Last weekend, China is opened up its aircraft carrier Liaoning to the public for the first time. The ship arrived in Hong Kong on Friday (July 7), accompanied by two destroyers and a frigate. Only 2,000 tickets for the tour at the weekend were handed out, leaving many who had lined up for hours disappointed. But for the lucky few, the visit is a peek into a highly specialised community, one that works, eats and sleeps together in a maze of hallways and rooms, surrounded by some of the most sophisticated technology and weapons in the Chinese military.
There are more than 3,800 rooms in the ship, including ones for sleeping, eating, exercise and laundry. There’s also the mess hall and even a store, where sailors can buy snacks and everyday items. For security reasons, every sailor carries a photo ID, which must be swiped to enter areas. Access is restricted according to a sailor’s assigned department. Men and women live apart, and fingerprint scanners restrict entry to the women’s quarters. Most sailors are given single beds about 1m wide and 2m long.
With nearly 20 ethnic minorities on board, it’s varied. The ship’s crew eat in 10 cafeterias, including ones specially designed for Muslims. They are offered four appetisers, six main courses and two desserts, going through two to three tons of food per day. When the crew really need to stretch out, the flight deck is turned into a makeshift soccer pitch. There is also an annual basketball competition, with 15 teams competing.
Editors note:
The Chinese Navy can accept 20 ethnic minorities. The RSN cannot even accept one because its ships don’t have halal kitchens. Which one is more inclusive? Hendak seribu daya, tak nak seribu daleh kan. They won’t be ‘losing face’ so to say if they employ a handful of Malays on board because everyone knows that Malays are just a small group in Singapore. We are the minorities and that perhaps may not be changing anytime soon.
What if food was not the issue here since there are halal combat ration already available in SAF. Are they still questioning our loyalty? Still having doubts in Malays in Singapore? Maliki Osman dan Yacoob Ibrahim diam ke tentang isu ini?
A prominent Muslim group in Malaysia has joined calls by Islamic conservatives in Indonesia for a boycott of Starbucks to protest against the international coffee chain’s support of gay rights.
Perkasa, a group with about 700,000 members that campaigns for the rights of ethnic Malay Muslims, said it agreed with calls this week by Muhammadiyah, Indonesia’s second-largest Muslim group, for a boycott of Starbucks over its pro-LGBT stand.
Perkasa also agreed with the Indonesian group’s call for Starbucks’ operating license to be revoked, it said.
Amini Amir Abdullah, who heads Perkasa’s Islamic affairs bureau, said Starbucks’ position challenged Malaysia’s constitution, which recognized Islam as the country’s official religion.
“Our objection is because they are promoting something that is against the human instinct, against human behavior and against religion. That’s why we are against it,” Amini told Reuters in an interview on Wednesday.
Muhammadiyah’s call for a boycott has gained support from the Indonesian Ulema Council, its top clerical body.
The religious groups’ opposition to Starbucks came after a video from 2013 circulated online of pro-LGBT comments made by the company’s chairman and former chief executive, Howard Schultz..
PT Sari Coffee Indonesia, which holds the license to run the Starbucks chain in Indonesia, said in a statement it was not affiliated with any political or ideological groups.
“We are grateful and proud to have been a part of local communities in Indonesia for 15 years, always maintaining the deepest respect for, and adherence to, Indonesia’s local laws, culture and beliefs,” said Fetty Kwartati, a director at PT MAP Boga Adiperkasa, the parent company of PT Sari Coffee Indonesia.
Some Muslims in Indonesia, however, said the boycott call would not stop them from buying Starbucks coffee.
“I love their products, not their CEO,” said Jakarta resident Kornelius Kamajaya.
The boycott call got a similar response from some in Malaysia.
“Don’t make it such an issue that we have to boycott a company because of one small statement,” said Muhammad Azril Maridzuan, an assistant bank manager in Kuala Lumpur.
Muslim groups should not “be so extremist” even though gay rights was against their religious beliefs, he said.
So I recently chanced upon a photo of two hijab women at a Pinkdot event. People wanna be confrontational about things these days, that’s why they have PinkDot. Let me be confrontational about it too.
Go to Pink Dot all you want. But with a hijab over your head, know that you have a religious+social+moral responsibility. Of course they will love it – who says outward Muslims can’t be supportive of LGBT right?
The way Islam views LGBT is with respect, I feel. We see it as a test and recognise it as an inner struggle that God wills to give to some people. We are to respect people who disagree. We are to agree to disagree. But to paint a false picture of our principles and beliefs is wrong. We respectfully disagree with LGBT and we don’t need anybody going around conflicting it. We don’t need the impression and confusion that non-Muslims might get from seeing the photo. We don’t have a strong enough reason to drop by the event to show some love when clearly the motive of the campaign is to support LGBT.
There is a reason why when we sin, our duty is to not reveal our sins. In fact it is God’s form of mercy when He does not reveal our sins – so why reveal it ourselves? It is another sin on top of another to reveal your sins to others. Thus what they did, if they were actually gay, is to reveal themselves. Similar concept with how wrong it is to openly eat in public during the fasting month.
Now I wish people would respect my religion as much as we are to respect the existence of their campaign and all. Gay or not, I hope the sisters are given hidayah.
Ps. I still love my gay friends but like I said, I am firm on agreeing to disagree.
