Singapore's Strategic Defamation of @ustadzabdulsomadofficial

Assalamu alaikum warahmatullahi wa barakatu everyone. This is Shahid Bolson. Welcome to

the Middle Nation. It seems like Singapore can't stop declaring how right and justified they were to deny entry to Indonesian scholar Abdul Samad. And with every new declaration, Abdul Samad gets more and more radical. By next week, I suppose, they will reveal that Abdul Samad is the head of ISIS. The latest government sycophant to applaud Singapore's Islamophobia is Bilvir Singh, who is the deputy head of the department of political science at the National University of Singapore, which is a bit like being the head of the agricultural sciences department at the University of Antarctica.

Singh has spent a considerable portion of his career doing what many Sikhs in the West have been doing since 09/11, namely being extra Islamophobic and alarmist about Muslims just to ensure that they will not be discriminated against themselves because people are confused by the turbans. Fifteen years ago, Singh wrote a book called the Talibanization of Southeast Asia, and he must really miss the heyday of anti Muslim propaganda in the West after nine eleven, a time during which a book that absurd could actually be published. Muslims in Southeast Asia are known the world over to be by far the most moderate, the most easygoing, the most relaxed Muslims on the planet. They're the least prone to even having an unfriendly interpretation of Islam, much less a violently extremist one. Lee Kuan Yew would have attributed this chilled out attitude to the tropical climate and the easy access to coconuts.

Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore are not Afghanistan or Chechnya, and the Malays are not Pashtuns. But Islamophobia has been a lucrative career for mediocre academics for at least the last twenty years. And Singh picked up the signal of the Singapore government loud and clear that they want to depict Islam as a radical and divisive force in this region. Region. So he has answered the call.

Singh starts gaslighting right from the opening sentence of his opinion piece, referring to Singapore as an ethnic Chinese majority state located in what is perceived as a Malay Southeast Asian world. So Singapore's Chinese majority is just a natural and permanent fact, while the region being Malay is just a perception. Just for clarity, the Malay Muslim population in the ASEAN region represents the single largest cohesive demographic group in ASEAN. They are the indigenous people. While maintaining a Chinese majority in Singapore has always been a manufactured outcome of policy, increasingly immigration policy.

He then goes on to describe Abu Samad as a radical Indonesian Muslim preacher, as if that is not a perception but a fact. There's actually nothing radical about anything that Abu Samad preaches. He's a scholar of the which is one of the four main accepted schools of jurisprudence in Islam and the main madhab followed in Southeast Asia. And his opinions are consistent with the opinions of his madhab. But that's actually the point, isn't it?

The whole point is to portray mainstream Muslim beliefs as radical. So he throws in adjectives here and there like literalist, simplistic, and extreme as if Bilvir Singh with his international relations degree is in a position or is qualified to critique the erudition of an Islamic scholar. He doesn't even wanna call Abdul Samad a scholar, just a preacher. And his extensive education in Islam is branded as Islamist credentials rather than as scholarship in the religion because the term Islamist has connotations of a political agenda. And he says in fact that Abdul Samad is very political and he evidences this by the fact that Abdul Samad endorsed a particular candidate in the twenty nineteen presidential election in Indonesia.

But now this is conspicuously contradictory because later on in his piece, he claims that Abdul Samad is hostile to democracy. Now I'm not sure how you're supposed to reconcile being opposed to democracy on one hand, but endorsing a presidential candidate for a democratic election on the other hand. But it doesn't have to make any sense. It just has to set off all the right standard alarm bells. He then goes on to talk about how Abdul Samad urged people to boycott Starbucks because of Starbucks support for LGBTQ issues, overlooking the fact that Singapore banned foreign companies like Starbucks from supporting LGBTQ events in Singapore.

And, of course, he brings up the issue of suicide bombing, but he does it even more dishonestly than the government spokesman have done it in the past. Because instead of saying that Abdul Samad regards them as martyrdom operations within the context of the Israeli Palestinian conflict, Bilvir Singh says that he supports suicide bombings especially in the case of Palestinians against Israelis. Now I've clarified this issue a number of times before in other videos as has Abdul Samad himself. He simply stated the opinion of Yusuf al Qaradawi, which is also shared by many other prominent scholars that those who undertake those actions in Palestine should be regarded as martyrs, not as people who simply wanted to kill themselves. This again is an opinion that is shared by many scholars, and it is very specific to the Palestinian situation and is explicitly not applicable as a general opinion.

