The Most Dangerous Racial Agitator May Not Even Be in Singapore. The Law Can Restrict the Agitator. Singaporeans Must Stop the Amplification.
Singapore’s new racial harmony law is necessary because communal agitation no longer needs to originate inside Singapore. But law can only restrict the agitator. Singaporeans themselves decide whether the agitation takes root.
The most dangerous racial agitator in Singapore may not even be in Singapore.
He could be thousands of kilometres away, speaking into a phone, uploading a video and relying on Singaporeans to do the rest.
No rally.
No pamphlets.
No physical organisation.
No local presence.
Just an audience.
That is one reason I welcome the Maintenance of Racial Harmony Act, which takes effect on 15 September 2026.
Singapore’s racial harmony is too valuable to defend only after it breaks.
The law consolidates race-related offences, introduces a restraining-order regime, establishes the Presidential Council for Racial and Religious Harmony, creates a community-remediation framework and adds safeguards concerning foreign influence over race-based organisations.
The legal problem today is not simply that inflammatory speech exists.
It is that digital distribution can turn a fringe provocation into a national conversation before traditional enforcement has even begun.
That changes the problem.
And Singapore’s legal architecture has to respond to that change.
Racial Harmony Does Not Preserve Itself
Singapore has lived with relative racial peace for long enough that it can sometimes feel permanent.
It is not.
Our cohesion did not emerge automatically because Chinese, Malays, Indians and others eventually learnt to coexist.
Singapore built institutions around it.
Schools.
Housing policy.
Common spaces.
Community organisations.
Minority representation.
Religious-harmony frameworks.
Political norms.
Law.
And, perhaps most importantly, an insistence that citizenship must matter more politically than ancestry.
The danger of success is complacency.
When several generations grow up without communal violence, preventive safeguards can start to look unnecessary.
But racial harmony is not self-sustaining.
It has to be maintained before hostility becomes confrontation.
By the time communal hatred turns physical, social trust has already failed.
That is why I support Singapore acting early where the legal threshold is met.
What the New Law Actually Does
The restraining-order regime is one of the most important parts of the new framework.
The Home Affairs Minister can issue orders against persons or entities involved in producing, communicating or distributing material prejudicial to racial harmony.
Depending on the circumstances, an order can restrict distribution, communications to particular audiences, or require reasonable steps to remove specified material from public availability in Singapore.
It can take effect immediately.
That speed is the point.
Online racial agitation does not wait for a criminal trial.
But preventive power deserves closer scrutiny precisely because it can operate before criminal conviction.
That makes safeguards important.
Restraining orders are time-limited. Affected parties receive grounds for the order and can make representations. The Presidential Council for Racial and Religious Harmony reviews the matter and makes recommendations, while the constitutional process involving the President and Cabinet provides a further check.
Those protections matter because Singapore must preserve room for legitimate disagreement.
People must still be able to say:
Immigration policy is wrong.
Integration is failing.
A minority community faces genuine problems.
Discrimination exists.
Government policy should change.
Our history should be interpreted differently.
These are not threats to racial harmony merely because they are uncomfortable.
A strong system must distinguish between difficult discussion and conduct intended or likely to produce racial hostility, denigration, incitement or violence.
The answer to toxic racial politics cannot be silence.
It must be disciplined speech, evidence, law and civic responsibility.
Zulfikar Shariff Shows Why Geography Is No Longer Enough
Zulfikar Mohamad Shariff illustrates the cross-border problem clearly.
He was detained under the Internal Security Act in 2016 after MHA said he had promoted terrorism and glorified ISIS online. Authorities said his activities contributed to the radicalisation of at least two Singaporeans and that he advocated replacing Singapore’s secular democratic system with an Islamic state governed by Syariah law, including acceptance of violence if necessary.
He later renounced Singapore citizenship in 2020 and is now an Australian citizen.
Yet leaving Singapore did not make him irrelevant to Singapore.
In 2025, MHA said he continued attempting to stir discontent among Malay/Muslims in Singapore against the Chinese community. Authorities subsequently issued directions under the Online Criminal Harms Act requiring access to his TikTok and Facebook presence to be disabled for users in Singapore, while police investigations were initiated.
The important point is not Zulfikar himself.
It is the model he demonstrates.
The agitator can be overseas.
The intended audience can remain Singaporean.
The racial fault line can remain here.
Physical absence no longer means political irrelevance.
And this is where precision matters.
Viewing overseas material is not the same thing as sharing it.
Sharing is not automatically the same as endorsing it.
Endorsing is not necessarily the same as coordinating.
And none of those acts should automatically be equated with incitement or a criminal offence.
But geography alone no longer answers the security question.
The relevant issue is whether conduct outside Singapore can produce harmful effects inside Singapore.
Foreign-Origin Content Is Not Automatically Foreign Interference
Singapore has already encountered other examples.
Earlier this year, authorities acted against social-media content targeting Singapore’s Indian community with inflammatory narratives, including claims that Singapore was being overrun by Indians and that its multiracial system was fraudulent.
Investigations indicated that some of the material likely originated on a China-based platform before spreading elsewhere.
Importantly, authorities said there was no evidence that this amounted to a coordinated campaign by any government or organisation.
That distinction must be preserved.
Foreign-origin content is not automatically foreign interference, and foreign interference is not the only way racial hostility can enter Singapore’s information space.
There are at least three different problems:
organic domestic prejudice;
foreign-origin inflammatory content;
and coordinated foreign interference.
They are not the same.
But they can reinforce one another.
A domestic audience already receptive to grievance can amplify foreign material.
