even western mainstream media rejected his statement. Netanyahu’s strategic purpose in labeling Hamas as “terrorist” was simply to justify the rejection of diplomacy. According to the Likud party ethos which dominates Israeli society, you can’t negotiate with terrorists, because all they want to do is kill Jews, and by the way most Palestinians in Gaza are supporters of terrorism “because they voted for Hamas”. There is thus no choice but to “erase the memory of this organization from the face of the earth” along with all its supporters and “human shields”.
When Mr Shanmugam repeats the myth that Hamas wants to “wipe Israel off the map”, his message is that even though Singapore, like the entire world outside of the West, does not officially view Hamas as a “terrorist” organization, yet Hamas is de facto a terrorist organization whose existence is not legitimate. Hence he is fitting himself hand in glove with the Likud narrative that there is no such thing as lawful resistance or a legitimate government in Gaza, that all UN Security Council ceasefire resolutions and ICJ orders directed at Israel are invalid because they would have Israel deal with a terrorist organization, that Israel is justified in assassinating Hamas civilian leaders and peace talk negotiators, in routinely massacring crowds of children and women to kill a single Hamas leader who is allegedly among them, and in its systematic destruction of the civilian infrastructure needed to support life in Gaza for the sheer reason that it is “Hamas-run”. I would put it to the learned minister that the problem is not that Hamas wants to wipe Israel off the map, but that Israel is actually wiping Gaza off the map.
October 7th
But what about October 7th? According to Mr. Shanmugam, “We must still condemn the terrorist attacks by Hamas on 7 October.” Once again, I fear the minister has not thought through what he is saying, and has contented himself with repeating the ritualistic condemnation of Hamas that all Western ambassadors to the UN are obliged to recite as the preamble to their statements before the endless meetings held to address Israel’s atrocities.
It is true that some 1,100 Israelis were killed on October 7th, including both civilians and soldiers. But October 7th was not a terrorist attack. Leaving aside Hamas’ strategic goal of putting the Palestinian question back on the table after it was forgotten and on the verge of being permanently extinguished under Saudi Arabia’s imminent accession to Donald Trump’s signature Abraham Accords, the October 7th attack had two tactical objectives. The 1st was to destroy manpower and matériel of Israel’s Gaza Division, including its surveillance installations encircling the Gaza Strip. The 2nd was to capture military prisoners to use as bargaining chips for the release of over 5,000 Palestinian captives in West Bank prisons. Of these imprisoned Palestinians, many are children held under indefinite “administrative detention”, i.e. without charge, and they are held under conditions of universal deprivation and abuse, including denial of healthcare leading to deaths in captivity. Palestinian prisoners released in the November 2023 prisoner swap have all emerged in poor condition, with women reporting being beaten and left without food, water or blankets. Their Israeli counterparts all emerged in “good condition”, though some reported suffering deprivation, but not abuse. But it is also a bit odd for an Israeli captive to complain about being kept in a tunnel when tunnels are the only safe place from indiscriminate bombardment by the IDF, or about lack of food when Israel has blockaded the Rafah crossing from Egypt, prohibited UN agencies from delivering food into northern Gaza and scared away all other food charities by its targeted killing of aid workers, when food trucks coming from the West Bank are attacked and set on fire by fanatical settlers, and when starvation is used as a weapon of war that does not distinguish between Palestinian and Israeli hostage.
Hamas’s plan to take military prisoners did not meet expectations because most of Israel’s Gaza Division had been redeployed north ahead of a planned incursion into the West Bank. Consequently, Hamas resorted to taking civilian hostages. It was not in Hamas’ interest to kill them, and in most cases when a Hamas bullet killed an Israeli civilian, the latter was either armed or killed in crossfire between Hamas and the IDF. There is the fact that October 7th was chaotic. Many other armed resistance groups were involved along with Hamas. When these militias breached Gaza’s “prison wall”, they were also followed by masses of enraged and undisciplined civilians. It was almost certainly non-Hamas actors who killed the many unfortunate Thai victims on that day.
