The Protest Straight Outta Yale

Credit where it is due: the organisers of the April “Anti-US Imperialism” rally at Hong Lim Park finally obeyed the law. For a movement whose recent track record includes at least 15 different incidents of arguable lawbreaking, their recent compliance with basic civic norms is commendable.

In case anyone needed a reminder, since 2021, the following incidents have been linked to the same activist milieu and the broader spillover of the Israel-Hamas conflict into Singapore:

• 2021 (Mar): Self-radicalised NSF Amirull bin Ali detained for plotting a knife attack on Jewish worshippers at Maghain Aboth Synagogue.
• 2023 (Oct): Activist Gilbert Goh investigated for holding an Israel-Hamas placard at Speakers’ Corner despite assembly restrictions.
• 2023 (Dec): Israeli folk dance class on OnePA targeted in online backlash.
• 2023 (Dec): Woman investigated for placing “Free Palestine” placards outside the Israeli embassy.
• 2024 (Feb): Pro-Palestinian march toward the Istana with watermelon umbrellas investigated.
• 2024 (Feb): Police warned against calls to protest Israeli exhibitors at the Singapore Airshow.
• 2024 (Mar): Posters in NTU toilets alleging the university was funding Israel’s war in Gaza investigated.
• 2024 (Apr): Protest banner unfurled at Gardens by the Bay’s OCBC Skyway calling for an end to Singapore’s arms trade with Israel.
• 2024 (Jul): Former statutory board manager An’nadya binte An’nahari issued ISA restriction order after making violent threats against Jews.
• 2025 (Jan): 124 pairs of shoes and a burial shroud placed outside NUS’ CREATE building to protest ties with Israeli institutions.
• 2025 (Mar): Monday of Palestine Solidarity disrupted more than 10 PAP Meet-the-People Sessions, turning resident help sessions into protest platforms.
• 2025 (Sep): Toilets in international schools attended by Jewish students vandalised with anti-Israel vulgarities.
• 2025 (Oct): Jewish man wearing a kippah shouted at by a passing motorist on his way to synagogue: “Free Palestine.”
• 2025 (Oct): Man wearing a cap resembling the Israeli flag allegedly assaulted.
• 2025 (Oct-Nov): Friends of Israel Keren Hayesod gala at The Fullerton Hotel derailed after online backlash that included comments about poisoning the food and holding the event “in front of an incinerator”, an apparent Holocaust reference. (Regardless coverage)

Elsewhere on social media, an Israeli-owned bakery in Bali Lane was accused of “deception” and targeted for boycott, and a long-running Israel Film Festival was mocked and derided.

No doubt, netizens of all stripes have seen emotional, incendiary, conspiratorial and oftentimes false news shared by those who identify with the pro-palestinian / anti-Israel cause. The two need not be synonymous, and yet, they often are treated as if they are.

Against that anti-social backdrop, the lawful assembly at Speakers’ Corner is a paragon of compliance.

Yet, the episode at Hong Lim has given us a peek into the hive mind once their hobby-horses have been stripped away because authorities had restricted the Israel-Hamas conflict as a permissible subject.

The Omnicause

Having been denied their actual cause, the organisers wrapped every grievance they had inside a cause that would not fall afoul of NParks’ restrictions: opposition to “American Imperialism”.

The result was an ideological buffet where nothing on the menu was related. Like eating durians with rice.

At the rally, speakers, distributed material, and protest placards connected all of the following to the single theme of “U.S. imperialism”: the structural debt of the Philippines, Singapore’s domestic climate policy, migrant worker wages, the death penalty, and Palestinian solidarity.

Consider Exhibit A (below) where one IG post even managed to tag climate action, anti-death-penalty campaigning, migrant worker advocacy, and Palestinian solidarity groups under a single header about U.S. militarism.

Here is the problem.

• Migrant worker exploitation in Southeast Asia (real problem) is driven by bilateral labour agreements full of loopholes, recruitment middlemen who extract illegal fees, and weak enforcement in source countries.
• Singapore’s climate policy is shaped by our energy mix, land constraints, and ASEAN coordination.
• The death penalty is a function of Singaporean criminal law and judicial philosophy.

None of these issues trace back to the U.S. Navy’s logistics agreements at Changi Naval Base.

