Former Malaysian leader Mahathir Mohamad stood by his widely condemned comments on attacks by Muslim extremists in France, saying Friday that they were taken out of context and criticizing Twitter and Facebook for removing his posts.

Mahathir, 95, sparked widespread outrage when he wrote on his blog Thursday that “Muslims have a right to be angry and kill millions of French people for the massacres of the past.”

Twitter removed a tweet from Mahathir containing the remark, which it said glorified violence and France’s digital minister demanded the company also ban Mahathir from its platform.

“I am indeed disgusted with attempts to misrepresent and take out of context what I wrote on my blog,” Mahathir said in a statement.

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.”

He said Twitter and Facebook removed the posting despite his explanation, slamming the move as hypocritical.

“On the one hand, they defended those who chose to display offending caricatures of Prophet Muhammad … and expect all Muslims to swallow it in the name of freedom of speech and expression,” he said.

“On the other hand, they deliberately deleted that Muslims had never sought revenge for the injustice against them in the past,” thereby stirring French hatred for Muslims, he added. On Twitter, however, that sentence was not deleted. A Mahathir staff member said the entire posting was removed by Facebook.

Facebook said in an email that it removed Mahathir’s posting for violating its policies. “We do not allow hate speech on Facebook and strongly condemn any support for violence, death or physical harm,” it said.

The comments by Mahathir, a two-time prime minister, were in response to calls by Muslim nations to boycott French products after French leader Emmanuel Macron described Islam as a religion “in crisis” and vowed to crack down on radicalism following the murder of a French teacher who showed his class a cartoon depicting Prophet Muhammad.

His remarks also came as a Tunisian man killed three people at a church in Nice, France.

The U.S. ambassador to Malaysia, Kamala Shirin Lakhdir, said Friday that she “strongly disagreed” with Mahathir’s statement. “Freedom of expression is a right, calling for violence is not,” she said in a brief statement.

Australian High Commissioner in Malaysia Andrew Goledzinowski wrote that even though Mahathir wasn’t advocating actual violence, “in the current climate, words can have consequences.”

Mahathir’s second stint as prime minister lasted from 2018 until he quit in February 2020.

Malaysia is known as one of the world’s most anti-Semitic countries and Mahathir has described himself as a proud anti-Semite, making comments such as “Jews are hook-nosed” and “rule the world by proxy.” An Anti-Defamation League survey showed that Malaysia has one of the highest rates of anti-Semitism in Southeast Asia, and maybe in the entire world.

Malaysia does not maintain diplomatic ties with Israel and has refused to host Israeli athletes for sports competitions on several occasions. In 2019, it lost the right to host the World Para Swimming Championships rather than host Israeli athletes and its Cabinet made an official decision not to host any events involving Israel or its representatives.

(YWN Israel Desk – Jerusalem & AP)