The Ugly Race Card

The Ugly Race Card

Apparently Geylang Serai has more than 100 clan associations, temples and civic organisations. So when some of them could not get a permit for their holding of events like gods’ birthday celebrations, they sought assistance from their Member of Parliament (MP). Land-use permits are issued by the Housing Board or the land office, a standard rubber stamping procedure in red tape.

So when the MP, in this case Dr Fatimah Lateef, did not produce the requisite piece of paper, the requestor can only conclude 1)she’s bloody useless; 2)she couldn’t be bothered; 3)she was bullshitting when she promised to “do her best to help.” After all, if the whole police force was mobilised over a phone call for fellow MP Denise Phua, including the assignment of personal protective escort, this permit request should have been a piece of cake. And if Fatimah did run into a roadblock with the HDB bureaucracy, she could have explained it better to the folks in her ward, and blame it on their (HDB/land office’s) complacency. But she obviously failed to do so, ergo, her “trouble connecting with management members of Chinese temples.”

Quixotically, like his wife’s red herring use of the word “peanuts”, Senior Minister Goh Chok Tong is now waving the volatile racist card, an explosive exercise in multi-racial Singapore. For reasons best known to the man, Goh said:”..it suggested that a minority community MP, a Malay, could not reach out to the Chinese temple, peoples, (and) the hint that maybe she, as a Muslim, did not want to reach out…” Whoa, that’s two ethnic references in one sentence, enough already! When an MP can’t handle the clerical staff at HDB or the land office, that klutz deserves to be owned, regardless of race, language or religion.

But that’s not all. Goh is determined to go after the whistle blower of a PAP cadre, allegedly the source of leak about Fatimah’s troubles with her ward. Is the man acting out of insecurity, now that Prof S Jayakumar is also named Senior Minister? No wonder Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew once suggested he should go see a shrink.

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