Singapore’s Shanmugam on deported blogger Amos Yee: ‘I wish the Americans had kept him’

Controversial blogger Amos Yee has been charged with violating Singapore’s compulsory military service rules.

Photo: Handout Singapore’s Home Affairs Minister K.

Shanmugam has said he wished the United States had kept controversial blogger and child sex convict Amos Yee, warning that foreign media and rights advocates have mistaken a repeat offender, who was deported back to the city state, for a free-speech icon.

Yee, who is listed on a US Department of Homeland Security website as among the “worst of the worst criminal aliens” the Immigration and Customs Enforcement has arrested, was deported from the US on March 19 and arrested upon arrival at Changi Airport the next day.

The 27-year-old is charged with violating Singapore’s compulsory military service rules. “I wish the Americans had kept him,” Shanmugam said when shown Yee’s image during an interview on The Rishi Report podcast on Friday.

Yee was granted asylum in the US in 2017 on the basis that he had been persecuted for his political views, but was later imprisoned for sex offences and removed after his release.

Shanmugam said the episode exposed “a tremendous hypocrisy” among “some media in the West” and others who had, in his view, reflexively cast Yee as a victim of political repression because he appeared anti-government.

To make the point, he singled out The New Yorker, which in a 2015 article had described Yee as the sort of person one might one day want “reviewing your books, making your movies, maybe even running your country”.

Shanmugam invoked the line as an example of how sharply overseas commentary had misjudged both Yee and the case against him.

In fact, the minister said, Yee had been charged with using “four-letter words to describe Christians and Muslims” and for posting “a very crude, sexualised image of Mr Lee Kuan Yew” – “nothing to do with being pro or anti-government”.

Shanmugam also questioned whether foreign commentators and rights groups that had once praised Yee were now prepared to admit they had “got it wrong”.

Yee’s deportation from the US has revived attention on one of Singapore’s most controversial internet personalities, whose trajectory over the past decade has taken him from teenage anti-establishment provocateur to being granted asylum, and then convicted sex offender before his forced return to the city state.

Singapore’s Home Affairs Minister K.

Shanmugam has questioned whether foreign commentators and rights groups that once praised Amos Yee are no

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