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PETALING JAYA: Malaysian political leaders have criticized French President Emmanuel Macron for his insensitive comments on Islam.
In a statement today, opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim said that Macron’s statement that Islam is facing a crisis around the world is offensive and unreasonable.
“To broaden the reasoned diagnosis of a radical fringe and then to involve the whole not only of Muslim communities everywhere, but the character of Islam itself is a great ignorance,” he said.
Macron’s comments last week came in response to the beheading of a teacher, Samuel Paty, outside his school in a suburb outside Paris earlier this month, after he showed cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad during a class. who directed on freedom of expression.
The teacher became the target of an online hate campaign for his choice of lesson material – the same images that sparked a bloody assault by Islamist gunmen at the office of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, the original editor, in January 2015.
Anwar said the Muslim world did not need sermons any more than it could tolerate the defamatory slurs and Islamophobic rhetoric of the French president.
“As long as it persists in its blind ignorance of the breadth and sophistication of Islam as a world of values and ideals, we will not be able to advance the cause of confronting the fundamentalist prejudices that afflict both sides.”
Meanwhile, PAS today submitted a memorandum to the French Embassy in Malaysia objecting to the French president’s statement.
“PAS calls on Muslims to defend Islam. Muslims must unite to prevent the sanctity of this religion from being ripped apart and insulted by enemies of Islam around the world, ”PAS information chief Kamaruzaman Mohamad said today in a Facebook post.
