A former Malaysian Prime Minister has sparked outrage for saying Muslims have the right to "kill millions of French people".
It comes after a knife-wielding attacker shouting "Allahu Akbar" (God is Greatest) decapitated a woman and killed two others at a church in Nice, France, on Thursday.
President Emmanuel Macron declared it an Islamist terrorist attack and said France had been attacked "over our values, for our taste for freedom, for the ability on our soil to have freedom of belief".
The attack came only two weeks after teacher Samuel Paty was beheaded in Paris for showing caricatures of the Prophet Mohammad in a civics lesson on freedom of speech. The caricatures are considered blasphemous by Muslims.
After the incident, Macron warned French citizens living or travelling in several Muslim-majority countries to take extra security precautions and pledged to fight "Islamist separatism".
On Friday Mahathir Mohamad, who was Malaysia's Prime Minister until February, took to Twitter and his blog criticising Macron's response.
The 95-year-old said the Prime Minister had shown he isn't "civilised" and said he was being primitive in blaming Islam and Muslims for Paty's death.
"Irrespective of the religion professed, angry people kill," he said.
"The French in the course of their history have 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."
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Mohamad said the French should teach their people to respect other people's feelings.
"Since you have blamed all Muslims and the Muslims' religion for what was done by one angry person, the Muslims have a right to punish the French."
The long post also included comments on issues including Western womens' clothing choices and Westerners' adherence to Christinaity.
Twitter quickly labelled the tweet as "glorifying violence" but allowed it to stay up because it "may" be in the public interest. The social media giant later removed the tweet entirely.
But French Minister of State for Digital and Telecommunications Cédric O called for harsher action.
"The account must be immediately suspended. If not, Twitter would be an accomplice to a formal call for murder," O said.
Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison also called the comments "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," he told Sydney radio 2GB, according to The Australian.
