TWITTER has deleted a tweet from Dr Mahathir Mohamad on Muslims’ “right to be angry” as glorifying violence following a beheading and knife attack in France.

The former prime minister had reproduced a post from his blog chedet.cc on the social-media platform to criticise French President Emmanuel Macron’s response to the October 16 beheading of a history teacher after showing pupils cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.

Yesterday, a knife-wielding man killed three people at a church in Nice, which Macron later called an “Islamist terrorist attack”.

Earlier, Twitter flagged Dr Mahathir’s tweet as “glorifying violence” but allowed it to remain in the public’s interest.

On Twitter’s guidelines and policies page, it said it recognises that sometimes it may be in the public interest to allow people to view tweets that would otherwise be taken down.

“We consider content to be in the public interest if it directly contributes to understanding or discussion of a matter of public concern,” said Twitter.

However, earlier today, the tweet, which said “Muslims have a right to be angry and to kill millions of French people for the massacres of the past”, was deleted.

Several Muslim-majority countries have launched campaigns to boycott French products, while protesters burnt the French flag and posters of Macron as demonstrations were held in Syria, Libya, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Palestinian territories, reports AFP.

France has been on high alert since the January 2015 massacre at the satirical weekly magazine Charlie Hebdo marked the beginning of a wave of jihadist attacks that have killed more than 250 people.

Tensions have heightened since last month, when the trial opened for 14 suspected accomplices in that attack.

The paper marked the start of the court proceedings by republishing cartoons of the Prophet that infuriated millions of Muslims worldwide – the same caricatures that teacher Samuel Paty used as lesson material. – October 30, 2020.