KUALA LUMPUR: Following his controversial remark of "Muslims have a right to kill millions of French people" and being recently labelled as one of the world's top 20 most dangerous extremists, former Prime Minister Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad has hit back at the international community.
Dr Mahathir pointed out that he has never killed anyone, unlike former US president George W Bush and former UK prime minister Tony Blair when they declared war on Iraq, killing hundreds of thousands of people.
"Muslim law says 'an eye for an eye'. If you kill a person, you should be killed. I am stating the law in Islam and yet, even Muslims don't follow their own law and start killing people.
"The Muslims are very accommodating, and they practically made peace with France," he said in an interview with the BFM radio station, earlier this morning.
When asked what warranted his comment on killing millions of French citizens, especially since he is a trained doctor, Dr Mahathir dismissed the criticisms hurled at him, saying it was simply an attempt to put a label on him.
"I have criticised the West and condemned them for supporting the Jews when the Jews committed wrongdoings and because of that, the West doesn't like me.
"The thing is, no one else would say this. But I did, even at the United Nations (assembly). I said they were not being fair and now they are trying to find a way to label me as a terrorist, when Blair and Bush declared war on Iraq.
"See what's happening in Iraq? Do you see it? They are the terrorists, not me. I never killed a single person," he said.
The Iraq War began in 2003 with the invasion of Iraq by a US-led coalition that led to the overthrow of the Saddam Hussein government. This was part of the George W Bush administration's War on Terror following the Sept 11 attacks - despite there being no connection of the latter to Iraq.
The conflict continued for much of the next decade as an insurgency emerged to oppose the occupying forces and the post-invasion Iraqi government. An estimated 151,000 to 1,033,000 Iraqis were killed in the first three to four years of conflict.