When NTUC assistant director Amy Cheong posted a racist rant on her Facebook page three weeks ago, she found herself buried in an avalanche of messages baying for her blood.
“How can you be so stupid?” was Mr Benjamin Koh’s first reaction when he heard of the incident.
Instead of telling her that, he sent her a note of gentle advice. “I told her: ‘I know what you’re going through right now, with everybody slamming you. Just be strong,'” he says.
Mr Koh speaks from experience. The dog lover had paid his price for lashing out online in a moment of folly.
He was jailed for a month in 2005 for making racist remarks on his blog, in response to a Muslim woman’s Forum letter suggesting that dogs should not be allowed in taxis. He received the harshest sentence among three bloggers prosecuted under the Sedition Act that year. The three convictions marked the first time the Act had been enforced since 1966.
Recalling that “very traumatising” year, Mr Koh says he has learnt his lesson and emerged a wiser person.
He took a deed poll last year to change his name – which he withheld from Insight – because he wanted a fresh start in life. But he stands by the view he had then that he is not a racist. He had posted the comments in a moment of anger, he says.
Mr Koh, who now handles social media and public relations in the creative industry, also says that he lacked understanding of Islam then. The agnostic says that while he has many non-Chinese friends, they usually do not discuss religion.
He started reading up on Islam after serving his sentence. “I learnt that you cannot judge a whole religion based on people’s actions,” he says. He is also now more careful with anything he posts online – even in locked posts. “Whatever you put on cyberspace is at your own risk,” he says, pointing out that people can take screenshots within seconds.
More importantly, he has learnt to be responsible for what he says or writes online.
Mr Koh gets a sense of deja vu each time there is an uproar over a racially offensive online post. On several occasions, he has sent the netizen a message, telling him or her to stay strong though they had committed a silly act.
In Ms Cheong’s case, however, Mr Koh feels there was absolutely no excuse for what she said. Ms Cheong, a Malaysian-born permanent resident who had lived in Singapore for a number of years and worked for an organisation that represents heartlanders, should have known better, he says.
He also feels offended by her claim that the supposedly cheap weddings held at void decks led to high divorce rates in the Malay community. “You mean people who spend hundreds of thousands of dollars don’t get divorced?”
But he hopes people will forgive Ms Cheong. “Instead of pointing fingers, maybe we should ask what prompted her to say those things, is there any way we can prevent it from happening.”
Asked if he felt his sentence was too harsh, he says he thinks it was meant to act as a deterrent, especially since his case happened after the London terrorist bombings in July that year.
The key to changing attitudes and preventing offensive outbursts online is education, he believes. Children can be taught values and skills in navigating cyberspace, such as not posting when one is angry and thinking twice before clicking “send”.
He says he is fortunate that his friends of all races have stood by him. “Sometimes I ask questions like if you go back in time, would you want to change anything? Sometimes it’s very tempting, but would I be wiser if I hadn’t screwed up? There’s a lesson to be learnt in everything,” he says.
“Otherwise, I might still have that arrogant mentality of ‘it’s my blog, it’s my space’ instead of being more careful, tolerant and understanding. Understanding is important, because if you tolerate but don’t understand, that’s still useless.”
This article first appeared in The Straits Times under the headline “Original racist blogger speaks” (Copyright 2012)