“Chaos” was also the excuse given by the IDF for their implementation of the Hannibal Protocol, which calls for the extermination of any Israeli about to be taken hostage. On October 7th, the protocol included shooting Hellfire missiles at any vehicles headed towards Gaza, and tank shelling houses containing Hamas fighters with their Israeli captives. Pictures of incinerated vehicles and demolished houses for which Hamas has been blamed show levels of destructiveness that the resistance groups’ light weapons were unlikely to have inflicted. As Israel has wiped clean all forensic evidence of October 7th, an independent examination of the day’s events will never be possible. But we may ask ourselves why Hamas would blow up a car or destroy a house which contained both Hamas fighters and valuable hostages. And why wouldn’t the IDF do so once the Hannibal Protocol had been invoked?
Israeli Psychological Operations and Cognitive Warfare
In November 2023, Elon Musk was accused of putting out antisemitic content on X. To make amends, he paid a visit first to the Auschwitz museum in Poland, and then to Israel where he was treated to a graphic “documentary film” about October 7th. He has since become a fervid supporter of the Jewish State. The film has also been viewed by various Western journalists, all of whom state that its content is harrowing. Elon Musk and these journalists have since dispatched themselves to tell the world that Hamas is truly barbaric, with the only problem being that they are barred by non-disclosure agreement from revealing what it is they have seen that makes Hamas barbaric.
When you watch an on-site Israeli “news” clip describing an alleged Hamas or Hezbollah atrocity on YouTube, you will likely see a female narrator telling the story in flawless American together with a staged witness in a scene cleared of all evidence. You will not hear any Arabic voices. If a subject looks like he is speaking Arabic, his voice will be muted and replaced by narration. Comments will be turned off. And with neither YouTube nor its parent Alphabet showing any competing versions of the events, the Israeli narrative will be hermetically sealed.
Israel accused Hamas of employing “systematic sexual violence” on October 7th, but denied a UN request to conduct its own investigation. To date, not a single 1st person testimony of a rape victim exists. A New York Times article with the sensational title “Screams Without Words” which merely repeated the Israeli claims has been thoroughly debunked by a torrent of studies and articles which can be found even on Google, and the New York Times article has only damaged the paper’s reputation because of its obvious attempt to attenuate Israel’s war crimes by a fictive context of retaliation against Hamas’ depravity.
Israel has refused to allow any independent body to conduct a forensic investigation into October 7th. After that date, only foreign journalists “embedded” with the IDF have been allowed into Gaza, while Israel systematically kills local Palestinian journalists. But since Israel made the mistake on April 1st of allowing foreign reporters to film the Al-Shifa Hospital complex it had just destroyed, along with its mass graves full of mutilated bodies and the corpses of executed patients and medical staff, even “embedded” reporters are no longer to be seen. Meanwhile, US mainstream media outlets agree to have their stories about Gaza vetted by the IDF before releasing them, while CNA has long stopped reporting on Gaza, as if nothing newsworthy is happening there.
The problem with all of this is not that Israel engages in massive censorship and complex psychological operations through its control of the Western media ecosystem. In the words of Sun Tzu, “the soldier does not shun deception” (兵不厌诈). The problem is when members of our government are either so innocent that they don’t understand what is going on, or they are knowing allies in Israel’s cognitive warfare. And when our state-owned media is even more diligent in whitewashing Israel’s crimes than CNN and the BBC, how is it that our leaders still claim that Singaporeans are “the champions of multiracial harmony”?
The Duty to Prevent Genocide
American think tank pundits never tire of boasting about how in the event of war with China, the US would cripple its enemy’s logistics through a “blockade” of the Malacca Straits with the help of its “reliable partners”, i.e. Singapore. These experts never worry about the legality of such an act, but law-abiding states need to concern themselves with this question.
On January 26th 2024, the ICJ ruled: “There is a real and imminent risk of irreparable prejudice to the plausible rights invoked by South Africa, as specified by the Court”, “..namely the right of the Palestinians in Gaza to be protected from acts of genocide.” Because of the structure of South Africa’s complaint, this was the Court’s way of saying that Israel was likely committing genocide. The Court added that “members of the United Nations Human Rights Council voiced alarm over discernibly genocidal and dehumanising rhetoric coming from senior Israeli government officials”, and also that there was a “sharp increase in racist hate speech and dehumanisation directed at Palestinians since 7 October”. In other words, in addition to Israel’s commission of plausibly genocidal acts, there was widespread expression of the intent to commit genocide. It is the presence of genocidal acts together with genocidal intent that constitutes the crime of genocide.
