You’ve Pissed Me Off and That’s OK

 

One of the largest stories last month was the beheading of a teacher, who had shown cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. Three teenagers were charged with his murder and the result was something of a diplomatic row between France and the Muslim World. French President, Emanuel Marcon was even declared an “enemy of Muslims,” in Indonesia:

https://www.pmnewsnigeria.com/2020/11/02/macron-an-enemy-of-muslims-indonesian-protesters/

Details of the background story can be found at:

https://www.dw.com/en/france-three-teens-charged-in-beheading-of-history-teacher/a-55526223

The dispute between France and the Islamic World is the second time that a European nation has come into conflict with the Islamic World over the topic of blasphemy. Shortly before heading to Saudi in 2006, I remember living through the Jyllands-Posten incident when the Danish newspaper published “offensive cartoons,” of triggered off mass protest across the Muslim world, which included the burning and the burning of embassies.

The main argument in the Western World was the fact that this was a freedom of speech issue. While most rational heads in the Islamic World had condemned the violence, there were many who were critical of the Western government’s failure to protest religious sensitivities and “respect for religion.” I remember interviewing Saudi Deputy Minister for Islamic Affairs, Dr. Abdullah Ilhidan in 2006, who argued that there was a need to protect everyone’s religious sensitivities.

Let’s start with the obvious point here. The cartoons from the Jyllands-Posten and Charlie Hebdo were downright offensive. If you leave aside the Islamic prohibition against depicting live images of anyone, let alone “God’s Last Prophet,” the cartoons were by all accounts provocative and accused the Muslim world of causing every terrorist incident around. For the sake decency, I am publishing a cover from Charlie Hebdo, which can be interpreted as a France’s attempt find common ground with its Muslim population.

 

There is also the question of whether it was necessary to publish the cartoons. In layman terms, it’s your right to say and publish what you want but do you need to go out of your way to piss people off? I remember asking PN Balji, who had just retired from his second stint in Today, whether he would have published the cartoons of the Jyllands-Posten. He said no because it was potentially explosive.

Singapore tried to straddle the middle ground between the Western view of “Freedom of Speech,” and “Respect for religion,” line. Our “least conflicted,” Minister, Mr. K Shanmugam, said that in the Singapore context “Freedom of speech stops at the boundary of giving offense to religion.” fe

https://www.straitstimes.com/opinion/free-speech-stops-at-the-boundary-of-giving-offence-to-religion-shanmugam

Having said all of that, there is no justification for the violence that was perpetrated against Danish Embassies in 2006 and against Charlie Hebdo cartoonist in France and calls to boycott Danish (in 2006) and French businesses more recently are what you’d call overblown. The French, for example, have since World War I not invaded any Muslim countries for personal gain (the French loud critics of the 2003 invasion of Iraq) and both the French and Danes have been relatively generous in giving asylum to Muslims freeing persecution from Muslim countries.

So, how is it such that Western countries that have a record of relative benevolence against Muslim majority states would be the subject of ire in the Islamic world over a couple of cartoons?

While I don’t have direct answers to the question, one might suggests looking at who is calling to defend the “honour” of the faith. In the 2006 Jyllands-Posten incident, it was found that in Palestinian controlled areas, the charge against all things Danish was instigated by Fatah, the secular party that runs the Palestinian Authority (PA) and the party that both the USA and Israel see as a “partner for peace.” Hamas, the Islamist party that both the USA and Israel, regard as a terrorist organisation, did not instigate violence against things Danish. In Egypt it was the foreign minister of the “secular” Egyptian government that branded the Danish cartoons a scandal and launched a multinational effort to prevent recurrence of such insults to Islam. In Iraq, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani condemned the cartoons but also commented about militants who discredit Islam by their acts. Sistani underlined how un-Islamic acts of extremism are used as justification to attack Islam. Khaled Al Maeena, my former editor at Arab News described the violence against all things Danish as “Foolish.”

There was no doubt that an amount of religious fever involved in the violence, one needs to look beyond the headlines. The events of 2006 and the current events might indicate that there are a good number of secular political players exploiting religious passions for good old fashioned secular purposes like power and money.

