Who is racist ex-professor Tan Boon Lee and does he hate all religions?

Overtly racist Ngee Ann Polytechnic ex-lecturer Tan Boon Lee’s behaviour in Dave Parkash’s video was not an isolated incident, but part of a pattern of racist behaviour that the former used to perpetuate in his classes.

An alleged former student of Lee posted about her experience with his overt racism in a class setting, where Lee used actual class time to lecture about Islam in a full-blown anti-Islamic rant to impressionable first year students in 2017.

Ngee Ann Polytechnic has since suspended Lee.

You can see the post below.

The Instagram user @_new_rule_ who called herself Nurul Fatimah Binti Iskandar said in an interview that, “He opened websites about Islam and explained why he didn’t agree with certain Quranic verses. He then singled me out, and tried to start a debate on the topic. It didn’t help that I was the only Muslim student in class and I sat in the front row.” The interview appeared in The Straits Times.

Lee declined to comment when asked about the incident, but he said that he recalled Nurul as a former student of his.

Nurul said in her Instagram post that she did not report the incident to Ngee Ann Polytechnic when it occurred, and the school said that it regretted her experience. Representative for the school went on to say, “Our staff members are expected to respect the cultural, ethnic and religious differences when interacting with students and other staff members.”

Natalie Siow Yu Zhen and her boyfriend have something to say about racist ex-lecturer Tan Boon Lee.

Comments on Nurul’s post were supportive of her speaking up on her experience with Lee, and some of them even shared experiences.

One commenter shared that Lee allegedly asked her to remove her hijab in class during another racist and Islamophobic perpetrated by Lee.

Another comment even mentioned that Lee allegedly targeted Christians as well in a separate occasion with the same negative slant to discussing their religion.

The same report from The Straits Times said that Lee is aiding in investigations as of publishing.

What did ex-professor Tan Boon Lee do to earn so much hate?

Ice cream shop owner Dave Parkash uploaded a video that was taken on June 6, Sunday night, about the over racism he and his girlfriend Jacqueline Ho, faced when they encountered Lee out in public.

The video, taken by 27-year-old Ho, showed Parkash and Lee in an argument in the street. Disturbing statements made by Lee pertained specifically to the inter-ethnicity relationship that Ho and Parkash were having. The two have been a couple for several years.

The ex-lecturer told them that a man of Indian descent and a Chinese woman together as a couple was a disgrace. He also made a comment that Dave was “preying” on the Chinese girl.

This was not new to Dave, who said he and his girlfriend had been subject to various instances of overt and subtle racism throughout their 7-year relationship.

He is of Indian and Filipino parentage, while his girlfriend, Ho, who is a designer in IT, is half-Thai and half-Singaporean Chinese.

Racism is everywhere

Parkash and Nurul separately confirmed that they had experienced casual and subtle raacism throughout their lives in Singapore, but had only been met with the overt kind from Lee.

A recent video uploaded by a man named Livanesh Ramu showed a neighbor disrupting his religious practice with a loud clanging gong in front of his own front door. He said that he lit incense every two weeks for five minutes.

Header image from Nurul Fatimah Binti Instagram account