News outlets are reporting that President-elect Donald Trump has offered the position of national security adviser to retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn and that Flynn has accepted. Flynn gravitated toward Trump after being forced out of the Defense Intelligence Agency in 2012, reportedly for being “a bad manager who left chaos in his wake.” On the campaign trail, Flynn has made a series of inflammatory comments, especially about Islam.
In August, the Dallas Morning News reported that Flynn had delivered a speech to a Dallas gathering of the anti-Muslim group ACT for America, in which he had called Islam “a political ideology” that hides behind “being a religion,” and “a cancer.”
A video posted by an attendee of the event confirms Flynn’s remarks. Here’s the relevant clip:
Islam is a political ideology. It is a political ideology. It definitely hides behind this notion of it being a religion. And I have a very, very tough time because I don’t see a lot of people screaming ‘Jesus Christ’ with hatchets or machetes or rifles shooting up clubs or hatcheting, literally axing families on a train, or like they just killed a couple of police officers with a machete. It’s unbelievable. So we have a problem.
It’s like cancer. You know, I’ve gone through cancer in my own life. So it’s like cancer. And it’s a like a malignant cancer, though, in this case. It has metastasized.
