This is a special mid-week issue of the newsletter just to send out an update.
If you pay any attention to the Singaporean news/social media outside of this newsletter, you’ll have likely seen PAP MP Seah Kian Peng’s Facebook post on Saturday claiming that those of us who met Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad last week (especially Dr PJ Thum) had asked Mahathir to interfere in Singapore politics by inviting him to “bring democracy to Singapore”.
(Recap: I mentioned this visit in the last issue of the newsletter, and blogged about the meet. After Mr Seah’s post, I published a follow-up response.)
Mr Seah hasn’t provided any evidence for his accusations, which triggered a torrent of abuse and calls for us to be arrested, jailed/detained without trial, or even executed/killed on multiple social media pages and in comment threads. On Monday, Mr Seah finally put out a follow-up post urging civility, but it was really too little, too late. And he still hasn’t retracted his baseless allegations, which have already been amplified by the PAP Facebook page, Law Minister K Shanmugam (on Facebook and in comments to the media), and the mainstream media.
Dr PJ Thum, Jolovan Wham and I have thus filed complaints with Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, who is Secretary-General of the political party Mr Seah belongs to, and also with Mr Charles Chong, who is the chairman of the Select Committee on Deliberate Online Falsehoods, of which Mr Seah is a member. This is about accountability and responsibility. I’ve attached JPEG files of the letters we sent below.
