France terror attack: International leaders condemn Mahathir Mohamad's 'abhorrent' comments on stabbing

Mahathir speaks out on Friday, saying lines from his blog post that Muslims have a right ‘to kill millions of French people’ were taken out of context

Former Prime Minister of Malaysia Mahathir Mohamad is at the centre of a controversy after his comments on the Nice attack (Copyright 2020 The Associated Press. All rights reserved)

Australia’s prime minister has led international condemnation of a statement by Malaysia’s former leader Mahathir Mohamad after the Nice terror attack, in which he said Muslims “have a right to kill millions of French people”.

Scott Morrison told a Sydney radio station that the former Malaysian prime minister’s statement about Nice, issued in a blog post and repeated in a Twitter thread, was “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,” Mr Morrison told 2GB Radio.

He added that the French attacks were “the most callous and cowardly and vicious act of barbarism by a terrorist and should be condemned in the strongest possible way”.

“The heartache that would be going across the French people today as it shudders through the rest of the world is hard to put into words.” Mr Morrison said he had called France’s Emmanuel Macron to express sympathies in the wake of the attack.

Mahathir has issued a follow-up statement on Friday, saying that his words about the Nice attack were taken out of context.

Posts in which Mahathir said Muslims have “a right to kill millions of French people for the massacres of the past” have been removed from Twitter and Facebook by the social media platforms themselves, with Twitter saying it could incite violence.

Mahathir was tweeting about the Nice attack, in which three people were stabbed to death at a church, and linking them to the death of French teacher Samuel Paty, who was beheaded after showing his pupils the cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad printed by French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.

Mr Macron has defended freedom of expression in France, saying that his country “will not give up our cartoons”.

In one tweet in the thread on Thursday, Mahathir said: “Macron is not showing that he is civilised. He is very primitive in blaming the religion of Islam and Muslims for the killing of the insulting school teacher.”

He added: “But irrespective of the religion professed, angry people kill. The French in the course of their history has killed millions of people. Many were Muslims.”

“Muslims have a right to be angry and to kill millions of French people for the massacres of the past.

Tweet of Mahathir Mohamad now taken down by Twitter (Screengrab/Twitter)

“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.”

The tweets come at a time when there is heightened tension between France and various Muslim-majority nations, where leaders have criticised Mr Macron for defending the Muhammad cartoons. 

Since Paty’s death, the cartoons have also been projected onto the sides of two government buildings in southern France during events to honour the memory of the slain teacher.