Lester Kok https://www.facebook.com/lester.kok.7 commented
:
Desperate time calls for desperate measure; protracted jailhouse
misery will do it to you. Misery does indeed yearn for company: for
Amos Yee to now hitch on to the rickety, decrepit,
wheels-fallen-off bandwagon of Ms. Han Hui Hui, betrays the
grasping of straws of a malcontent sinking slowly but painfully in
foreign quick sand. Evidently his earlier U.S. pompom asylum team
has already ditched him impelling his now last-ditch summon for
cavalry backup from home. It is a Hobson's choice for Amos, however
pathetic the hookup may be -- Ms Han the wannabe Joan of Arc of
Singapore and Amos the wannabe Milo Yiannopoulos of U.S.A. What a
formidable pair!
Here's a timely re-post of a March 2 article entitled the
Trinity of Fallacies that examines the root of his problems.
The Mother/Son/Holy-Spirit Trinity of Fallacies: an anatomy of
the Amos Yee asylum debacle.
Amos Yee himself alone is far from being responsible for his
current asylum quagmire. Two other principals from central casting
are equally if not more responsible, i.e., his mother Mary Toh and
his U.S. mentor-facilitator, fellow compatriot Melissa Chen. As
March 7 approaches -- the day of the anticipated court ruling on
his asylum bid -- I’m predicting a total defeat of his application;
the reasons for it were given in my first post on Melissa Chen’s
Facebook in early Jan. https://lester978.wordpress.com/.../on-amos-yees-asylum...
And in a recent post in late Feb. I coin the term ‘amosization’ in
due recognition of the mind-boggling screwup by Amos and company
from the get-go in his asylum quest. (https://lester978.wordpress.com/.../the-coinage-of...)
Here now is a further look at the trinity of fallacies consisted in
each of these 3 individuals, fallacies predicated on a farrago of
confusion, denial, outright contradiction and not least egotism cum
arrogance that have all conspired to bring about Amos’ imminent
state of implosion.
The Mother: as the mother (and adult in the family) Mary Toh
should bear the lion’s share of responsibility for her son’s
current plight. Her abject failure early on to recognize the
difference between critical discourse and religious blasphemy
committed by her son will haunt her forever. She has publicly
remonstrated that her son should never be imprisoned for
criticizing religion. But clearly, she knew it a fallacy to treat
her son’s mischief as worthy religious critique. I was perturbed
even as a non-Muslim by his outrageous shenanigans in profaning the
Quran on Youtube. The outrage generated by his simulated act of
ravishing and boffing the Quran culminating in orgasmic gasps,
evokes memory of a public controversy happened back in 1987 in the
U.S.; it involved the art exhibition of American
artist-photographer Andres Serrano featuring his blasphemous
artistic masterpiece called Piss Christ. Piss Christ was a
photographic display of a crucifix dipped in a jar of the artist’s
own urine. While even such sacrilegious expression is protected
under the Constitution of free speech in America, Mary Toh the
mother knows full well there is none such in Singapore but to the
contrary are in effect so-called ‘harmony laws’. Her willful
turning a blind eye to her teenage son’s prior misconduct has now
redounded to his current woes big time.
The Son: enough cannot be said of the egotism, narcissism and
hubris of Amos Yee; they have indeed become his own worst nemeses.
His mother in late Feb. revealed that Amos has been in solitary
confinement in the McHenry County Jail for 2 weeks now for
‘criticizing’ Islam, according to her account on Facebook. http://mothership.sg/.../amos-yees-mother-confirms-amos...
Apparently, even the jailhouse authority in the States is now
finding Amos’ arrogance and impudence insufferable that warranted
sanction against it -- his current penalty issued from his
participation in an inmate group study of the Quran conducted by an
imam, during which Amos’ arrogance got the better of him that led
him launch into a torrent of Fuck-bombs. http://www.theindependent.sg/amos-yee-allegedly-in...
