My comment to a friend’s facebook post, when they talked about loyalty of Malay Muslims being questions and them being denied sensitive positions in Govt or military:
The issue about this is not “all Singaporean Muslims” being the problem. You dont need a lot people to defect and create existential issues for the country.
I can tell you, China’s influence operations in Singapore is creating similar issues. Most Singaporeans Chinese do not feel “connected” to China and is very unlikely to be influence by their propaganda. However, if just 0.1% falls for it — with a population of chinese around 3–4 million, we still potentially face 3000–4000 converted PRC agents….
And to be honest, I can easily imagine we have 300–400 of these PRC agents right now, like literally, working against Singapore (we already caught a few).
However, Chinese do not have this “brotherhood” bond with China that Muslims seemed to have (at least China had been trying very hard to promote this) — thus this palestine issue made it very clear. Why arent the Chinese sympathizing with the Palestinians as much as our Muslim brothers in Singapore? Thats the connection. Thats the danger.
When Muslims in Singapore criticize China regarding the Uighur issue in Xinjiang, how many Chinese have you seen “pushing back” against those criticism? Hardly any. Few in fact (but any would cause a concern to be honest). We Singaporean Chinese simply dont care that much about China.
It MIGHT be seemingly subtle, the difference. But its a huge difference. Just 1% of our Malay friends decides to put religion ahead of country — we will have 7000 converted agents secretly working against the country. Just for context, there is only 1000 militants that took over Marawi in Philippines — and that took over 6000 filipino troops almost half a year to clear out.
Lets go to the extreme, the Jemaah Islamiyah terror threat, we arrest 34 people, with another 36 detained under ISA. Thats around 70. Which means, radicalisation is at around 0.01% among the Muslim population in Singapore (or slightly lesser if we consider in Indian Muslims) — and this is the “unlikely” scenario that anyone would actually even be radicalised by those crazy rhetoric.
As a non-Muslim, what I hope is for Muslims in Singapore to constantly denounce un-Islamic organisations and people — like how I would, against China regarding the Uighur issue (or literally almost anything China it seems nowadays). Openly criticise, denounce and distant.
I have some Muslim friends just say, “they are not Muslims” (referring to ISIS) — thats like I say, those people who tortured/imprisoned/killed Uighurs are “not Chinese”. Thats not even the point. Unfortunately, to me (maybe in the mosque, the condemnation of extremism is very often; I wouldnt know), the silence is deafening.
Anyway, this is my view and my take. You can take it or leave it. Most non-Muslims will never share their honest views on this — because its too “sensitive”, because such talks, always end up kena accuse of Islamophobia or Racism or just kena scolded for “Not Your Business”. Its very discomforting to type and share all these — because I risking a coffee with the police doing this.
If we cannot have open dialogue, then we can definitely forget about more difficult conversations like whether the state should take the risk to allow Muslims to take up sensitive positions in the military/govt when we are surrounded by Muslims countries.
