The South Korean tech company Samsung recently pulled an online advertisement showing a hijabi Muslim woman supporting her drag queen son after intense criticism from residents of Singapore, the ad’s target audience, Agence France-Press (AFP) reported on Friday.
Samsung said this week it chose to remove the video advertisement “from all public platforms” because it “may be perceived as insensitive and offensive” to some members of the Singaporean public, AFP reported on January 21.
“We acknowledge that we have fallen short in this instance,” the tech giant wrote in a Facebook post.
The commercial in question featured a hijab-clad Muslim woman using Samsung headphones to listen to a voice message recorded by her son as he was preparing to perform as a drag queen. One scene depicts the young son placing a wig cap on his head. The son paints his face in makeup to appear more feminine in another scene, applying foundation and false eyelashes in a mirror. He ends his appearance in the advertisement by joining his mother in a full drag queen costume.
The advertisement sparked a tremendous backlash among many Singaporeans who called for Samsung to withdraw the ad in the days leading up to its recall.
“We Are Against Pinkdot,” an organization that describes itself as a “public policy group … [that] stands against the normalization of homosexuality within Singaporean society,” led an online campaign to remove the Samsung ad through its social media platforms starting on about January 15.
The group said Samsung’s ad represented “an unfortunate attempt to push the LGBT ideology into a largely conservative Muslim community.”
“We are against the ideology of mainstreaming homosexuality and transgenderism into a conservative society,” the organization affirmed.
The Republic of Singapore is a city-state with a population that includes a significant minority of ethnic Malay Muslims who comprise 13.5 percent of the republic’s 5.45 million inhabitants. According to Singapore’s 2020 census, 15.6 percent of the republic’s population of 5.45 million identifies as Muslim.
“[A] rarely invoked colonial-era law banning sex between men was upheld by the country’s High Court only two years ago,” AFP noted of Singapore on Friday.
“Last May, the [Singaporean] government warned the US embassy ‘not to interfere’ in local matters after it hosted an online gay rights forum attended by Singaporean activists,” the French state-owned broadcaster recalled.
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