“With regards to an earlier posting I made…..”  This is how Andrew Loh sometime founder/leader/editor of socio-political website TOC,  now in hot water for taking foreign funding, started his written apology to Singapore President Tony Tan.  No need to bore you with the details again but he basically hurled insults at our President and called him names including  F****r.  Yes in addition to  being a very petty man, Andrew Loh has anger management, balance and truthfulness issues.

Yesterday he decided  to hurl insults my way all uncalled for and based on a lie he concocted. it was illuminating to see the petty minds who weighed in to join him in hurling abuse. and concocted a lie about me to give him the excuse to abuse me..

At the time of his apology to The President Andrew Loh acknowledged he was in the wrong and wrote:

“The words I used were harsh and insulting, and the sentiments I expressed about the President unfair and untrue.

He could say exactly the same about what he has done to me, not that I’m the President, but he has used harsh and insulting names about me and also expressed untruths in order to paint a false picture of me that goes to the heart of my credibility. Let’s see if he apologises.

I shouldn’t have to justify myself and won’t bore you by posting up here copies of EVERY condolence message and wishes for a speedy recovery that I have sent out in the past several years. You can Google my letter of condolence to LHL and family on the passing of his father, which was well received.  I believe the most recent message apart from my wishes to the PM yesterday was to send my thoughts to SR Nathan’s family. Heng Swee Kiat was probably the recipient before that.

It is my belief that if someone is ill then common humanity takes precedence over politicking every time. And I put that belief into action whenever I can.

 

So what  happened that allowed Andrew to spin a web of lies?  Yesterday I was watching the PM’s National Day Rally speech online and Tweeting about it when inexplicably LHL suddenly stopped speaking. This is my sequence of Tweets before and just after it happened:

Its obvious from the timeline captured by The Independent and published that I hoped the PM was OK and that  in no sense at any time did I make fun of him being ill once I knew he was ill. As the Independent states the camera was turned away after the  first falter. When it seemed that PM Lee was actually ill, I Tweeted  my concerns for his health and  wished him well officially on the Party media.

I don’t think any of this was difficult to understand in context. The Independent seemed to get it (see here).

I did make made a  “Brainstorm” comment before I realised what was happening. I deleted it as soon as I realised this was PM Lee’s illness not a technical glitch. I didn’t delete it for my sake but our of respect and sensitivity for PM Lee’s condition.

Look at all the nasty dirty minds who dredged up that one deleted Tweet and used it out of context as an excuse to launch a character attack on me without any attempt to hear my side of the story. People like Andrew Loh maybe can’t control their bile but Gerald Giam and Bernard Chen of Workers Party should know better. Middle Ground surprised me going off half baked without the facts. And as for Alfred Dodwell… Shame on them all.

I don’t know why I used the word brainstorm because brainstorming is when you throw out ideas in a group. Maybe I was having a brain freeze? I think the reason it came to hand is that I faltered  at the NUSS IQ forum hosted by Viswa Sadasivan in August last year. It happens to all public speakers at some time and one of the speakers said, ” KJ’s having a Brainstorm! ” and we all laughed. The moderator kindly allowed me to continue.  There were some complaints by Straits Times but Viswa was in charge and cut the fumble out of the video. I took away the opinion he was a very decent human being.

In fact I think you would have to be trying very hard to take that sequence of events and paint me in a terrible light. Or you could just be blinded by prejudice or then again you could be Andrew Loh. Of course anyone who knows me even a little also knows that I would never do anything so horrible as to discover the PM was ill and after the fact to make fun of it. Like everyone I was shocked and it had seemed impossible to me that LHL would get ill during his NDR speech. Thank Goodness it doesn’t seem to have been anything major and he bounced right back.

Here is a weird thing. Around the time I made that first Tweet, Chee Soon Juan leader of the SDP,  put out the Tweet below saying: “I was just informed that Mr Lee Hsien Loong had suffered a neurological problem.”   What does he mean by “Neurological Problem”?  Did his admins (he doesn’t write his own Facebook page) see my deleted brainstorm  Tweet and take the brain issue from there? Or is  Chee, as a psychologist, able to diagnose a neurological condition just from being informed by a third Party? It’s one thing to use a figure of speech like brainstorm, quickly delete and correct and another thing entirely to suggest that the PM has a neurological condition. It’s not only foolhardy, likely to spread panic but is also defamatory.

