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| Yang Kaiheng, with wife Ai Takagi |
A Singaporean man behind a website that published fabricated articles stirring hatred against foreigners in the city-state was put to jail for sedition on Tuesday.
State prosecutors had pushed for a strong deterrent sentence of eight months of imprisonment on Yang Kaiheng, owner of the defunct online blog site The Real Singapore (TRS), saying the write-ups on which the charges were based were "designed to provoke hatred against foreigners in Singapore."
27-year-old Yang had earlier faced trial but later pleaded guilty to six charges of implanting discord between locals and foreigners in a number of articles, three of which contained "blatant falsehoods designed to insert prominent xenophobic" references, state prosecutors said.
One made-up article falsely said that a Filipino family instigated fracas at a Hindu festival in 2015. Another fake article alleged that a Chinese woman coerced her grandson to urinate into a bottle inside a metro train.
According to the prosecutors, the articles were mostly written in such a way that hatred against Filipino, mainland Chinese and Indian nationals working in labor-starved Singapore, would be proliferated.
Prosecutors added that Yang is a "calculating opportunist, who realized that by generating a groundswell of resentment towards foreigners, he could attract readers to the TRS website and thereby generate vast sums of advertising revenue."
Yang's Australian Wife, Ai Takagi, who wrote and edited articles for the website, was sentenced in March to 10 months in jail, also for sedition.
The controversial website, which earned hundreds of thousand in advertising revenue, was shut down after Takagi and Yang's arrest while visiting the island last year. Both were based in Australia.
State prosecutor described Yang as the "proprietor" and "distributor" of TRS and said a stiff sentence on him "must reflect the fact that this is most serious case of seidtion to date in Singapore."
District court Judge Chay Yuen had noted that Yang pleaded guilty on Friday, the same day the Brexit vote result was announced. In a statement, he said: "To put it bluntly, nationalism can degenerate very rapidly into xenophobia, racism, intolerance, and violence."
"Brexit is an example and a reminder of how strong, uncertain, and unpredictable these emotions can be and the ramifications that these feelings can and have caused," the judge added.
Sedition laws in Singapore, which have been criticized to obstruct free speech, make it an offense to promote hostility between different races or classes in the multiracial society.
About 40 percent of the Singapore's 5.5 million people are foreigners, many of them from China, India and the Philippines.
Photo: All Singapore Stuff
Source: InterAksyon
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