Does American power play a role in global inequality? Of course. But when a movement claims that migrant debt, carbon emissions, criminal sentencing, and a Middle Eastern war are all symptoms of the same American disease, it has abandoned analysis in favour of an intellectually lazy, anti-hegemonic zeitgeist.

These are distinct problems with distinct, mostly local causes, and they require distinct solutions. Lumping them together does not sharpen the critique. It just demonstrates that thought terminating cliches and luxury beliefs are an American export. That’s where the real imperialism is. By parroting the very arguments found on liberal American campuses, transmitted through YouTube and adopted wholesale, the protestors participated in the very imperialism they sought to denounce.

“Stolen Land”? More Like Stolen Talking Points

The rally also claimed Singapore is built on “stolen land.” Who stole land? Whose land was stolen? If the protesters were claiming that our Chinese, Indian and Malay forefathers that migrated to Singapore stole land, then many protesters are also imperialists.

Singapore left Malaysia in 1965. We were not founded by displacing an indigenous population. We are a post-colonial city-state that forged sovereignty out of an unwanted separation.

Importing settler-colonial terminology from American and Australian debates and applying it here is a basic category error that tells you more about the speaker’s state of mind, rather than their understanding of basic history.

Defund What, Exactly?

Copy-pasted slogans demanded we “Defund Militarism” and lamented that there is “money 4 war but no $$$ for food.” This framing makes sense in the United States, where the federal defence budget genuinely competes with domestic welfare spending.

In Singapore this is absurd.

Our public housing, healthcare, and education systems are as well-funded as they are precisely because defence spending makes the country predictable, stable, and difficult to coerce. Foreign direct investment does not flow into undefended territories. The SAF underwrites social spending; it doesn’t drain it.

The “Hands Off” Erasure

Protesters chanted for the U.S. to take its “hands off” Iran, Venezuela, Syria, and the Philippines, as though removing American influence would solve each country’s problems. It would not.

• Syria’s worst atrocities were committed by Assad’s own barrel bombs against his own civilians.
• Iran’s theocratic regime executes dissidents and funds proxy wars across four countries without any American instruction.
• Venezuela’s economic collapse was engineered by Maduro’s own policies long before any sanctions bit.

Yes, American foreign policy has caused real harm in all four countries. Nobody serious disputes that. But the “Hands off” framing does something dishonest: it treats these governments as though they have no agency, no responsibility, and no capacity for homegrown failure and condescendingly reduces the entire Global South to passive victims of Washington.

The Smallness “Veil”

One speaker declared that Singapore’s smallness has become a “veil,” a psychological excuse for powerlessness that organised people power can tear away.

The facts are these. Singapore is 733 square kilometres with no natural resources and no strategic depth. Our foreign policy was built by a generation that understood a small state survives by being useful to great powers, never by lecturing them.

Smallness is not a mindset to be overcome through activism. It is the permanent geographic reality that every policy decision has to account for.

LKY and Lenin

Some speakers, and politicians and online personalities invoked the spirit of the 1954 anti-colonial protests, where a young Lee Kuan Yew defended students fighting for domestic self-determination.

Banners at the rally quoted Lenin’s 1917 pamphlet on capitalism and read “No War But Class War.” To borrow LKY’s name while promoting the ideology he spent his entire post-independence career opposing is to be historically illiterate.

Lee courted American strategic presence in Southeast Asia because he understood that ideological purity is a luxury small states cannot afford. The rally’s organisers apparently missed that part of history entirely.

The Comments Section Proved The Point

The Facebook comments section beneath the media coverage showed exactly why authorities had imposed restrictions in the first place. Within hours, commenters were no longer discussing the rally. They were arguing about Xinjiang, Yemen, Japanese war crimes, the Houthis, and at least three other conflicts.

Each person arrived with their own preferred atrocity and their own preferred villain.

This is what happens when a small, multi-ethnic society imports everyone else’s conflicts. The discussion splinters along every available fault line.

Singapore’s restrictions on conflict-related assemblies exist because a country of 5.9 million people, with multiple communities living side by side in deliberately integrated housing blocks, cannot afford to let its domestic cohesion become collateral damage in someone else’s war.

Solutions? None.

The rally offered no viable alternative to the security arrangements that keep the Strait of Malacca open and Singapore solvent.

What it offered was the one thing modern activism prizes above all else: the fleeting, unearned dopamine hit of feeling self-righteous.