Despite all our gripes and grouches about National Service (and its yearly reservist call-ups) it’s widely regarded as A Good Thing for a variety of reasons: Singapore has too small a population to rely on citizens volunteering for the military, it forces people from different backgrounds to assimilate, etc. etc.
It’s been 50 years since mandatory conscription came into effect, and it’s become a cultural phenomenon unique enough to inspire films and literature revolving around national service. Criticisms abound, of course, but nobody can deny that Singapore stands ready when disaster (or God forbid, war) goes down.
NS50, the year-long commemoration of National Service’s 50th anniversary, however does not bring back warm nostalgic memories for all Singaporean men. We’re not even talking about recalling the time you messed something up and caused everyone else to be punished, nor the time you wore the same dirty underwear for a week straight in the field — we’re talking about structural discrimination that disadvantaged people based on their race.
Suspiciously missing from all the NS50 bluster and forced pride is the fact that Malay youths were virtually (not officially, mind you) excluded from conscription from 1967 till 1977.
Even when they were eventually let in, they were mainly positioned to serve in the police force or the fire brigade. The small minority of Malays who manage to be called up into the military were given menial jobs, and are (almost always) excluded from key defense roles such as intelligence, the air force, commandos, artillery units and more — a practice that arguably continues to this day.
The Ministry of Defence keeps insisting that the selection of personnel in various military vocations is not based on race. “The ethnic composition of commanders is similar to that in the general population,” Minister for Defence Dr Ng Eng Hen said in a 2014 response to a Parliamentaryquery about the racial breakdown across National Service vocations.
The unofficial, widely understood reason is this: There is uncertainty as to where the loyalties of the Malay community lie should Singapore engage in war with neighboring Muslim-majority countries such as Indonesia and Malaysia.
“By the second half of the 1970s, Malay exasperation with military recruitment and discrimination polices reached an all-time high. Even without official data, Malay parents knew that their children alone were not called upon to serve. Malay officers and (non-commissioned officers) who had been transferred from field command positions to the logistics corps were also frustrated. Nearly every officer knew that military units had informal quotas on Malays.”
Though pleas were made to Malay leaders to change things, the figures of the day didn’t help ease the malaise. They stated that Malay youth lacked education and couldn’t speak English well (even though drafted Chinese Hokkien youth were the same). They argued that the government didn’t have enough facilities to train Malay soldiers (even though race should make no difference to when it comes to military training).
1969 image from National Archives of Singapore
It may not be much of an issue today, but the impact of Singapore’s blatant exclusion of Malays in the service back then was severe. Tania Li argues in her book Malays in Singapore: Culture, Economy, and Ideology that it left the Malay community behind in socio-economic standing.
“There was an unfortunate side effect to the non-recruitment of Malays into National Service. Employers in Singapore are generally unwilling to recruit or train young male workers who have not completed National Service or obtained exemption papers as these youths can be called up at any time. Since Malays were not officially exempted from National Service, Malay youths were unable to obtain apprenticeships or regular jobs, and many were forced into an extended limbo period of about 10 years from ages 14 to 24 … (this) was in part responsible for the high percentage of Malay youths who became involved in heroin abuse during the late 1970s”.
Peled repeats similar sentiments.
“Malay servicemen were pushed out of the military, and young Malays found that the military doors, once their prime avenue for social mobility and a promising career, were firmly closed. Years of exclusion resulted in social bitterness, frustration and a major collision between the state and its principal ethnic minority group”.
The silent ostracizing did not last, fortunately. Policies were eventually eased as the Malaysian invasion threat diminished, and Malay citizens were slowly integrated into the military. By the 1980s, more Malays were being posted in sensitive positions, including the Commando Battalion, while more began graduating as officers.
The memories of the past however are hard to erase, and for former Straits Times’ senior political correspondent Ismail Kassim, the ongoing NS50 campaign did nothing but revive painful memories. Nonetheless, he asserts that it’s a good time for the government to make amends for the past wrongdoings.
“Surely it is not beyond the ability of the present star-studded scholar-leaders to think of some way to assuage the hurt of the past.”
This is another ugly truth of how labels are conveniently thrown by them at persons to distract from the issue of contention.
They are no champion of racial equality. For if they were, there would be no discriminatory practises of excluding the Malays from so-called sensitive positions in the SAF for the last 5 decades sowing the poison of distrust into the minds of Singaporeans towards the entire race, the Malay schools would not have closed down, the Madrasah would have stop ‘begging’ long time ago for a decent premise to educate our children while SAP schools are showered with endless tax-payers money, or would the Malays be systematically marginalised in so many other ways in society. Instead, race have been abused by the PAP to institutionalise deceptive mechanism such as the GRC to their political advantage. And now the EP.
The fact that after more than 50 years of PAP led Malay leadership in government, the Malays are still behind in education, over represented in drug abused cases, prison inmates, delinquents, divorce, low income, etc., etc., are a damning indictment of the failures of the chosen PAP Malay leadership. The reserved EP is neither our community’s priority, need nor want for a show-puppet Malay President. Its a disgrace.
We have seen few days ago what parliament has become when 1 party rules and now the last bastion of the people’s defence will simply become another tool of the PAP.
Come on Singaporeans, lets take back our country from the current double tongue bunch of financially bloated elites that knows no shame oozing out their hypocrisy and taking the entire nation for their joy ride.
