Amos Yee charged under the Protection from Harassment Act |
|---|
|
By gdy2shoez From ‘Youtube Amos Yee charged, bail set at $20,000', 1 April 2015, article in CNA "Amos Yee Pang Sang was on Tuesday (Mar 31) charged in the State Courts with multiple charges. The 16-year-old, who was arrested on Sunday, had his charges read out to him in Court, and asked for a lawyer to represent him. The three charges were under Section 298 and Section 292(1)(a) of the Penal Code, as well as Section 4(1)(b) of the Protection from Harassment Act. For the first charge under Section 298, the charge sheet stated that the YouTube video created by Yee “contained remarks against Christianity, with the deliberate intention of wounding the religious feelings of Christians in general”. As for the Protection from Harassment Act charge, Yee’s video “contained remarks about Mr Lee Kuan Yew which was intended to be heard and seen by persons likely to be distressed” by the clip, according to the charge sheet. The Court also granted him a bail amount set at S$20,000, under the condition that he will not post, upload or otherwise distribute any comment or content, whether directly or indirectly, to any social media or online service or website, while the current case against him is ongoing. The amount has been posted, and Yee is out on bail."  ‘According to section 298, it is an offence to insult someone else with the intention of wounding the religious feelings of that person, meaning if I tell you in the face that I do not think it’s physically possible for Jesus Christ to walk on water and the Bible is a silly pack of lies, and you’re offended by the remark, it means that your ‘religious feelings’ have been hurt, and I’m liable to get charged under the Penal Code although I’m merely presenting an argument based on current scientific knowledge. It’s a different story, though, if I decided to put a pig on the Kaaba. That would be an act of sedition, meaning I’m promoting ‘feelings of ill will and hostility’ among the races. How does the law draw the line here? Has FHM been charged for depicting Jesus with a shotgun? What does Christianity say about ‘turning the other cheek’? The more intriguing charge, however, is the one under the protection from harassment act. My idea of harassment is an obsessed fan stalking me outside my doorstep, and sending death threats to my spouse out of jealousy. The victim of the act here is, specifically, ME. Who, exactly, was Amos Yee ‘harassing’? Did he send his link to specific people and force them to watch it? Was he causing trouble to a dead man by loitering around his casket threatening to jump on it? Did he go up to the Lee family and prance around with a party hat and a trumpet going ‘Hooray your dad is dead!’? If the harassment charge is equivalent to ‘insulting’ a fellow human because you have the ‘intention’ of doing so and it causes them ‘distress’, then we’ll have to round up a whole bunch of attention-seeking netizens and bloggers who so much as declare that a minister’s wife looks like a sack of shit, or influencers attacking other influencers with obscenities or death threats. Hell, I’ll charge the Pizza Hut guy for calling me a pink fat person because he hurt my feelings and I can’t sleep because I’m crying all night long. Amos’ parents have been called ‘useless’ by Facebookers because they can’t control their kid. Maybe they should take action against such unfair accusations as well. Since when have we become so fragile to, for lack of a better word, MEAN things people say about us, or our dead parents? Come on, give our police a break. They just spent an entire week securing the biggest funeral of all time. Now we expect them to drag a naughty boy to court who hasn’t yet learnt how to toss a grenade or shoot a rifle. (Soon, Amos, soon). It’ll be less taxing on our psychological well-being if we just brushed off such insults, and not go ballistic on a kid like how the Thais would punish people for mocking their almighty King. Like, chill, people. Are we serving justice, or appeasement? Amos’ crime here is being pathologically ‘insensitive’ to the occasion, and for that I personally think a jail term is too harsh. To be fair, he makes observations, one-sided as they may be, about the country and its leadership at an age when most adolescents are hopelessly apathetic about the state of the nation, spending more time at tuition or playing video games than downloading charts and statistics about how miserable Singaporeans are under LKY’s so-called ‘dictatorship’. Some uncles 3 times his age don’t even bother with the research and continue hating on the Lee legacy because their friends are into it too. He’s 16. He’s barely growing hair on his balls, and what he needs now is learning from this and grow some ‘perspective’, ‘objectivity’ and ‘tact’, and hopefully he may mature into a formidable political commentator, channeling the eloquence and fury into something beyond acting like a spoilt brat in a Jack Neo movie. The seeds of discontent have been planted, all he needs is some pruning. That includes the hair. This article was first published over at the blog of gdy2shoez on 1 April 2015. It is reproduced with permission. |
|
YOU MAY WISH TO READ: A social media experiment by school teacher to gather 10K FaceBook likes |
