Singaporeans have been hiring agencies in China to get their husbands’ mistresses to back off, according to a foreign report on these “mistress-ditching” firms.
But what if the spouse’s lover is in Singapore?
To save their marriages from falling apart, Singaporeans have been paying five-figure sums to hire honey trappers to seduce their own misbehaving husbands or wives, reveal private investigators here.
The honey trapper will attempt to seduce the third party or the cheating spouse to destroy the extramarital relationship, they say.
Yes, agents have been engaged by distraught husbands, too.
“It is not an advertised service. The request must come from the client,” says Mr David Ng from DP Quest Private Investigation Consultancy.
“They usually know what they want. They would request a particular profile of a honey trapper that they want, specific to the preference of their cheating spouses.”
Many Muslim men after living a long life of practicing major sinful acts such as drinking, adultery, clubbing and so on, come back and repent to Allah swt. Alhamdulilah. However, when some of those men start looking for a wife, they look for someone who is as pure as a Mary (pbuh). Now that’s hard to grasp, but what is even harder to grasp and more sickening is when a man who did not even repent, practiceing a life of a non-Muslim, and still wants someone as pure as Mary (pbuh).
Question is, why did society make a female’s sin worth so much more than a male’s sin? A sin is a sin. Whether it’s from a male or a female. A girl having a *bad* history is worth the same as a guy having a bad history. A girl should not be ignored just because she once talked to a guy or because she did not wear the Hijab during a certain time of her life. Wallahi girls get pushed aside for the silliest reasons such as, “because her brother in law’s cousin’s brother’s son’s wife smokes Shisha…”
Please remember, Allah is the most fair. He will give you someone who you deserve. So the more you work on improving your self, the better your spouse will be inshaAllah.
On Wednesday night, along with thousands of other Singaporeans, I lined up to pay my respects to Lee Kuan Yew. I was a little surprised at myself for doing this – after all, I’ve been involved in countless activist events over the years, few of which the man would have approved of: Against censorship, against the Internal Security Act, against the death penalty and the general whitewashing of national history.
Still, I did have something quite specific to be grateful for. Pictured above is what I wrote as a condolence message for the wall outside Parliament House: “Thank you for speaking up for the gay and lesbian community.”
I’m referring to the fact that Lee Kuan Yew consistently stated in interviews that he believes homosexuality is natural and should not be persecuted. His statements on this issue have been documented and praised on SG Wiki, as well as the Chiongs’ blog (a same-sex parenting site run by two of my friends) and this very news site.
He was the first Singaporean politician to say anything supportive about gay people, beginning with a CNN interview in 1998 where he replied to a gay caller’s concerns about his future in the country with an assurance that “we don’t harass people”.
In 2007, he reiterated these views at a PAP Youth Wing event: “[Y]ou are genetically born a homosexual… So why should we criminalise it?” The same year, he denied that there was any censorship of art depicting homosexuality in Singapore. In his infamous 2011 book Hard Truths to Keep Singapore Going, he went so far as to say he’d be OK with a lesbian daughter or MP.
These statements mattered a hell of a lot to us LGBT activists. We’ve been trying for years to improve Singapore’s laws and social attitudes, against a tide of religious opposition and rhetoric about “Asian values”.
Lee Kuan Yew on homosexuality in interview with the Sunday Times.
But whenever things seemed hopeless, we were able to hearken back to those words and remember that the most conservative, curmudgeonly, establishment figure in the Singapore government was OK with our existence. And that meant that maybe, just maybe things might just turn out all right.
Given these facts, you might be wondering why a number of Singapore’s queer intellectuals – Alfian Sa’at, myself, and others – have mostly been sharing articles critical of Lee Kuan Yew on social media.
The biggest reason, of course, is that we’re not single-issue activists. We also care about the fact that he sued opposition politicians into bankruptcy, made offensive statements about Malays, Muslims and women, and caused the destruction of much of our pre-independence architecture and culture. These things matter, and we don’t want people to forget this, even in the midst of mourning.
But then there’s the fact that, deep down, we don’t feel like we were been handed a fair deal by the government while Lee was alive. While I wouldn’t say he was homophobic, he certainly had a hand in creating the culture of homophobia that exists in Singapore today.
From the very beginnings of his rule as Prime Minister in 1959, he was determined to police the morals of his citizens. That very year, he launched his attack on “yellow culture”, placing a ban on jukeboxes and pinball machines. By the 1980s, he was espousing the idea of “Asian values”, claiming that male-dominated nuclear families were the basic unit of our society.