Then because he wants to look like he has well informed insight, he says that Abu Samad's views are aligned with the views of Hezbo Tahrir because that's a group that he's heard of, and he knows that most of his audience probably won't have heard of them, so he appears to have deep knowledge. He also knows that Hezbo Tahrir is a group that has been banned in Indonesia, so he probably hopes that by linking Abdul Samad with that group, he might prompt the Indonesian government to take legal action against Abdul Samad. But, of course, there is no link. But all Singh has actually done here is to expose the fact that he knows almost nothing about Hezbo Tahir except the name if he actually believes that Abdul Samad's views are inspired by Hezbo Tahir and not by his own Madhab and his extensive education. He claims without proof that Abdul Samad believes that all non Muslims and non Malays should be expelled from Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore, and that he supports the creation of an ethnocentric state, which is really ironic given the Chinese supremacist policies of Singapore and the racial eugenicist views and opinions of Lee Kuan Yew.

And in fact, while we're on the subject of irony, I'm not really sure how you can pretend to be offended by Abdul Samad's alleged disdain for democracy when you come from a one party dictatorship whose founder frankly stated on many occasions that western style democracy cannot be applied in Asia and that Singapore will be democratic when possible, but autocratic when necessary. Indeed, Singh goes on later to say that Indonesia might be constrained in being able to persecute Abdul Samad because Indonesia is a democracy, which he appears to feel is a handicap that Singapore does not suffer from. He then goes on to ramble a bit about how, for some baffling reason, Abdul Samad regards the Chinese majority citizens of Singapore as Chinese and not as indigenous people, which is obviously both accurate ethnically and historically, but it's just something that no one is supposed to acknowledge or talk about. You know, the whole tone of this opinion piece is actually conspicuously Israeli, as if Singapore is the promised land of the Chinese that has to be secured against the threat posed to it by the indigenous people. This is really the imaginary scenario that he's trying to put forward here, as if Singapore is somehow in danger, not from suicide attacks maybe, but from the possibility that 270,000,000 Indonesians will urinate on them.

Apparently, this is something that keeps Bilvir Singh up at night.

That itself can create a sense of insecurity for us.

Now, yes, I can make fun of this buffoon and his moronic propaganda because, yes, it should be ridiculed. But let me reiterate again why this matters. The fact is that Abdul Samad is not a radical, he's not an extremist, and he's not dangerous. But Singapore has decided to characterize him this way and by extension to characterize the Muslims in this region that way. This is a strategic decision intended to create a negative image of Muslims in Southeast Asia at a particular moment in time when The United States is pivoting its focus towards the ASEAN region.

America wants Indonesia and Malaysia to sever ties with China and to advance and support US policy goals, which are largely not in the interests of these two countries. America does not want Indonesia and Malaysia to maintain a non aligned stance, and they will definitely be looking for any tactics that can potentially coerce Malaysia and Indonesia into capitulation. And they will be looking for any pretext to take a hostile posture towards Indonesia and Malaysia to get what they want. What better method than to accuse the Muslim majority countries in this region of extremism? No matter how far fetched it may be, Muslim countries have bent over backwards for the last twenty years to try to convince the West of how moderate they are, if only to escape the otherwise likelihood of invasion, occupation, bombing, or sanctions.

On a side note here, this opinion piece indicates something that's very bad for Singapore. They are producing now an academic class that is so obsequious and propagandistic that they cannot fulfill their proper intellectual function in society. I mean, you can't begin your piece by saying that the racial and religious fault lines in Singapore are sharp and then say later in the piece that Singapore is a successful multiracial, multireligious society. It can't be both. Either you have sharp fault lines that are fracturing your society along racial and religious lines, or you have social harmony.

Unless, of course, you see the only successful way of managing a multiracial, multireligious society is by keeping the tensions between the communities raw so that you can constantly play them against each other. But no healthy society would regard that as a success. Abdul Samad, by the way, comes from a genuinely multiracial and multireligious society, Indonesia, and they have nowhere near Singapore's level of restrictiveness, censorship, and repression. But then again, Indonesia doesn't try to maintain the artificial dominance of a regional minority group. Their demographics are natural and not a forced anomaly.

Now when Abdul Samad said that he saw Singapore and Indonesia as parts of the same land, he meant that with a sentiment of brotherhood. To willfully interpret that as a threat to Singapore's sovereignty is maliciously twisted. Now if I was in a position to advise Abdul Samad, I would strongly urge him to file a case of defamation against Bilvir Singh, against home affairs minister Kay Shamogam, and anyone else who publicly slandered him as an extremist. It's not only his right to do that, but in my opinion, it may well be the best strategy to frustrate Singapore's attempt to malign the Muslims of this region as extremists. And if he were to sue them, he could potentially preempt what looks very much like an effort to create the pretext for the launching of hostile US policy in Southeast Asia.