The Ngee Ann Polytechnic lecturer being investigated for allegedly insulting an interracial couple is now accused of spreading Islamophobia in class.
His former student, Nurul Fatimah Binti Iskandar Muda Abdul Jalil, outed senior lecturer Tan Boon Lee on social media yesterday for questioning Islamic beliefs and speaking critically of the religion during class back in 2017, prompting the student to ditch the lesson halfway. She reported the senior lecturer to the school but heard nothing back, she said.
“On 28th July 2017, Mr Tan used our class period to have a full-on discourse about Islam which escalated so badly that I ended up sitting outside on the floor of the corridor with my classmate, Merick, waiting for his unsettling speech to be over,” she wrote.
“I remember being livid. I remember trying to build up the courage to finally make a complaint. I remember nothing happening,” she added. The student was the only Muslim in class, according to her. Her 2017 class timetable listed Tan as the lecturer for “Object Oriented Programming.”
Insisting that Muslims were treating god like their father was just one of the things Tan had said before Nurul Fatimah and a classmate walked out, according to her.
She also quoted him as saying: “What type of father tells [you] to worship him 5 times a day and threatens to send [you] to hell if you don’t?”
As well as the following: “Only animals will treat their children like how Allah does to his people […] We need to be smart enough to identify if the religion we follow is fake or not.”
Nurul Fatimah believed that Tan should not be allowed back into the classrooms when investigations into his alleged racist outburst conclude. Tan, who seemed to disapprove of interracial couples, was captured in a viral video confronting a Filipino-Indian Singaporean man dating a Thai-Chinese woman that it was “racist that the Indian prey on Chinese [girls].”
Tan has been temporarily suspended while the school and police investigate the incident.
Neither Ngee Ann Polytechnic nor Nurul Fatimah immediately responded to Coconuts’ request for comment.
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