A devout Muslim who has praised Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and publicly branded all non-believers as mentally ill “animals” was recently hired to serve as the Huffington Post’s political director in Britain

Mehdi Hasan, a controversial British media figure whom insiders have billed as a mouthpiece for the Iranian regime, recently left his job at the left-wing New Statesman magazine to join the Huffington Post as a senior staffer, according to reports in the British press. The Huffington Post merged with Internet giant AOL in February 2011 to form the Huffington Post media group. Hasan formerly served as political editor of the New Statesman, which is affiliated with a socialist political party and has faced criticism for publishing articles that many observers have deemed anti-Semitic. In one instance, the New Statesman published an article titled “A Kosher Conspiracy” that purported to expose the great power of Britain’s “pro-Israel lobby.” The cover of that issue featured a Star of David piercing a Union Jack. Hasan can be seen on tape delivering multiple religious screeds in which he accuses non-Muslims of being animals and mentally inferior. “We do not bend our law, or morality for short term aims,” Hasan is seen saying in one video recording of his lecture. “Never. And we never lose the moral high ground. Once we lose the moral high ground we are no different from the rest, of the non-Muslims, from the rest of those human beings who live their lives as animals, bending any rule to fulfill any desire,” Hassan said. He goes on in the recording to praise Iran’s Khamenei for issuing a religious ban or “fatwa” against nuclear weapons, despite that country’s continuing pursuit of nuclear arms. In a separate audio recording, Hasan can be heard describing disbelief in Islam as an “infirmity” or mental illness.