Malaysia’s Mahathir hits back at critics, says comments on France and Muslims were taken out of context

Name: Malaysia’s ex-PM says Muslims ‘have right to kill millions of French’ hours after France attack
Uploaded: 2020-10-30T10:59:19.000Z
Duration: 5 min 32 s
Description: Malaysia’s ex-PM says Muslims ‘have right to kill millions of French’ hours after France attack

The 95-year-old had written that ‘Muslims have a right … to kill millions of French people’, but says reports omitted a crucial subsequent sentence

He also blamed social media giants Twitter and Facebook for the fiasco, suggesting they employed double standards when it came to matters concerning Islam

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Mahathir’s Thursday blog post has drawn reactions from around the world. Photo: Reuters

Bhavan Jaipragas

Published: 6:59pm, 30 Oct 2020Updated: 1:00am, 31 Oct 2020

Mahathir Mohamad, the former prime minister of Malaysia, on Friday blasted critics whom he says misrepresented a blog post in which he wrote that “Muslims have a right to kill French people for the massacres of the past” by deliberately omitting crucial context for his remarks.

The 95-year-old politician also blamed social media giants Twitter and Facebook for the fiasco, and suggested they employed double standards when it came to matters concerning Islam.

His controversial blog post went viral around the world after it was serialised as a thread on Twitter, with the social media platform hours later removing one of the tweets that was deemed to be objectionable. Mahathir said Facebook had taken such action as well.

“I am indeed disgusted with attempts to misrepresent and take out of context what I wrote on my blog yesterday,” he wrote on Friday.

The original post, posted on his popular blog chedet.cc on Thursday, was a response to calls across the Muslim world for a boycott of products from France following French president Emmanuel Macron’s remarks earlier in October describing Islam as a “religion in crisis”.

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Malaysia’s ex-PM says Muslims ‘have right to kill millions of French’ hours after France attack

Mahathir had suggested it was egregious for Macron to tar all Muslims with a broad brush following the murder of a teacher in Paris who had showed his class cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed.

“Muslims have a right to be angry and to kill millions of French people for the massacres of the past. But by and large the Muslims have not applied the ‘eye for an eye’ law. Muslims don’t. The French shouldn’t,” Mahathir wrote yesterday, pointing out on Friday that the first sentence had been taken out of context without the accompaniment of the rest.