All this emphasis on a singular vision of morality trickled down to create a policy of harassment against LGBT people: the efforts to chase transgender women out of Bugis Street (culminating in its demolition in 1984), the entrapment operations on gay men, the censorship of queer-themed plays and movies, the dismissals of gay teaching staff, the fact that in the late 1990s, the police actually spied on People Like Us, Singapore’s first LGBT organisation. (If you don’t believe that last point, check out Lynette Chua, Mobilizing Gay Singapore, p 55-56.)
Mind you, there’s no evidence that Lee Kuan Yew directly ordered any of these actions. There’s no evidence he held any animosity towards us, ever. But because he was so central to the creation of modern Singapore, it’s hard not to feel that most of our current problems are traceable back to him.
And there’s a further charge I want to lay at his feet. In spite of all the gay-affirming things he said, he never did anything for us. He had the power to get rid of Section 377A (our colonial anti-gay sex law) and to retire our anti-gay censorship policies, but he didn’t.
You can’t claim he was ignorant. He knew there were dissatisfied queer Singaporeans – they were the ones who prompted his questions during his CNN interview and his PAP Youth Rally. We know he read the papers, so he would have known about current affairs, and in Hard Truths, he reveals that he had researched homosexuality and found it natural. But when we urged him to do something about the censorship of gay art, his response was to claim it didn’t exist.
This is why I am supremely skeptical of Trevvy.com’s tribute to him, which claims, that the “repeal of Section 377A would probably had been a success had he been the Prime Minister then.” If he had wanted to, Lee could have chucked out this law at any of a number of moments in the past, simply by slipping a note into his now-fabled red briefcase.
Gender symbols (image – Wikimedia Commons)
But he didn’t. Perhaps he didn’t think we were very important. Perhaps he never felt we were worth the trouble.
This is why, like so many other Singaporeans – members of racial minorities, unmarried women, and many others – we LGBT citizens will always feel like we were among his least favourite children.
Yet at the end of the day, I’m grateful for Lee Kuan Yew’s comments. I know this for a fact, because in the wake of his death, I find I’m worried about the future of Singapore’s LGBT rights.
When gay rights came up for debate over the constitutional challenge to 377A, PM Lee Hsien Loong refused to acknowledge the psychological, institutional and concrete harm that the law perpetuates, blithely telling the world, “Why is that law on the books? Because it’s always been there and it’s best if we just leave it.” Discussing gay rights, he said, “These are not issues that we can settle one way or the other, and it’s really best for us to leave them be, and just agree to disagree.”
Why wouldn’t he stand up for us LGBTs? Regardless of his personal beliefs, he faces a much higher cost to defending our rights. He needs to win the support, not just of his citizens, but also of Parliament, of which a disproportionate 32% are Christian. Nor does he have the authority of a founding father to back up his position.
Beyond the PAP, we have the Workers’ Party, which refused to condemn the retention of 377A during the Penal Code revisions of 377A. It also boasts the only MP to take part in the anti-LGBT Wear White campaign: Muhamad Faisal Abdul Manap.
The National Solidarity Party, the Reform Party and the Singapore Democratic Party have made statements that they believe in equal rights for all, regardless of sexual orientation. But what hopes have they of forming a government? NSP even felt compelled to add, “we do not think Singapore is ready for equal promotion of alternative lifestyle.”
With Lee Kuan Yew gone, there is no mainstream politician we can point to who is willing to even defend our natural right to exist. And with the balance of power shifting, who knows what may happen in the coming elections? Might a specific politician, or even a whole party, use anti-LGBT rhetoric as a means to rally votes? Might we become the new scapegoats for the countries’ woes?
But I have to remind myself: These are things that could have happened even when the old man was alive. Life was pretty bad for us in the days of his administration; growing acceptance amongst the young would suggest it’s going to get better.
For years now, Lee Kuan Yew has been more of a symbol than a man, more of a philosopher than a politician. His death came slowly, with forewarnings. Even without his grudging support – as the song goes – we will survive.
Things are going to change. But then things have always been changing, even before he came along.
He had a few kind words for us. Now comes the time for action.
Many Muslims and non-Muslims alike claim that Islam is a religion of peace and that violence perpetrated in the name of Islam is actually due to distortions or misunderstandings of the religion.
There are those, however, who would say that Islam is not innocent of its militant and murderous adherents.
They often cite verses of the Quran, such as Al-Tawbah (9):5, which says: “But when the forbidden months are past, then fight and slay the Pagans wherever ye find them, and seize them, beleaguer them, and lie in wait for them in every stratagem (of war).”
To make matters worse, it is always possible to find historical cases of the brutal treatment of Christians by Muslims.
