Ex-Malaysian PM Mahathir Defends Controversial ‘Kill Millions’ Statement; Says Remarks Taken Out Of Context

Defending his comment that Muslims have a right to kill millions of French people for the massacres of the past, former Malaysian Prime Minister (PM) Mahathir Mohammad has rued over the removal of his comment from Twitter and Facebook, reports Livemint.

Aged 95, Mahathir has complained that his comment was taken out of context. In a statement issued by Mahathir, he said that he is disgusted by the attempts to misinterpret what he had written.

He said critics failed to read his posting in full, especially the next sentence which read: “But by and large 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.

Mahathir went on to call Facebook and Twitter's move to remove his comment as hypocritical and tried to push that they were defending those who chose to display "offending caricatures" of Prophet Muhammad and expecting the Muslims to swallow it in the name of freedom of speech and expression.

Mahathir had made the highly-controversial comments after French president Emmanuel Macron's asserted that Islam as a religion was in a state of crisis and vowed to crack down on radicalism following the open-street beheading of a teacher who had shown his students a cartoon depicting Prophet Mohammad.

In a twitter thread posted soon after the news broke of terror attack in Nice, France, Mohamad also says, "Since you have blamed all Muslims and the Muslims’ religion for what was done by one angry person, the Muslims have a right to punish the French. The boycott cannot compensate the wrongs committed by the French all these years".