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Former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad accused Twitter and Facebook of unfair treatment on Friday after they removed his posts that said Muslims had the right to “kill millions of Frenchmen.”
The 95-year-old man sparked outrage by posting the comments on platforms a day earlier, shortly after a man with a knife killed three people in a church in Nice, the latest attack by France attributed to Islamist terrorism.
But Mahathir, who was the Muslim-majority prime minister of Malaysia until February, said his comments had been misrepresented and that his main intention was to express that Muslims had never sought revenge for injustices.
He said the posts were removed despite attempts to delineate context, adding that Facebook and Twitter “should at least allow me to explain and defend my position.”
“But that’s what freedom of speech is for them. 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.
“On the other hand, they deliberately removed that Muslims had never sought revenge for injustice against them in the past.”
Neither Facebook nor Twitter responded directly to Mahathir’s latest comments.
Mahathir’s posts did not refer to the Nice attack, which followed the beheading of a French teacher who had shown students caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad and the subsequent tensions between France and Muslim countries.
He said the French “in the course of their history have killed millions of people. Many were Muslims. Muslims have the right to be angry and kill millions of French for the massacres of the past.”
But he added that “in general, Muslims have not applied the ‘tit-for-tat’ law. Muslims have not. The French shouldn’t.
mr / gle