Pursuant to its opinion, the Court released a number of “provisional measures” to prevent the crime of genocide, ordering Israel to stop killing Palestinians, to grant Palestinians access to food, water, shelter and medical aid etc. The Court further ordered Israel to submit a report within one month proving its compliance with the measures, as well as to preserve all evidence related to allegations of genocide.
On May 24th 2024, after Israel had not merely failed to comply with all of the interim measures of January 26th, but expanded its offensive into the Rafah Strip where it had earlier instructed civilians to shelter, the Court wrote: “in conformity with its obligations under the Genocide Convention, Israel must immediately halt its military offensive, and any other action in the Rafah Governorate which may inflict on the Palestinian group in Gaza conditions of life that could bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.” The Court further ordered Israel to allow UN-mandated fact-finding missions into Gaza to investigate allegations of genocide. Naturally, Israel did not dignify the court orders with a response, and to this day continues to unleash the most advanced weaponry known to man upon a defenseless, besieged and continually displaced citizenry. Homelessness, starvation, malnutrition and disease in the midst of a destroyed healthcare system are the order of the day in Gaza. The crippling archaic epidemic of polio has resurfaced, and Israel’s response to this disease spread by contaminated drinking water has been to blow up fresh water wells in Gaza while inoculating its own soldiers.
But it is not just Israel that is in breach of its obligation to prevent genocide. Article 1 of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (the Genocide Convention) enjoins all states to “prevent and to punish” the crime of genocide. Is there a single UN member state that is living up to its obligations under Article 1? Arguably there is one, in the sense that the Ansarullah movement, which the West knows as “the Houthis”, is the de facto government of Yemen.
If you Google search “Why are the Houthis blockading the Red Sea”, you will be treated to a plethora of articles and studies stating that they are doing so “in support of the militant group, Hamas”, that they are seeking “revenge” for Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, that they are trying to bolster their position as champions of the Palestinian cause”, etc. These commentaries seem to offer a diversity of analysis of the Red Sea blockade, but they all boil down to that mainstay of Western journalism - the substitution of a patronizing mindreading exercise for fact. In the case of Ansarullah, they paint a picture of a 3rd World actor trying to upset the international order in a bid to break free of its own marginality, but which is acting too big for its britches and needs to be taught a lesson by the people in charge. Anyone interested in facts, however, will note that Ansarullah has imposed a targeted blockade on Red Sea shipping with links to Israel, and this act objectively interrupts Israel’s logistics supply chain and hinders Israel’s ability to launch military operations, just as a US blockade would do to China if the 2 countries went to war. The important difference is that the “Houthis” are in their unique way upholding Article 1 of the Genocide Convention, whereas the US would be acting outside international law.
On January 12th 2024, a military coalition spearheaded by the US and UK began launching air strikes on Yemen under the banner of an operation that would come to be known as “Prosperity Guardian”. After these attacks began, Ansarullah announced that it would also be attacking US- and UK- flagged vessels in the open seas alongside Yemen. As of July 2024, it was said that “months of intense Western naval operations have failed to secure the Red Sea” as “the US Navy faces its most intense combat since World War II.” The Ansarullah blockade has led to a 79.6% drop in dry bulk carriers going through the Suez Canal, and the southern Israeli port of Eilat is at a standstill. The US and UK have launched dozens of bombing missions against Yemen, and while they have failed to degrade the Houthis’ ability to blockade the Red Sea, they have succeeded in killing a lot of civilians. While the exact number of such casualties is unknown, a single day of strikes on May 30th claimed 16 Yemeni civilian lives, while the entire Ansarullah blockade has killed a total of 3 non-combatant seamen.
