Press TV - By nominating an open Islamophobe to lead a top United Nations aid agency, the administration of US President Donald Trump has shown its disregard for freedom of religion, an American scholar and political commentator says.

Dr. Kevin Barrett, an author and Islamic researcher in Madison, Wisconsin, made the remarks in an interview with Press TV about Ken Issacs, the US State Department’s nominee to coordinate the UN International Organization for Migration, or IOM.

The State Department announced Thursday that Isaacs, who is the current vice president of the Christian relief organization Samaritan’s Purse, will become the director general of IOM.

“We have another Trump administration fiasco with the nomination of some Christian Zionist extremist Isaacs to head a UN agency responsible for distributing relief to refugees,” Barrett said.

Pointing to Issacs’ extreme anti-Muslim views, Barrett said he would give Christians “preferential treatment” if approved for the job.

Following a terrorist attack in London last June, Issacs reposted and commented on a CNN International story that quoted a Catholic bishop as saying “this isn’t in the name of God, this isn’t what the Muslim faith asks people to do.” He then responded to the news item by writing, “CNN, Bishop if you read the Quran you will know ‘this’ is exactly what the Muslim faith instructs the faithful to do.”

The 169-member IOM has almost $1 billion annual operating budget and for decades has called on the US, one of its top benefactors, to lead the organization, The Washington Post noted.

Barrett said Isaacs’ election ran against the most foundational American principles, including the US Constitution’s First Amendment, “which shrines religious freedom as the most important mission of the United States.”

Calling Isaacs a “traitor” to the Constitution, the analyst said appointing him to any position was “outrages,” although he had the right to express his opinions as long he remained an ordinary citizen.

Barrett predicted that the nomination would face strong opposition at the UN but said this would not end Washington’s hostility towards Islam.

“It is a symptom of the neoconservative war on Islam on behalf of Israel which of course was launched in the public relations stunts of September 11, 2001 when Israeli infiltrators in the United States and their neoconservative confederates managed to blow up the World Trade Center and murder 3,000 Americans in an act wrongly contributed to radical Muslims,” he argued.