Acting Ukip leader Gerard Batten has defended his description of Islam as a "death cult" and claimed a "significant minority" of Muslims are extremists who want to be martyred.
London MEP Mr Batten, who took over at the head of the crisis-hit party after Henry Bolton was ousted on Saturday, said Islam "glorifies death".
He said Muslim migrants coming to the UK should reject the "dark age ideologies which many of them bring with them" through a literalist interpretation of the Koran.
On Sky News's Sunday With Niall Paterson Mr Batten did not rule out running for the party leadership on a permanent basis and insisted it still had a role to play on the national stage by making sure Brexit supporters were not "betrayed".
Defending his "death cult" comments, written in a blog shortly after the 2017 Westminster terror attack, Mr Batten said: "What I wrote there about Islam is factually and historically true.
"Anybody that cares to look at the history of Islam over the past 1,400 years will see that that is true."
He added: "It glorifies death. They believe in propagating their religion by killing other people and martyring themselves and going and getting their 72 virgins.
"Not all of them - that's not saying that all of them do believe that or do that - I'm saying that a significant minority believe that and they are the problem.
"But the trouble is they are justified in those beliefs by a literalist interpretation of their own so-called holy texts."