Even before its failure was proven, Prosperity Guardian did not have a huge fanbase. Reliable US allies such as Spain, Italy and France refused to participate. The 2 countries most directly affected by Red Sea traffic disruption, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, didn’t want anything to do with it. Australia has refused US requests to send warships, and most countries which joined the coalition decline to reveal the nature of their contributions. Half of the coalition members do not advertise their participation and are anonymous.
184 of the world’s 195 nations do not wish to be publicly associated with “Prosperity Guardian”. Possibly they are put off by the US and UK’s known propensity for senseless violence, or by the unseemly braggadocio of an operation masterminded by yet another ex-arms industry lobbyist of a US Secretary of Defense with lots of experience sitting in high-tech command centers directing the killing of massive numbers of Iraqis and Afghanis. Certainly, the Saudis were not eager to repeat their 8-yearlong military failure against the Houthis. Above all, it is not great optics to be seen participating in bombing assaults on a homegrown resistance group that has dedicated itself to impeding a genocide.
Singapore is 1 of only 10 countries to have proudly advertised its participation in this failed high-tech military venture in support of Israel’s annihilation of Gaza. Of course we are not sending fighter jets or warships to launch missiles, but we are still gung-ho on protecting “key sea lines of communication” from being “threatened by unlawful acts by non-state actors or terrorist groups”, implying that the inconvenience of Western vessels having to sail around the Cape of Good Hope is worse than a genocide.
“Foreign Arguments” are the Problem
Rising “anti-Singapore sentiments” do not reflect aggressive Malaysian nationalism, Muslim partisanship or terrorist incitement. They exist because “we don’t want to import foreign arguments into Singapore”. To the astonished frustration of those with a conscience, our ministers persist in framing the Palestine question as a dispute between two parties which they should work out amongst themselves, which is to say we expect the most hapless and poorly defended people on earth to secure a fair deal from the world’s most heavily armed “high-tech” power, one which has a 57-year record of bulldozing their homes, stealing their land and water, killing or detaining their children at will, and carpet bombing them every few years when the Palestinian “weeds” grow too high.
Our leaders condone the myth that Hamas initiated the violence on October 7th, even though the UN Secretary General pointed out in the early aftermath of the October 7th attacks that “they did not happen in a vacuum”. And though we call for “humanitarian ceasefire” when a particularly spectacular piece of Israeli brutality explodes on social media, we equivocate our position by falsely portraying Hamas as an existential threat to Israel, suggesting that Israel can go back on the rampage once a certain level of humanitarian needs has been met, only we hope Israel doesn’t go “too far”.
In stark contrast to Singapore’s prevarications, Indonesia’s Minister for Foreign Affairs, H.E. Retno L.P. Marsudi in December 2023 called Gaza “a gross violation of human rights”. Nine months later, few would disagree with her. Our other neighboring country’s prime minister does not hesitate to call out the real problem in Palestine, which is Israel’s conquest, dispossession, detention and wanton killing of Palestinians, abetted by the hypocrisy of the world’s biggest superpower which urges restraint while sending an unending flow of weapons to Israel to keep killing Palestinians. Even the UK representative to the UN was “appalled” by Israel’s air strike on the Al-Tabaeen School in Gaza which killed over 80 civilians performing Fajr Morning Prayers, as well as by Israel’s 17 air strikes on schools in July alone. He also accused Israel of committing “war crimes” in its “systemic mistreatment of detainees and the intentional starvation of civilians”. At the same meeting, the representative from Japan said: “We strongly condemn the deplorable remarks” of Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, in which he advocated the deliberate starvation of 2 million Gazans.
At a time when Israel’s daily massacres and maimings of sheltering women and children are earning it the condemnation of its staunchest allies, Singapore’s silence is deafening. When our neighboring country’s foreign minister characterizes the annihilation of Gaza as a “matter that strikes at our fragile humanity”, while our own insists that Singapore distance itself from “foreign arguments”, the threat to Singapore stems not from external forces or “radicalised” individuals, but because we are one of the few voices without a conscience in the world when it comes to Israel.
Gaza has destroyed not only Palestinian lives, but also America’s moral credentials. Tragically, Singapore seems determined to follow its mentor into the abyss, not only because of our loyalty to the world’s greatest superpower, but also because of our deep sympathies with the world’s sole terrorist state.
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