Singapore’s Imminent Pathway to Mass Radicalisation

Recently, a Malaysian activist Fadiah Nadwa Fikri was banned from entering Singapore for “radical advocacy,” inciting local activists “to break the law and use violence.” Upon closer research, we discovered that Fadiah was doing much more than just promoting the Palestinian cause. She specifically justified “violence as another tactic that can be used to dismantle the oppressive systems that we lived under.”

A few days before she was barred from re-entering Singapore, 11 people were issued conditional warnings for conduct that breached racial harmony laws, with some wearing shirts declaring that “there are no more universities left in Gaza.”

These are not isolated incidents. Taken together, they point to a broader tension that has been building in Singapore for some time, arguably preceding the War in Gaza. A closer look at the past few years shows how that escalation has unfolded:

1. 2021 (Mar): Singapore detained self-radicalised NSF Amirull bin Ali for plotting a knife attack on Jewish worshippers leaving Maghain Aboth Synagogue on Waterloo Street. 
2. 2023 (Oct): Police investigated activist Gilbert Goh for holding an Israel–Hamas placard outside Speakers’ Corner, despite restrictions on public assemblies related to the conflict.
3. 2023 (Dec): An Israeli folk dance class listed on the OnePA portal was targeted in online backlash during the Gaza war, highlighting hostility toward Israeli cultural activity in Singapore.
4. 2023 (Dec): Police investigated a woman who placed “Free Palestine” and “Cease all trade with Israel now!” placards outside the Israeli embassy, extending anti-Israel activism to a diplomatic site.
5. 2024 (Feb): Police investigated a pro-Palestinian march toward the Istana carrying watermelon umbrellas.
6. 2024 (Feb): Police warned against calls to protest Israeli exhibitors at the Singapore Airshow.
7. 2024 (Mar):  Police investigated posters placed in NTU toilets alleging the university was funding Israel’s war in Gaza, in an incident cited as part of escalating anti-Israel agitation in public spaces. 
8. 2024 (Apr): Police investigated a protest banner unfurled at Gardens by the Bay’s OCBC Skyway calling for an end to Singapore’s arms trade with Israel.
9. 2024 (Jul): ISD said former statutory board manager An’nadya binte An’nahari had become self-radicalised and had expressed enmity toward Jews and made violent threats against them. 
10. 2025 (Jan): Police investigated a Gaza protest outside NUS’ CREATE building where 124 pairs of shoes and a white burial shroud were placed to protest ties with Israeli institutions, extending anti-Israel activism into campus public space. 
11. 2025 (Mar): A group calling itself Monday of Palestine Solidarity was accused of disrupting more than 10 PAP Meet-the-People Sessions across multiple constituencies, including confrontational incidents that turned resident help sessions into protest platforms. 
12. 2025 (Sep): Home Affairs Minister K. Shanmugam said toilets in international schools attended by Jewish students were vandalised with anti-Israel vulgarities in a worrying antisemitic development. 
13. 2025 (Oct): A Jewish man wearing a kippah on his way to synagogue at Waterloo Street was shouted at by a passing motorist: “Free Palestine.” 
14. 2025 (Oct): A Singaporean Chinese man wearing a cap resembling the Israeli flag was allegedly assaulted, marking a notable anti-Israel spillover incident in Singapore. 
15. 2025 (Oct–Nov): The Friends of Israel Keren Hayesod gala at The Fullerton Hotel was derailed after online backlash, including comments about poisoning the food and suggestions that the event be held “in front of an incinerator,” an apparent reference to the Holocaust.

Non-official incidents pointed in the same direction too.

In one circulated social media post, an Israeli-owned bakery in Bali Lane was accused of “deception” and users were urged to boycott it. In another, social media channels mocked the hosting of a long-running Israel Film Festival. And in yet another, a man stands on a bathmat printed as an Israeli flag as a sign of contempt – calling for the burning of the flags and hellfire upon the nation.

And this is mild compared to many other posts on social media.

Read together, these incidents reveal a pattern more significant than any single protest or online flare up. What we are seeing is not merely louder activism, but a recognisable pathway to radicalisation: moral absolutism, symbolic public confrontation, institutional coercion, and, in its most dangerous form, the legitimisation and committing of harm.

Stage 1:  Moral Absolutism

Radicalisation rarely begins with violence. More often than not, it begins in an environment where perceived grievances and injustices are attached to a person, policy, or nation, and gradually framed in increasingly absolutist moral terms.

Imported conflicts often start not with hatred, but with moral intensity, both on and offline: grief, outrage, and a sincere desire to stand with perceived victims. This is not wrong in and of itself. The danger begins when moral urgency hardens into moral absolutism, and a complex political conflict is reduced to a simplistic fight between good and evil, or the powerful and the oppressed.

In such a setting, neutrality becomes complicity, and those linked to the perceived oppressor are no longer seen as people to be conversed with or persuaded, but as an enemy camp which is part of the problem.

In activist circles, the Israel–Gaza conflict has increasingly taken on this character. Israel is no longer treated merely as a state whose policies may be criticised, but as an “evil” entity to be opposed without qualification.

There is little room for nuance: the conflict is flattened into a simplistic narrative of genocide, apartheid and colonial oppression. Silence itself is perceived as complicity.

 
Stage 2: Symbolic Public Confrontation 

Once a foreign conflict and the state associated with it are framed in morally absolute terms, it rarely remains a matter of rhetoric or online expression alone.

