Mahathir said Macron was “very primitive” for blaming Islam and Muslims over the beheading of a teacher recently, maintaining that the killing was not in line with Islamic teachings.

“Irrespective of the religion professed, angry people kill. 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. But by and large, the Muslims have not applied the ‘eye for an eye’ law. Muslims don’t.

“Since you have blamed all Muslims and Islam for what was committed by one angry person, the Muslims have a right to punish the French. The boycott cannot compensate for the wrongs committed by the French all these years,” he said in a blog post today.

Mahathir said freedom of expression does not include the liberty to insult other people or curse them, adding that, in Malaysia, serious racial conflicts have been averted thanks to the need to be aware of others’ sensitivities.

“If we are not, then this country would never be peaceful and stable.”

Macron’s comments last week came in response to the beheading of a teacher, Samuel Paty, outside his school in a suburb outside Paris earlier this month, after he had shown caricatures of Prophet Muhammad during a class he was leading on free speech.

The teacher became the target of an online hate campaign over his choice of lesson material – the same images that unleashed a bloody assault by Islamist gunmen on the office of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, the original publisher, in January 2015.

Aside from the backlash from Muslim leaders in a number of Muslim-majority countries, the French president’s comments have also garnered brickbats from those in Malaysia, including opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim and Foreign Minister Hishammuddin Hussein.