Foreign narratives can validate local prejudice.
And organised actors, where they exist, can exploit divisions that are already present.
Singapore needs different tools for different layers of that problem.
Blocking Helps. It Does Not Solve Belief.
Access restrictions are useful.
They can reduce reach.
Lower discoverability.
Interrupt distribution.
Protect casual users from repeated exposure.
And send a clear legal signal.
But restrictions cannot eliminate screenshots, reposts, private forwarding, discussion or access from outside the restricted environment.
Blocking reduces transmission.
It does not erase belief.
And that leads to a harder problem.
A block can stop a page from appearing on your screen. It cannot stop you from wanting to believe what the page tells you.
That is not primarily a censorship problem.
It is a resilience problem.
What happens when someone actively seeks out a grievance because the grievance confirms what he already wants to believe?
No technical restriction can solve that.
Foreign Agitation Needs Local Oxygen
An overseas agitator has limited influence unless people here give his material distribution, credibility or emotional permission.
Someone shares the clip.
Someone reposts the allegation.
Someone removes the context.
Someone adds a more inflammatory caption.
Someone says:
“See? This is what they are doing to us.”
That is how foreign material becomes locally meaningful.
Not every repost is an offence.
Not every mistaken share is malicious.
But repeated, knowing amplification can still have serious social consequences even where no criminal threshold has been crossed.
Foreign agitation has limited power unless Singaporeans supply the distribution, credibility or emotional permission it needs.
This is why civic resilience matters as much as legal power.
A foreign speaker cannot manufacture an entire grievance community alone.
People here have to participate in building it.
The Standard Must Apply to Everyone
The legitimacy of this framework depends on symmetry.
No race should receive special protection from criticism.
And no race should receive permission to demonise another.
The civic principle should apply equally even though different statutes govern racial, religious, criminal-harm and national-security concerns.
No community’s history should be weaponised into a claim of superiority, permanent victimhood or hostility towards another Singaporean community.
Imported Chinese ethnonationalism should find no political home here.
Neither should Malay communalism.
Nor Hindu nationalism.
Nor Islamist supremacism.
Nor far-right racial ideology.
The question is not:
Whose side is speaking?
The question is:
What is this conduct doing to Singapore?
That distinction matters to me because cultural pride itself is not the problem.
My own work with The Keris Collector is built around cultural inheritance.
There is nothing wrong with knowing where we came from.
There is nothing wrong with preserving Malay, Chinese, Indian or any other heritage.
But heritage should deepen understanding, not become ammunition against fellow Singaporeans.
Cultural pride is legitimate. Racial antagonism is not.
Our ancestry may cross borders.
Our political community is Singapore.
Singapore First
This is ultimately why I welcome the new law.
Not because I want Government policing every offensive opinion.
Not because difficult discussions about race should disappear.
And not because I think one community is inherently more dangerous than another.
I welcome it because Singapore has built something difficult and valuable: a multiracial political community in which citizenship is supposed to matter more than ancestral rivalry.
That settlement is worth defending.
Since the last General Election, I have increasingly pushed back against attempts to interpret Singapore through crude communal frames, including narratives portraying Malay/Muslims as an oppressed bloc whose natural adversary is the Chinese community.
I claim no special influence.
But the concerns increasingly overlap with problems Government agencies have themselves identified: racial grievance can be cultivated online, carried across borders and used to weaken identification with Singapore.
The answer must not be to declare every grievance illegitimate.
Real discrimination should be confronted.
Real policy failures should be debated.
Minority concerns should be heard.
Historical claims should be examined.
Government should be challenged when evidence warrants it.
But there is an enormous difference between:
“Singapore has a problem we should fix.”
and
“Your fellow Singaporeans of another race are your enemy.”
The first can strengthen Singapore.
The second can tear at the basis on which Singapore exists.
Law can help maintain that boundary.
OCHA can restrict certain criminally harmful online content.
FICA addresses particular forms of foreign interference.
Police investigate offences.
ISD deals with a much more serious layer involving extremism, terrorism, subversion and threats to national security.
The Maintenance of Racial Harmony Act adds a preventive instrument focused specifically on racial harmony.
These tools should complement one another.
They should not blur into a system where every offensive opinion becomes a security threat.
And none of them can substitute for citizenship.
Singapore can legislate against incitement.
It can restrict harmful content.
It can investigate offences.
It can disrupt serious threats.
What it cannot legislate into existence is loyalty to one another.
That part is ours.
Singapore First means refusing to let a foreign agitator, domestic opportunist, anonymous account or ideological movement decide who our enemies are.
The law can draw the line.
Singaporeans still have to choose not to cross it.
CONCISE SOURCE / REFERENCE NOTE
This essay draws primarily on the Maintenance of Racial Harmony Act 2025, MHA’s legislative and restraining-order materials, and CNA’s reporting on the law taking effect on 15 September 2026. The Act creates preventive restraining orders subject to review and institutional safeguards while preserving space for good-faith discussion of racial issues. The Zulfikar Mohamad Shariff case is based on MHA’s 2016 ISA statement and its 2025 OCHA action, which recorded his earlier detention, renunciation of Singapore citizenship, Australian citizenship and subsequent online agitation aimed at Singapore audiences. The anti-Indian content case relies on MHA’s 2026 statements, which said some material likely originated overseas while explicitly stating there was no evidence of a coordinated campaign by a government or organisation. These examples illustrate the difference between domestic prejudice, foreign-origin inflammatory content and coordinated foreign interference, while supporting the broader argument that Singapore’s strongest defence combines law, institutional safeguards and civic refusal to amplify racial hostility.