LIKE many teenage boys, Amos Yee, a Singaporean blogger, is crude, insensitive and confrontational. In 2015, just days after the death of Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s founder and long-time leader, Mr Yee posted a profanity-laced video to his YouTube channel calling Lee “a horrible person”, an “awful leader” and a “dictator”. For a small part of that video (around 30 of its 519 seconds), he also mocked Christianity. He challenged Lee Hsien Loong, Lee’s son and Singapore’s current prime minister, to “come at me, motherfucker”.
Prosecutors did so instead. Convicted of “wounding religious feelings” and obscenity, for posting a crude cartoon showing Lee Kuan Yew doing something unspeakable to Margaret Thatcher, Mr Yee was imprisoned for four weeks. Then just 16 years old, Mr Yee served two weeks in a mental asylum for adults and two weeks in an adult prison. The experience failed to deter him: he pleaded guilty a year later to insulting Islam and Christianity, and was imprisoned for six weeks.
But Mr Yee learned his lesson: late last year he boarded a plane to Chicago and applied for asylum, claiming that he would be persecuted for his political...Continue reading
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