I chanced upon this hilarious section while flipping through Today earlier, misleadingly titled “Good to hear voices from both Mid-E camps“. Here’s what I read:
He’s so nutty that I can’t tell if he’s just joking and being facetious, or if he actually believes what he’s writing. He is so far out that he can’t even remotely be described as being in ANY camp regarding the Middle East conflict. Maybe the “space aliens are invading us” or “LSD is my best friend ooh look at all the pretty colours” camp.
Even worse, you wonder to yourself what the hell the editors at Today were doing. I thought they would have some quality control as to the kinds of reader submissions they would publish.
I used to think that this Wong Hoong Hooi guy was just some harmless eccentric fellow, even though I don’t agree with most of what he says. Now I just think he’s a complete nutso fruitcake who drank too much of that “Asian values” kool-aid.
Read it for yourself and decide.
10 Comments
He has problems.
I am in today’s Today as well! In somewhat modified form, under the letters about the whole happiness shebang. I didn’t think it was particularly important to write it (it’s not like anyone would take this Adrian Tan guy’s recommendations seriously anyway) but it was a good opportunity for “get out of my hair” type sentiments to be published.
False dichotomy means die die must have opposing view for “balanced coverage”… *coughs*
Lol! I don’t get it. First he seems to be against the Anglo-Saxon hemegony, then he says that English muts be acknowledged as the dominant language (wtf???), and right after that he contradicts himself by saying that other languages must be elavated to the same status as English, so that English won’t be totalitarian in nature. Seriously… wtf???
No he doesn’t.
He does not say that English must be acknowledged as the dominant language, he says that English IS the dominant language but we have to accept that it is only dominant for NOW, and that other languages are also valid. The language analogy is only used to illustrate the dominance of Western thoughts and ideals. He’s just saying that the West are essentially defining “free world”, and enforcing their own definition of “free”, and thus the Arab’s “right” to defence or otherwise is decided by the West.
So what’s wrong with that?
alex:
He’s wrong because nothing he says has any foundation in reality.
There is no such thing as “Western thought and ideals”. There are only ideas which are logical, or illogical.
And you can’t get any more illogical than stark raving lunatic like Wong Hoong Hooi.
He has a funny way of juxtaposing unconnected points: e.g. his recent letter telling pregnant women not to complain if they get sacked because men have to do NS.
Is there a Anglo-Saxon definition of “freedom” that is different from, say, an Asian definition of “freedom”? The Old Man seems to think so.
When I was in college I had a housemate who would always read out letters by this Wong Hoong Hooi, who was a regular contributor to the ST Forum. His views on sexism are extremist and are usually rather laughable.
This seems to be one of his more sensible letters, though, even though the bad grammar gives rise to all forms of misintepretation.
It is true that there is absolutely nothing wrong with western thought and ideals. But the way they are being practiced, especially in the Middle East, leaves much to be desired. So when he criticises the “free world” he’s not criticising the ideas, but the hypocrisy. Particularly the pro-Israeli bias of the Anglo Saxon countries.
It’s like saying that Israel is a free country when there are 2 sets of laws in the country - one for Jews and one for Arabs. To start a war with Lebanon because of a few captured soldiers - people think that that’s daft and rightly so.
It’s usually the case that whenever Palestinians harm Israelis, the Israelis will exact 10 times the retribution. You kill one of mine, I kill 10 of yours. It’s all in the history books.
The unfortunate part is that Wong Hoong Hooi is representing such viewpoints, and you can count on him to represent a viewpoint in such a manner that discredits it.
Actually Wong Hoon Hooi is a cool dude. He got into a long argument or “exchange” several yrs ago on matters regarding AWARE and how men are discriminated in Sg. IIRC he even sat down with Jenny Chua (dat tai tai bimbo) for a truce session at the end of dat drawn out exchange of words, hahaha. Once a while he will pop up to slam those feminists. The other long running pet peeve of Wong seems to be the discrimination of Chinese culture and language in Sg. Perhaps discrimination is too harsh a word to use, marginalised perhaps? Hence his regular jabs at those anglicized folks or bananas who couldn’t even write or pronounce their own chinese names.
What Israel can or cannot do is controlled by American interests and thus “Western thoughts and ideals”. I think there ARE definite differences between Western and Middle East cultures and ideals, e.g. in religion, political ideology, etc, etc so.
But yes, Israel’s response has been disproportionate.