AQ Response (Racial Harmony Blog Assignment)

I feel that Szilagyi’s view should be adopted in Singapore.

Both authors acknowledge freedom of expression as a key component in a democracy. However, while Singer believes that people should be allowed to exercise their freedom without restrictions set by the law, Szilagyi emphasizes more on social responsibility.

Being a racially diverse society, social cohesion plays an important role in the progress and stability of the nation. The peace that had been attained after the tumultuous years of post-WWII where riots and unrest was rampant can still be easily shaken by even the smallest displays of racial discrimination.

Peter Singer believes that denial of the Holocaust would not be deterred by the penalty of imprisonment (Paragraph 5 Line 3-4). However he provides no evidence that the penalty of serving a jail term for offenders that abuse freedom of speech will not deter them or others from repeating or committing such an offence.

In incidents such as the one in which blog authors in Singapore who posted racist comments on their blogs were jailed, such a harsh legal measure was proven effective when Leonard Loo, managing partner of Leonard Loo & Co Advocates & Solicitors observed that "Currently if you surf the net you will come across a lot of bloggers making such comments. You will probably see a drop in such cases henceforth”. This shows that the imprisonment of the racist bloggers was indeed effective in preventing further displays of such behavior.

In his article, Zsofia Szilagyi discusses the point that public dissemination of information can result in the spread of harmful propaganda due to manipulation o the information (Paragraph 11 Lines 2-3). One may question that while information can indeed be manipulated to serve political purposes, does this really influence the views of the public?

In saying this, the author is assuming that the public are easily influenced by the media and the government.

However, proof of such a phenomena can be found in incidents such as the resigning of Dr Mahathir. He was accused of using the war against terrorism to garner support for himself by arousing contempt against his Islamic political opponents and the effect was that his position was strengthened during electioneering while support for the Islamic Party decreased. This proves that people are indeed swayed by political manipulation in their decision-making as something as important as election results can be affected by such a case of political exploitation.