So, the question would be where does one draw the lines between freedom of speech and religious respect come. Freedom of speech, as they say, will involve a huge amount of offensive speech. As a rational person, I’d say that the best way to deal with offensive speech is to ignore it – a case of I don’t like what you say so I won’t listen. I’m also fortunate where I live in Singapore where people express their frustrations online but don’t take to the streets.

I also understand the government’s position when it says freedom of speech stops when it causes offense to religion. While our last race-based riot was in the 60s, the government is not wrong to argue that our religious and racial harmony cannot be taken for granted.

Having said that, there is a problem, namely the problem of “definitions.” Hence, when a minister talks about “responsible” speech, the question is one of “responsibility.” When you talk about “not offending,” there is a question of what defines “not offensive.”

The ground level compromise in Singapore is fairly visible. In any given hawker centre you’ll see how trays are divided into halal and non-halal sections. Muslims happily sit alongside non-Muslims, who may guzzle pork dishes. On the ground level, there seems to be a working compromise.

However, when things go a level above the ground, there is a grand flip-flopping on what constitutes offense to religion. This is a government that has barred Muslims from serving beyond a certain level in the military but at the same time, sees no issue in reserving the presidency for a particular race and religion. We say that we must not be “offensive to religion or race,” but at the same time we had a former politician who was in the habit of writing all sorts of “Truths” about how people of a certain faith were not integrating, remarks which did hurt the community.

So, perhaps we need to relook at the rules and their application. Yes, there should be certain limits on freedom of speech but these limitations need to be there for a good reason. As a Buddhist I may get offended if you call Gautama Buddha a mad oversexed hippy. It may be offensive to me as a Buddhist but it’s not provocative or done with the possibility of getting some nut job to do me or my family harm. What should be limited is if you label say, “All Bald Singapore Chinese men as serial rapist,” in the public sphere. Such comments are likely to damage my ability to get a job as a toilet cleaner or worse put me in the cross hairs of some nut case.

Secondly, we need to raise our standards. If we are to say that provocative speech ends where it causes offense to a religion or even a race, we also need to look at who says it. If a coffee shop auntie says something offensive, the answer should be – who cares, the old lady is entitled to an opinion, no matter how offensive. However, if we intend to make causing offense a public issue, surely politicians should be slapped harder when they do so – after all their words have a greater impact on society.

We live in a world that currently needs to find more opportunities for dialogue. There should be freedom of expression and people should listen to opinions that they don’t necessarily like (as anyone who contributes to the internet will testify to). Having said that, we do need to accept that harmful and inciteful speech needs to be watched. It’s how you ensure there’s a social dialogue with rules that everyone can agree on.    

Lucrative Problems

I got to admit that I love Bollywood and being forced to stay at home and having access to Netflix has allowed me to catch up on a few Bollywood movies. The smattering of Hindi I’ve been able to pick have come from watching Bollywood movies.

Anyway, I watched Aiyaary, where there was a scene about an incident in Kashmir (the long-disputed sore in Indian-Pakistan relations). In this scene, the younger character asks his mentor, “There are intelligent and capable people on both sides. Why is it that we can’t solve the problem?” The reply of the older character replies, “Kashmir is an industry,” and he goes onto explain that too many people on both sides are making money from the problem. He then let’s his protégé understand that, “When you’re making money from a problem, you safeguard the problem instead of solving it.” The dialogue can be found at:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-we3SC-NzA

This section of the movie caught my attention because the world is going through a lot of problems. We have a global pandemic, the depletion of natural resources, climate change and now there’s racism in much of the Western world. Old conflicts like Kashmir and the Israel-Palestine issue seem set to get worse.

None of these problems are new. These problems were highlighted in the global media some thirty years ago and if you followed the news in that time, you’d get the impression that these were insolvable problems.

However, if you look at the technological advances that have been made in that period, a sane mind would have to ask, “Why can’t we solve these problems?” Why, for example does South East Asia and the South America get covered in a haze every so often? The annual bout of regional choking haze comes from the burning of forest, which is meant to clear land for cash crops.

