Australian high commissioner ‘deeply disturbed’ by Dr M’s tweet

 

Dr Mahathir supports the boycott of French products in response to remarks on Islam made by French President Emmanuel Macron.

PETALING JAYA: Australia’s top diplomat in Malaysia has expressed great concern over former prime minister Dr Mahathir’s Mohamad’s response to the “boycott French products” movement being promoted by Muslims in many countries.

High Commissioner Andrew Goledzinowski said he was “deeply disturbed” by what Mahathir had written in his blog today.

“Though the former prime minister has not, and would not advocate actual violence, but in the current climate, words can have consequences,” he said in a tweet.

Earlier today, Mahathir defended calls for Muslims to boycott French products in response to remarks on Islam made by French President Emmanuel Macron.

In a series of tweets, repeating what he had written in his blog, Mahathir said Macron was “very primitive” for blaming Islam and Muslims over the beheading of a teacher recently, maintaining that the killing was not in line with Islamic teachings.

“Irrespective of the religion professed, angry people kill. The French in the course of their history have killed millions of people. Many were Muslims,” he said in one tweet.

This was followed by the tweet that was flagged, which read: “Muslims have a right to be angry and to kill millions of French people for the massacres of the past.”

Twitter had initially flagged the controversial tweet because it was seen to be “glorifying violence”.

“However, Twitter has determined that it may be in the public’s interest for the tweet to remain accessible,” it said, adding that any retweeting of the controversial post would not be allowed.

However, shortly afterwards, the tweet was deleted entirely.

Macron’s comments last week came in response to the beheading of a teacher, Samuel Paty, outside his school in a suburb outside Paris earlier this month, after he had shown caricatures of Prophet Muhammad during a class he was leading on free speech.

The teacher became the target of an online hate campaign over his choice of lesson material – the same images that unleashed a bloody assault by Islamist gunmen on the office of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, the original publisher, in January 2015. - FMT