It’s perfectly fine to ask if Mr. Alfian Sa’at’s module on dissent is academically ‘rigorous’ enough, or to question if the curriculum has crossed the fine line between education and activism.

To this, Minister Ong Ye Kung says ‘yes’. I think it’s fine. I’m sure we can agree to disagree.

What we should not do, however, is to make spurious allegations in Parliament. We should not be accusing Singaporean citizens of disloyalty, especially when there is little evidence to support such a thesis.

Yet, this is exactly what our Education Minister did on Monday—insinuate, cast aspersions, and sling mud. To give you ‘a flavour of his thinking’, let me take his words out of context and twist them to serve my own polemic:

Speaking on the issue of the Yale-NUS scandal, Mr OYK went from explaining MOE’s guiding principles to a series of personal attacks on Alfian Sa’at’s character.

First, he cited a poem from 1998 titled ‘Singapore, You Are Not My Country’, taking a few lines out of their original context (“And how can you call yourself a country, you terrible hallucination of highways and cranes and condominiums ten minutes’ drive from the MRT”) to underscore his point that—uh—actually I’m not sure what the point is.

He then recounted a 2013 case where Mr. Alfian apologised to Malaysians on behalf of the Singaporean government for arresting protestors. In more recent years, he has been found guilty of ‘praising’ the new Malaysia and ‘juxtaposing’ it favourably against Singapore.