Former Defense Intelligence Agency chief Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn. (AP Photo, File)

(CNSNews.com) – President-elect Donald Trump has offered the key post of national security adviser former Defense Intelligence Agency chief Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn (ret.), the Associated Press reported Thursday, citing an unnamed senior Trump official.

Flynn, who served as head of the DIA from 2012 to 2014, has been advising the Trump campaign on national security issues.

He is also an outspoken critic of radical Islam and shari’a (Islamic law), and has attracted the ire of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).

Earlier Thursday, CAIR issued a statement urging Trump not to appoint him “because of his history of anti-Muslim comments and associations.”

It quoted him as comparing Islam to “a cancer” during an event in Texas earlier this year hosted by ACT for America, an organization which CAIR described as an “anti-Islam hate group.”

“A person who believes the faith of one fourth of the world's population is a ‘cancer’ should not be advising the president on anything, let alone on our nation’s security,” said CAIR national Executive Director Nihad Awad.

“We urge President-elect Trump not to appoint General Flynn to any administration post, and if he already has made that decision, to find another candidate who does not hold such bigoted views.”

Flynn this year published a book entitled The Field of Fight: How We Can Win the Global War Against Radical Islam and Its Allies.

He was promoting the book at the event in Texas last August referred to by CAIR’s Awad.

“Islam is a political ideology,” Flynn told the audience in Dallas, in the context of talking about the spate of Islamic terror attacks over the summer that included those in Orlando, Fla., in the French city of Nice, in Baghdad, in Bangladesh, at the Istanbul airport in Turkey, on a train in Germany, and elsewhere.

“It is a political ideology,” he continued. “It definitely hides behind this – this notion of it being a religion.”

“I have a very, very tough time,” Flynn went on, “because I don’t see a lot of people screaming ‘Jesus Christ’ with hatchets or machetes or rifles, shooting up clubs or hatcheting, you know, literally axing families on a train.”

“So we have a problem,” he said. “It’s like cancer – I’ve gone through cancer in my own life – so it’s like cancer. And it’s like a malignant cancer though in this case, that has metastasized. Like I just said, the number of attacks in 22 countries in just the last 45 days …”

Answering questions after his remarks Flynn, in response to a theological query, replied, “If there’s a god that believes in chaining a human being inside a cage, pouring gasoline over their head and then lighting them on fire or – that’s one way – or taking children and dropping them into acid baths, or taking women and girls, young girls, and raping them constantly for just the sheer sick pleasure, because they can – then to me that’s not a god. That’s the devil.”

CAIR, which calls itself “the nation’s largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization,” has a record of labeling its critics “Islamophobes.”

In his book, Flynn is critical of attempts to introduce aspects of shari’a into America.

“It is no accident that Radical Islamists in America are pushing very hard and very systematically to gain legal standing for Sharia, and to forbid any and all criticism of Islam; these are all steps towards creating an Islamic state right here at home,” he writes.

“We have to thwart these efforts and encourage criticism of those who support them. There are many American Muslims who have spoken out against the advance of Radical Islam in the United States, and they are predictably singled out by the Islamic radicals in our country and, to a degree, shunned by politically motivated people in our own government.”

“If we cannot criticize the radical Muslims in our own country, we cannot fight them either in America or overseas,” Flynn writes. “Unless we can wage an effective ideological campaign in the United States, we will not be able to defeat the jihadis on foreign battlefields, because we will not understand the true nature of our enemy.”