Word: fayed
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Singagpore Government's statement on the condition of Michael Fay, the American recently caned for vandalism, as reported by Reuters yesterday...
Despite pleas for clemency from the White House, Singapore not only appears determined to carry out its caning sentence on American teenager Michael Fay, but is planning the same punishment for another youth. A second American, who was arrested for vandalism along with Fay, is still on trial. Singapore's Senior Minister and predominant political personality, Lee Kuan Yew, 70, recently addressed this and other issues of U.S. policy with managing editor James R. Gaines, chief of correspondents Joelle Attinger, Southeast Asia bureau chief William Dowell and senior correspondent Sandra Burton. Excerpts...
...caning sentence has fascinated many Americans who had never heard of Singapore and perhaps could not tell Southeast Asia from Sweden on a map. It has concentrated minds wondrously on an already lively domestic debate over what constitutes a due balance between individual and majority rights. Too bad Michael Fay has become a fulcrum for this discussion. Not only does he seem destined to be pummeled and immobilized by an instrument of ordeal, but the use of Singapore as a standard for judging any other society, let alone the cacophonous U.S., is fairly worthless...
Singaporeans have every right to be proud of their achievements. Does that justify Michael Fay's sentence? A letter writer to the New York Times advised that "six of the best," as he suffered at an English public (that is, private) school, might cure all that ails American youth. Comparing Fay's sentence to a headmaster's paddling is fatuous -- but then, as John Updike once noted, old boys of Eton and Harrow can often "mistake a sports car for a woman or a birch rod for a mother's kiss." The pain from flaying with wet rattan...
...circumstances of this affair -- evidently no Singaporean has ever been punished under the Vandalism Act for defacing private property -- suggest that Singapore has used Fay as an unwilling point man in a growing quarrel between East and West about human rights. Several large Asian countries, China among them, argue that the U.S. has no business criticizing their own, equally legitimate values. But Japan stresses majority rights too. So does Hong Kong. Neither is watering its economic miracle with the blood from a bamboo cane...