Interestingly, in a Dec.12 interview with New Lens 4 days prior to
his absconding to America, this was what Amos reportedly said: ‘“I
could even go as far as to say that my kind of video that humps the
Quran, and was overly rude to religious people. I’d probably want
my videos and maybe even my account to be taken down too,” he says.
“It is just not a good way to communicate information to people.”’
End quote.
https://international.thenewslens.com/article/56605
And now just 2 months on, he has reverted to Amos redux -- the
vintage expletive-laden Amos coupled with a complex fallacy of
superiority. Indeed, somewhere earlier I wrote: ‘His problem is he
is not so much unreformed as unreformable at this juncture of his
life’; granted, he is but still a teenager. In fact, in a recent
response to Melissa Chen’s desperate attempt at shielding Amos from
possible comparison with other Internet trolls like the recently
disgraced and cashiered Milo Yiannopoulous, I did argue that Amos
is at bottom a Milo wannabe. https://lester978.wordpress.com/.../is-amo-yee-a-milos...
So Singapore being Singapore, will brook no such acting up in the
guise of so-called freedom of expression by any disruptive
character at the expense of communal harmony at home. Amos’ seeming
denial of such ground realities and his knowingly throwing caution
to the wind, bespeaks his streak of ornery recalcitrance, as we now
witness this tape of his being rerun again in America.
The Holy Spirit Melissa Chen : https://www.facebook.com/melcsquared : from early
on, the ubiquitous presence and influence of Melissa’s aura on the
young man cannot be understated. She has nostalgically recounted
her personal visitation to the kid’s residence as he became a cause
célèbre. Melissa herself is quite a remarkably protean social
activist in the States. A brief scan of her Facebook page affords a
whiff of what she does so well on the Internet -- the stuff of a
fellow citizen activist that her teen protégé would doubtless
cherish and aspire to that which he couldn’t pull off at home.
Melissa would no doubt deny her major complicity in Amos’ asylum
maneuver. But her mea culpa in spurring him on to seek asylum
abroad is writ large in her answer to my first post of Jan. 3rd on
her site: “If I didn't feel a sense of responsibility toward this
case and toward Amos himself, I wouldn't be spending time/effort on
it right now. So if things don't work out I will absolutely
shoulder the blame.” End quote. But for all her activist savvy, it
has now become increasingly clear, what egregious absence of due
diligence, how abysmally ill-prepared was the Amos party in their
asylum bid. It is however Melissa’s fallacy of overrating the
justness of Amos’ so-called free speech cause and having
wrongheadedly equated his condign prosecution with invidious
persecution at home that she eventually became wise up to. Sometime
last month past mid January, Melissa got cold feet in her mentee’s
asylum cause and appeared to be abandoning ship after realizing how
poorly the public response was to the two pro-Amos campaigns she
helped initiated in early January. To date Amos’ crowdfunding has
gleaned only about $4K in donation (a mere fifth of what he had
managed in 2015 at home at the time of his first offense) and just
only 400 names have bothered to sign on to the call for his release
from DHS detention. And a final note of contradiction need be
mentioned about Melissa’s conviction as a self-styled free speech
‘absolutist’: while on the one hand Melissa deems the Singapore
authority regulating speech (as in Amos’ case) as undemocratic, on
the other hand she wholeheartedly approved of and would do so with
abandon to preclude ‘alt-right’ wingnut like Richard Spencer from
speaking in meeting as was the case in a recent conference she
partook in in late Feb.; I can only conclude that the libertarian
clamor against speech regulation of any form is merely cant.
Finally, I would be remiss here if I left out mentioning one
other not so incidental character from central casting who I
believe did have a significant role in bringing on Amos’ current
sorry state of affairs. The dysfunctional relationship with his
uncommunicative and unrelatable father will perhaps someday be the
stuff of psychoanalysis for Amos in behavior management
therapy.