Not one of those petty individuals made a storm out of Chee’s “neurological problem” post. In fact they covered it up. Chee’s FB post was re-written no less that four times  before he  came up with his final “Sincere” message.  It still says the PM has had “a breakdown” which I find untruthful as well as unacceptable.  Now guess which one of us Andrew Loh hurls insults at.  Yes, lucky me!

Dodwell is that on-off lawyer champion of rights for some humans but not all. It seems that Dodwell mounted his high horse, put up my deleted tweet in isolation and out of context on his Facebook page, made some derogatory patronising remark about me and then Loh saw it and went off on one of his major rants. The partial post can be seen above. I’d show you more but he’s blocked me.

As you see he called me an idiot and an insensitive buffoon. No sorry – a COMPLETE insensitive buffoon and a disgrace to what.. the nation or some such.  I’m sure it’s no coincidence that buffoon or clown is the favourite smear of the PAP. Loh then decided to add some embellishment of his own. He embellished and exaggerated until the result was a lie. No wait A COMPLETE Lie. On his Facebook wall Loh says that “KJ’s first thought on learning of what happened to PM Lee is to make fun of it”   Yeah, you’ll have noticed that Loh thinks he is in my head and knows my first thoughts.

Dear Andrew Loh, If I had truly done that, if that had been my thought process,  then go ahead and even call me a F***  like you did the President with no complaints from me. instead .  Sadly the truth doesn’t allow Andrew to assassinate my character as neatly as a lie does.

As though lying and embellishing in a manner befitting of Ryan Lochte wasn’t enough,  Andrew then goes for the gold medal in Hypocrisy. He Tweets about leadership succession with no sensitivity- no wait  COMPLETE lack of sensitivity  as though the PM is on his deathbed already.

Classy timing Andrew. Classy.

Not that Alfred Dodwell is any better. Dodwell perversely commends Chee Soon Juan for saying that LHL had a “breakdown” whilst taking the fourth and final edit of Chee Soon Juan’s original post to make a false and unfair comparison with my very early deleted one.

(See how they do these smoke and mirror tricks!)  Either he should put up my later Tweet wishing PM Lee well with Chee’s or both of our original versions.

Dodwell’ s failure to establish the facts speaks volumes about the man.  If he tried to be this blase before a  judge  in court I am sure he would find himself up before the Law Society. But as this only happened on Facebook there are no sanctions for the man’s misrepresentation. Dodwell puts up a picture of a bible on his Facebook page. He certainly displays a complete lack of Christian ethics in his petty behaviour.

Why has there been a concerted campaign to unfairly blacken my name? I can only assume that this was a damage limitation exercise to protect Chee Soon Juan from his awful  gaffe and shift all the opprobrium on to me. In any case what scares these people so much that they always have to resort to the smear or ad hominem attack rather than being able to engage in an intellectual debate on policy?

I can’t see any well wishes for the PM from Alfred Dodwell himself although I have searched his page. Just a bunch of flippant bandwagon jumping type comments.What hypocrites! Such a little country so many little men.

Just stop to think if these kinds of people got in charge of our social media… Oh wait! Welcome to our Orwellian nightmare.

Finally this is all just a (Twitter) storm in a teacup. Everyone should calm down and focus on what is important.

Published by kjeyaretnam

I'm a Singaporean economist who became an opposition activist. I blog to provide an alternative to the porkies that the Pinkies tell. It just so happens that my alternative is the truth. That's why I've never been sued in any civil or criminal court no matter how hard hitting my criticism. I'm quoted and interviewed and asked to speak across the world but largely censored in Singapore in an effort to silence my political opinions. The left hate me because they think I split their vote and because I eschew their outmoded economic models. Models that don't work. The Right and the Conservatives hate me because I'm a liberal. I'm not sure what the middle think of me. I don't think there are more than a handful of people in the middle, here in Singapore. I'm a Singaporean born and bred, dual heritage, my parents Singaporean established here before the State of Singapore was created. I'm not Eurasian. I read economics at Cambridge and could be broadly described as from the Keynesian school but I believe in interventions. I was formerly a successful hedge fund manager. After economics and politics my greatest interests are history, film and Makan. I run but I run so I can eat like a Singaporean. View all posts by kjeyaretnam