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BE SMART ABOUT: Ken Isaacs, Nominated to United Nations post but hates Muslims and denies Climate Change
BE SMART ABOUT is an important series highlighting examples of those in power (or in danger of acquiring power) who you need to stay informed about so you can share this knowledge and together we can Be Smart and Actively Dissent.
Today we discuss Ken Isaacs, head of international relief for Samaritan's Purse, who is the Trump administration’s nominee to lead the UN International Organization for Migration.
United Nations’ International Organization for Migration, or IOM.... 169-member organization has a nearly $1 billion annual operating budget and for decades has deferred to the United States, one of its top benefactors, to lead the organization.... coordinate billions of dollars in assistance to migrants around the world....
Ken Isaacs was announced [last] Thursday as the Trump administration’s pick to become director general....
Ken Isaacs has said some things that you would assume ought to disqualify him from consideration.
In tweets, social media posts and radio appearances....Isaacs, a vice president of the Christian relief organization Samaritan’s Purse, made disparaging remarks about Muslims and denied climate change....
In June, after a terrorist attack in London, Isaac reposted and commented on a CNN International story that quoted a Catholic bishop saying “This isn’t in the name of God, this isn’t what the Muslim faith asks people to do.” Isaacs responded: “CNN, Bishop if you read the Quran you will know ‘this’ is exactly what the Muslim faith instructs the faithful to do.”
In other social-media posts, Isaacs divided refugees along religious lines and said Christians in at least one instance should receive preferential treatment.
Eric Schwartz, president of Refugees International and a former assistant secretary of state under President Obama stated, "...I’ve seen some of his statements and they reflect a troubling prejudice that is really incompatible with a position of leadership for the world’s most important international migration agency. The person who leads this needs to be a symbol of the international community’s support for humanity. And that means that dark-skin people and Muslim people have the same inherent worth as any other people."
Isaacs’s public media posts caught the department by surprise and were not reviewed before his announced nomination, State Department officials familiar with the matter said.
Now there's a shocker. Thanks to our excellent journalists for doing the research that our purposefully understaffed State Department isn't doing.
In 2015, Isaacs visited a mostly Syrian refugee camp in Greece, writing in a post on Facebook that.... ridiculed Obama for wanting to accept large numbers of Syrian refugees as a “foolish and delusional”.... that he had spent two hours in the refugee camp and that his visit had been long enough to conclude that there were dangers lurking in the groups of refugees.
Isaacs’s views on climate change and dwindling natural resources, factors the United Nations has cited increasingly as contributing to international migration, may also cause consternation abroad. Writing on Facebook in reference to the Paris climate accord in 2015, Isaacs called a connection between national security and climate change “a joke.”