When environmentalist complained about the ecological devastation, the standard reply in Southeast Asia (and is now being loudly used by Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro) was that “the poor world needed to feed people,” and the subtext was “even if it pissed off Western environmentalist,” who were merely imperialist trying to keep us poor.” While this might have been the case in the 1960s, why does this have to be the case in 2020? You’d imagine that we’d have found a way to substitute palm oil in certain products or found a way for farmers to clear land that didn’t kill off the rest of us.

Unfortunately, it’s not been in anyone’s (or at least the people who count) interest to find a solution. The plantation owners keep poor people busy and politicians have been convinced that its in their interest to keep the plantation owners happy.

Here in Singapore, there’s the issue of foreign labour, which has become an issue now that Covid-19 has exploded in foreign worker dormitories. Suddenly, Singapore’s media has shifted its focus on the condition of foreign workers and there have been letters galore about the need to rely less on foreign workers.

True to form, the industry has hit back and there have been a number of letters from “industry” groups, which called for any cut to the supply of foreign labour to be “short-sighted” and detrimental to the economy. One of the most prominent forum letters can be found at:

 https://www.straitstimes.com/forum/forum-call-to-cut-number-of-foreign-workers-here-is-short-sighted

The argument against having more foreign workers is unfortunately the same as it is the same argument against any basic improvement to the welfare of foreign workers – namely less foreign workers like better foreign worker welfare will increase the costs for employers who will then have to charge more and make everything more expensive for us, the consumers.

This argument has been used very effectively to dodge solving the actual problem, which is the fact that employing a foreign worker is not actually cheap for employers nor does it give foreign workers the money they thought they’d have but the system benefits a host of other parties like labour suppliers, dormitory operators, labour agents and repatriation companies. Any disruption to the system will inevitably upset a host of other people. Nobody explains the problem better than Alex Au, who works at TWC2, an NGO for migrant workers:

http://twc2.org.sg/2020/05/01/the-dorms-are-not-the-problem/?fbclid=IwAR1nhYuPYZ_hYyigLs3VbUrfO4CLtEXz9XuTbB20EOFyKNU6aOInlRGp5GQ

Crudely put, every foreign worker is a money spinner for a host of parties. The government, despite its generous support for the migrant workers in this pandemic, is in fact one of the guilty culprits. The revenue from the foreign worker levy is a major money spinner (average of $750 per worker per month – the stress of this being an average) for the government. However, in addition to that, there is a quota system, which limits the number of foreign labourers that a company can hire.

The official reason for the levy and quota is that it reduces the price differential between foreign labour and local Singaporean labour. The reality is that it has created a very lucrative niche called Labour Supply. The basics are simple – hire a labourer on the cheap and then “rent” them out to other companies that need labour but don’t have the quota. As one former accountant for a labour supplier says, “The worker works the overtime while the labour supplier pockets the overtime pay.”

Other laws get exploited too. There is a lucrative niche for lawyers working on workman 

compensation. All you need is to find a worker involved in a workman compensation claim. You pay for the housing, flight ticket and perhaps give him a bit of pocket money and once he’s gone back, collect the workman compensation, which is inevitably higher than what you paid.

The answer to our foreign labour problems is simple. You just need to reduce the people in between the labourer and the employer. If you reduce the army of middlemen, the employers can get cheaper labour and the workers can get more money. The key parties would benefit. However, the middlemen form an industry in themselves.

I look at the situation with maids as an example. At one time, a maid in Hong Kong earnt up to $700 a month because there wasn’t a powerful middleman. In Singapore a maid would costs an employer around $700 a month but the maid would only get $400 if she was lucky. The difference between the Hong Kong and Singapore scenario is the fact that there is a levy to be paid in Singapore.

I’ve never argued against the need for middlemen. Agents and even labour suppliers have a role to facilitate the relationship between employer and employee. Dormitory owners also serve a purpose in housing workers. Nobody is saying that these businesses should not be allowed to make a profit.

What is being argued here is that the system needs to be changed so that the most important players (namely the employer and employee) get a fairer deal. The system as it is, remains a problem. It’s a choice between increased costs for employers and basic welfare for workers (which is defined as livable wages and accommodation that does not make people sick.)

Entrepreneurial thinking is needed to restructure the system and the sooner the government bites the bullet and goes through the pain (including losing the addiction to easy levy money), the better it will be for all of us.