Recently, Malaysia made international news for all the wrong reasons (again). In case you missed it, former Prime Minister, Tun Mahathir Mohamad shared his views on the ongoing unrest in France through a Twitter thread which has caused international outrage for one particular tweet.
Twitter has subsequently deleted the tweet for “violating Twitter rules about glorifying violence”. Here is a screenshot of the tweet in question:
At first glance, Tun Mahathir’s tweet is indeed shocking and warrants international outrage. However, to be fair to him, this was a Twitter thread which he shared point by point his blog post on the matter.
Well, the former Prime Minister took to social media again to clarify what he actually meant and the post contained some strong words in it. Titled ‘MISREPRESENTED CONTEXT’ and shared on Facebook, Twitter as well as on his Che Det blog, Tun Mahathir said that he is ‘disgusted with attempts to misrepresent and take out of context’ what he wrote.
He iterated that the majority of people, especially international media only highlighted one part of his write-up, which was the 12th paragraph which reads:
“Muslims have a right to be angry and to kill millions of French people for the massacres of the past.”
Tun Mahathir said that these people stopped there and implied that he was promoting massacre of the French. However, if the posting was read as a whole, such thought would never surfaced, especially the subsequent sentence which read,
“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.”
Tun Mahathir further explained that because of the spin and out of context presentation, reports were made against him and that he was accused of promoting violence. In fact, Facebook and Twitter even requested his admins to remove the post, despite attempts to explain the post’s context.
Tun Mathathir ended his post by suggesting that the reaction to his post was just to stir French hatred for Muslims even more. You can read the whole post here.
What do you guys think of the whole controversy? Was Tun Mahathir misrepresented? If so, should he have worded his postings more carefully? Share your thoughts with us in the comments!
