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PETALING JAYA: Former Prime Minister Dr. Mahathir Mohamad has defended calls on Muslims to boycott French products in response to comments on Islam by French President Emmanuel Macron.
Mahathir said Macron was “very primitive” for blaming Islam and Muslims for the beheading of a teacher recently, and maintained that the killing was not in line with Islamic teachings.
“Regardless of your religion, angry people kill. The French throughout their history have killed millions of people. Many were Muslim.
Muslims have the right to be angry and kill millions of French people for the massacres of the past. But in general, Muslims have not applied the law of “tit for tat”. Muslims do not.
“Since he has blamed all Muslims and Islam for what an angry person did, Muslims have the right to punish the French. The boycott cannot make up for the mistakes made by the French over all these years, ”he said in a blog post today.
Mahathir said that freedom of expression does not include the freedom to insult or curse other people, adding that, in Malaysia, serious racial conflicts have been avoided thanks to the need to be aware of the sensitivities of others.
“If we are not, this country will never be peaceful and stable.”
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.
Aside from the backlash from Muslim leaders in several Muslim-majority countries, the French president’s comments have also drawn criticism from those in Malaysia, including opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim and Foreign Minister Hishammuddin Hussein.
