Rod Stewart says Instagram post showing mock execution was him acting out 'Game of Thrones'

Rod Stewart provoked the ire of the internet Thursday with a hastily deleted Instagram post from the Abu Dhabi desert.

While on tour in the region, the 72-year-old singer appeared in an image on his wife, Penny Lancaster's, page that appeared to stage a mock execution.

The videotaped scene shows Stewart making a cutting motion across a man's neck, as the man kneels over the desert sand. The clip, which has since been deleted, looks eerily similar to Islamic State (ISIS) beheadings that have been posted online.

On Twitter, Stewart apologized and said he and his friends were just "larking about" and the video was "understandably ... misinterpreted."

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However, Stewart's actions drew the outrage of people such as John McCarthy, a British journalist who was kidnapped and held hostage during the Lebanon hostage crisis in 1986.

He told BBC Radio Scotland that Stewart has made "a grotesque thing into a kind of pantomime," saying the singer's actions weren't sensitive or respectful towards the victims of such violence or their families, who would be "absolutely sickened" by his behavior. "Your blood runs cold just imagining what it must be like to be in that situation in the last moments of your life or, indeed, as relatives to see that," McCarthy said.

Of course, Twitter also had its own set of choice words for the performer.

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Stewart has since denied that mocking an execution was what he and his friends were doing. Rather, he's since said, they were just "playing out Game of Thrones" and imitating the Beatles. And he apologized on Friday in a tweet.

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