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Former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad has maintained his widely condemned comments on the attacks by Muslim extremists in France, saying they were taken out of context. He also criticized Twitter and Facebook for removing his posts.
Mahathir, 95, sparked widespread anger when he blogged Thursday that “Muslims have the right to be angry and kill millions of French people for the massacres of the past.”
Twitter deleted a tweet from Mahathir containing the comment, which it said glorified the violence, and France’s digital minister demanded that the company also ban Mahathir from its platform.
“In fact, I am disgusted with attempts to misrepresent and take what I wrote on my blog out of context,” Mahathir said in a statement Friday.
He said that critics did not read his post in its entirety, especially the following sentence, which read: “But in general, Muslims have not applied the law of ‘an eye for an eye’. Muslims don’t. The French shouldn’t. Instead, the French should teach their people to respect the feelings of others. “
He said Twitter and Facebook removed the post despite his explanation and criticized the move as hypocritical.
“On the one hand, they defended those who chose to display offensive cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad … and they hope that all Muslims will buy it in the name of freedom of expression,” he said.
“On the other hand, they deliberately removed that Muslims had never sought revenge for injustice committed against them in the past,” prompting French hatred of Muslims, he added. On Twitter, however, that phrase was not removed. A Mahathir staff member said Facebook removed the entire post.
Facebook Malaysia said in an email that it removed Mahathir’s post for violating its policies. “We do not allow hate speech on Facebook and we strongly condemn any support for violence, death or physical harm,” he said.
The comments by Mahathir, a two-time prime minister, were in response to calls from Muslim nations to boycott French products after French President Emmanuel Macron described Islam as a religion “in crisis” and promised to take action. fiercely against radicalism after the murder of a French teacher who showed his class a cartoon depicting the Prophet Muhammad.
His comments also came when a Tunisian killed three people in a church in Nice, France. Mahathir wrote about cultural clashes between the Western and Islamic world and condemned French President Emmanuel Macron for linking Thursday’s attack in Nice with Islam.
The US ambassador to Malaysia, Kamala Shirin Lakhdir, said she “totally disagreed” with Mahathir’s statement. “Freedom of expression is a right, asking for violence is not,” he said in a brief statement Friday.
Australian High Commissioner in Malaysia Andrew Goledzinowski wrote that while Mahathir was not advocating actual violence, “in the current climate, words can have consequences.”
Mahathir’s second term as prime minister lasted from 2018 until he resigned in February 2020.
He has been seen as a defender of moderate Islamic views and a spokesperson for the interests of developing countries. At the same time, he deliberately criticized Western society and nations and their relations with the Muslim world, while in Israel and elsewhere he was denounced for making anti-Semitic comments.
