Monday, October 27, 2014

Singapore film ban creates free speech issue...

The documentary, “To Singapore, with Love,” has screenings planned this month from Britain to India to Malaysia. One place it won’t be playing: Singapore.

The government here banned the film, which presents vignettes of Singaporean dissidents who fled decades ago “to escape the prospect of detention without trial,” as the film’s website says.

The ban raises uncomfortable questions about free speech, for Singapore as a whole but also for a U.S. Ivy League university that was going to show the film at its local affiliate.

Yale-NUS College is a partnership between the Connecticut school and the National University of Singapore. Even before the campus opened in 2013, critics said Yale was tarnishing its reputation for academic freedom by lending its insignia to an authoritarian state run mostly by a single party. Now that Singapore has stopped Yale-NUS from screening “To Singapore, with Love,” some say those fears have been realized.

“The prime minister and his long-ruling People's Action Party have a long, well-documented record of using meticulous, Kafkaesque legalism to block freedoms of expression they want to block and to permit whatever they decide to permit in this rich little city-state,” Jim Sleeper, a political science lecturer at Yale, wrote on the Huffington Post in response to the censorship. Full story...

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