A case in point is the 11th century Fatimid ruler, Abu Ali Mansur Tariq al-Hakim. Al-Hakim was known in the West as the “Mad Caliph” because of the brutal manner in which he treated religious minorities. The persecution of Christians and Jews began under his reign in AD1004 when he decreed that Christians would no longer be allowed to celebrate Easter.
Al-Hakim is also known to have forced Jews and Christians to become Muslims at the point of a sword, and to have destroyed numerous churches and other Christian holy sites in Palestine and Egypt, including the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem in 1009.
But Al-Hakim was thought to be mentally unstable and his reign was seen by even Western historians to be a departure from the norm on how Christians and Jews were treated in Islamic empires.
We are reminded of this barbarism today by the actions of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) under Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi. After capturing large areas of Iraq and Syria earlier this year, ISIS began to target Christians and other religious minorities, subjecting them to harassment, arrest, violence and conversion on pain of death. Archbishop Athanasius Toma Dawod of the Syriac Orthodox Church said that ISIS had burned churches and old religious texts, damaged crosses and statues of the Virgin Mary, and converted churches into mosques.
It is also important to point out that ISIS also targets Muslims who run afoul of the authorities. It was reported that a man who was caught eating during the fasting month was crucified for three days while a woman who committed adultery was stoned to death.
How do we reconcile the idea of Islam as a religion of peace, with the verses of the Quran that appear to support the violence perpetrated against Christians, such as those during the reigns of Al-Hakim and Al-Baghdadi?
There are two ways to deal with this question. One is to show that these verses are to be interpreted in their historical contexts. The other is to demonstrate how Muslims in history were guided by Islamic ideals and acted towards non-Muslim minorities.
The Quran in Al-Tawbah (9):13 asks: “Will ye not fight people who violated their oaths, plotted to expel the Messenger, and took the aggressive by being the first (to assault) you?” This makes it clear that the exhortation to fight mentioned a few verses earlier referred to cases of defence against aggressors. However, even this was highly regulated as Muslims were forbidden to fight during four sacred months.
Furthermore, the historical fact is that Muslims in general adhered to the Quranic ideal of showing tolerance and compassion to Jews and Christians who lived in Muslim-ruled lands. The Quran in Al-Mumtahanah (60):8 says: “Allah forbids you not, with regard to those who fight you not for (your) Faith nor drive you out of your homes, from dealing kindly and justly with them: for Allah loveth those who are just.”
It was in this spirit that the Prophet Muhammad dealt with the Christians of his time.
Any Muslim who fails to protect the life, property and honour of Christians is not only acting in contrast to Islamic tradition but is also violating the oath made by the Holy Prophet Muhammad.
This was stated by the Prophet himself in the Ashtiname or Covenant, a kind of charter that he signed which granted protection to the monks of Saint Catherine’s Monastery.
In fact, the Prophet said: “(W)hosoever of my nation shall presume to break my promise and oath… destroys the promise of God… (and) becomes worthy of the curse, whether he be the King himself, or a poor man, or whatever person he may be.”
The Prophet had made many such covenants with Christians.
Another historical event worthy of mention is the surrender of Jerusalem to the Caliph Omar in AD637. The Caliph travelled to Jerusalem in order to accept the surrender of the city from the Patriarch Sophronius. Sophronius then invited Omar to pray in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Omar declined the invitation for fear that his praying there may set a precedent that may eventually lead to the conversion of the church to a mosque.
These early historical examples of the gracious treatment of Christians by Muslims were not exceptions, but the rule. They continued throughout Islamic history.
Spain under Muslim rule, Al-Andalus, particularly between the 8th and 11th centuries, was known as a golden age of Jewish history, when Jewish philosophy and culture made advances. At a time when Jews were persecuted elsewhere in Europe, Andalusia’s Jews flourished, even taking up high positions in government.
The Ottoman Empire (1299-1023) went beyond tolerance and accepted non-Muslim minorities, granting them protection and religious freedoms. By the 16th century, the Ottomans established control over large parts of Europe, ruling over large Christian populations. Sultan Mehmed developed a system in which each religious community, or millet, elected its own leader and enforced its own religious laws. Orthodox Christians constituted a millet; the Jews another.
A proper approach to the interpretation of Quranic texts, involving a correct contextual understanding of its meanings, and the study of Islamic history, will reveal that tolerance and acceptance of non-Muslim minorities were the norm.
While Muslim empires were not liberal according to the standards of modern democracies, they were certainly progressive in comparison to their contemporaries when it came to dealing with religious minorities. Deviations from the norm were treated as violations by most Muslim themselves. This was true of Al-Hakim and is certainly the case with ISIS today.
The problem lies not with Islam the religion, but with ideological interpretations of it. The purest of ideas in a text can be reinterpreted in line with evil interests. All ideologies, religious or secular, have been subjected to this.
