Kuala Lumpur: Former Prime Minister Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad
(pic) said his social media posting on Thursday that Muslims have a right “to kill millions of French people” has been taken out of context and misrepresented.Those who did that highlighted only one part of paragraph 12 which read: “Muslims have a right to be angry and to kill millions of French people for the massacres of the past.”
“They stopped there and implied that I am promoting the massacre of the French,” he said in his blog, Friday.
“If they had read the posting in its entirety and especially the subsequent sentence which read: 'But by and large the Muslims have not applied the ‘eye for an eye’ law. Muslims don’t. The French shouldn’t. Instead the French should teach their people to respect other people’s feelings,” said Dr Mahathir.
The 95-year-old leader said because of the spin and out-of-context presentation by those that picked up his posting, reports were made against him and he was accused of promoting violence.
He said Facebook and Twitter had then requested the administrators of his Facebook and Twitter accounts to remove the postings, and despite attempts to explain the context of the posting, they were removed.
“There is nothing I can do with Facebook and Twitter’s decision to remove my posting. To my mind, since they are the purveyor of freedom of speech, they must at least allow me to explain and defend my position,” he said. He said that is what freedom of speech is to them.
“On one hand, they defended those who chose to display offending caricatures of Prophet Muhammad S.A.W. and expect all Muslims to swallow it in the name of freedom of speech and expression. On the other they deleted deliberately that Muslims had never sought revenge for the injustice against them in the past,” said Dr Mahathir.
He said even his appeal that the French should explain the need to advise their people to be sensitive and respect the beliefs of other people was left out.
He said he was indeed disgusted with attempts to misrepresent and take out of context his Thursday posting. What is promoted, he said, by these reactions to his article is to stir French hatred for Muslims.
The controversial tweet by Dr Mahathir concerning the attack on a cathedral in Nice, France has since drawn condemnation from Australian figures and leaders.
Sydney Morning Herald reported former Australian Ambassador to France Brendan Berne referring to the 95-year old ex-Prime Minister as a “pious hypocrite”.
“As Australians, we know very well that this is a man who likes to provoke. He is a bigot without principles, except those of attacking the Western world,” he wrote in French.
Berne recently ended his three-year tenure in Paris on October 16, and has since resettled in Nice. It is understood that he was at the Notre-Dame Basilica less than 24 hours before it was attacked on Thursday.
Similarly, High Commissioner of Australia to Malaysia Andrew Goledzinowski said he found Dr Mahathir's remarks deeply disturbing.
“I know that he has not, and would not, advocated actual violence. But in the current climate, words can have consequences,” he said on Twitter.
Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison also slammed Dr Mahathir for his remarks, calling them absurd and abhorrent.
“The only thing that should be said today is to completely condemn those attacks. The only response is to be utterly, utterly devastated.
“This was the most callous and cowardly and vicious act of barbarism by a terrorist, and should be condemned in the strongest possible way,” he said during an interview with Sydney-based radio station 2GB today morning.
Morrison later tweeted that Australia's hearts go out to the French people who are dealing with so much during Covid-19, and that they condemn all acts of terrorism and stand united against such vile acts.
The attack in Nice comes while France is still reeling from the beheading earlier this month of French middle school teacher Samuel Paty by a man of Chechen origin.
Since Paty’s killing, French officials – backed by many ordinary citizens – have re-asserted the right to display the cartoons, and the images have been widely displayed at marches in solidarity with the killed teacher.
That has prompted an outpouring of anger in parts of the Muslim world, with some governments accusing French leader Emmanuel Macron of pursuing an anti-Islam agenda.
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