In a 13-post Twitter thread uploaded Thursday night under the title Respect Others, the 95-year-old former strong man said he did not approve of the beheading earlier this month of a French high school teacher, Samuel Paty, by an 18-year-old Chechen Muslim, who was angered because he had shown his class a caricature of the Prophet Mohammad, and that the killing was “not in keeping with the teachings of Islam”.

“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,” he wrote.

Dr Mahathir, whose reformist coalition government collapsed last February after he refused to hand power as agreed to Anwar Ibrahim, slammed French President Emanuelle Macron as “primitive” for declaring in response to the murder of “the insulting schoolteacher” that Islam was a religion in crisis.

“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 boycott cannot compensate the wrongs committed by the French all these years,” he wrote.

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