The first behavioural shift is not yet direct coercion, but symbolic confrontation: activists seek to occupy public space to make their cause hard to ignore.

In Singapore, this has taken the form of emotionally charged displays and unauthorised symbolic actions, from the 2024 illegal watermelon-umbrella procession toward the Istana, to the placement of shoes and a white burial shroud outside NUS’ CREATE building. Each act turned an ordinary public space into a visible political statement.

In Singapore, however, the symbolic phase has often been brief. Even symbolic acts are frequently tied to direct demands on institutions or the state, which means symbolic protest quickly becomes coercive.

Stage 3: Institutional Coercion

The next shift is more serious. At this stage, activism is no longer simply about making a statement, but about forcing a response. Institutions, venues, community spaces, and visible individuals become targets of pressure. The aim is not merely to express outrage, but to make neutrality costly and to compel action.

Instances of this include posters placed in Nanyang Technological University toilets accusing the institution of complicity, including one telling prospective students their fees were “funding the genocide in Palestine”. 

The same coercive logic appeared in the disruption of Meet-the-People Sessions across multiple constituencies, the backlash against Israeli cultural activities such as an Israeli folk dance class, and the pressure campaign that derailed the Friends of Israel Keren Hayesod gala at The Fullerton Hotel.

Repeated public intimidation does more than pressure institutions. It normalises a “permission to hate” effect, making hostility seem more acceptable and escalation easier.

Stage 4: Legitimisation of Harm

When this third stage no longer seems enough, it can give way to a fourth.

By this point, the target has already been blamed, vilified, and increasingly cast as evil. As radicalisation literature notes, this is the stage at which demonisation can begin to “facilitate the justification of or impetus to aggression”.

When a target is repeatedly cast as evil, getting rid of it can begin to seem justified. As Home Affairs Minister K. Shanmugam recently warned, once a group is repeatedly dehumanised, “violence becomes acceptable.”

This does not mean all pro-Palestinian activists will cross that line. Many will remain within peaceful protest, advocacy, or boycotts aimed at the Israeli state. The greater danger today is not organised radicalisation, but online self-radicalisation.

In the social media age, repeated moral confrontation can make harassment seem justified to a small but dangerous minority.  In a highly charged environment, a smaller fringe can become more willing to justify intimidation, harassment, or even violence, especially when Jews, Jewish institutions, or visibly Jewish individuals are treated as stand-ins for Israel. 

Singapore has seen before how dehumanising grievance can spill into real-world violence, even in different ideological forms, most notably in the 2021 plot to attack two mosques.

In the present context, however, the more immediate concern is the rise in hostility toward Jews: from the 2021 synagogue knife plot and the 2024 ISD case involving explicit hostility toward Jews.

More recently, a man in a kippah was shouted at with “Free Palestine”, while online comments about the Friends of Israel  Keren Hayesod gala called for “poisoning the food” or holding the event “in front of an incinerator,” an apparent Holocaust reference.

Overseas Experience Illustrate the Danger

This progression has already been seen elsewhere. Overseas experiences offer a cautionary lesson. Democracies that once assumed such tensions would remain online have, in recent years, seen anti-Jewish hostility escalate into direct attacks.

Just this past week, a terrorist attack in London saw two Jewish men, one in his 70s and another in his 30s, stabbed in broad daylight in the heavily Jewish neighbourhood of Golders Green. The Metropolitan Police have classified this as a terrorist incident, and it follows a series of arson attacks on Jewish community ambulances and synagogues.

We would also be wise to remember incidents such as the antisemitic assault on a Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach in Sydney, which left 15 dead and 39 injured.

The case of Naveed Akram, the younger perpetrator of the 2025 Bondi Beach shooting, reveals how radicalization can mask itself behind a facade of normalcy. Years before the massacre, Akram was a visible participant in “street dawah” in Sydney a seemingly peaceful teenage preacher engaged in religious outreach. However, the difference between his earlier life as a “diligent” youth and his eventual mobilization to violence was not a change in character, but the corrosive effect of two silent catalysts: time and an ideological echo chamber.

For six years, Akram lived a quiet life, even being removed from security watchlists while his extremist worldview hardened in private. This “quiet period” highlights a dangerous reality: radicalisation does not always lead to immediate action; it often festers within closed social circles where grievances are amplified without challenge.

These serve as a grim reminder of what happens when the ‘permission to hate’ moves from symbolic protest to physical violence.

Although Singapore is not Australia or Britain, if the radicalisation pathway has been established, why should we assume it will play out differently here? For us, the lesson is clear: the presence of these same echo chambers and the passage of time can turn today’s symbolic activism into tomorrow’s physical threat.

Implications for Singapore

The point, then, is not that every protester is a security threat. It is that the process of radicalisation is playing en masse before our very eyes. 

What begins as moral conviction can evolve into activism in which disruption feels righteous, intimidation feels cathartic, and harm becomes easier to imagine. The concern is therefore less about any single protest than about the civic norms being formed around it.

Singapore wasn’t always this way, but it’s becoming something that will benefit neither us, nor our future generations if these trends continue unabated.

Once coercion becomes normalised as a legitimate form of political expression, the line between activism, intimidation, and harassment becomes harder to hold.

For Singapore, that is why social cohesion matters. The stronger the trust between communities, the less room there is for imported “us-versus-them” narratives to make intimidation seem justified.