KUALA LUMPUR: Former prime minister Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad said his earlier post about prejudices that were leveled against Islam was taken out of context by certain quarters.
As a result, it has been implied that he was promoting the massacre of the French, he said in a blogpost today.
His earlier post on Twitter, which has been removed, faced backlash from many countries around the world.
Expressing disgust over the way some quarters had misconstrued his earlier statement, he said parts of what he had written were conveniently left out in certain media reports.
"Those who did that highlighted only one part of paragraph 12 which read: 'Muslims have a right to be angry and to kill millions of French people for the massacres of the past.'
"They stopped there and implied that I am promoting the massacre of the French.
"If they had read the posting in its entirety, 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," he wrote on chedet.cc.
His statement came on the heels of another tragedy in France yesterday, where three people were killed at a church in Nice, France in what authorities called the latest jihadist assault.
Twitter initially declined to remove Dr Mahathir's post, but caved in following strong reaction from the French government.
According to the Langkawi member of parliament, Facebook and Twitter had also sent requests to his social media accounts' administrators, asking for the postings to be deleted.
"Despite attempts to explain the context of the posting, they were removed," he wrote.
"There is nothing I can do with FB and Twitter's decision to remove my posting."
Dr Mahathir said as the purveyor of freedom of speech, the popular social media sites should have allowed him to explain and defend his position.
"But that is what freedom of speech is to them. On the one hand, they defended those who chose to display offending caricatures of Prophet Muhammad S.A.W. and expect all Muslims to swallow it in the name of freedom of speech and expression.
"On the other, they deleted deliberately that Muslim had never sought revenge for the injustice against them in the past," he said, adding his critics were trying to stir French hatred for Muslims.