The big story coming out of the Democratic National Convention is speaker Khizr Khan (shown), the Pakistani-born lawyer whose son was killed by Muslim jihadists in Iraq in 2004 — and who now rails against the man who wants to keep Muslim jihadists out of America. That man, of course, is GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump, and, in typical Trumpian style, he isn’t taking the criticism lying down.
Trump initially received condemnation for saying of Khan’s wife, Ghazala — who sat silently under a hijab while her husband spoke at the DNC — that perhaps “she wasn’t allowed to have anything to say.” Trump did take pains to mention that the Khan’s deceased son, Army Captain Humayun Kahn, was a “hero.” But this didn’t stop some Republicans from issuing condemnations, representative of which was South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham’s statement, “This is going to a place where we’ve never gone before, to push back against the families of the fallen.”
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Of course, at issue aren’t “families,” but one family — that chose to enter the political campaign. Note that “campaign” is a term of war, and, as I pointed out in “The Grieving Activist,” it’s unreasonable to place yourself on the firing line and not expect to take flak. Launch salvos, actual or political, and return fire ought to be anticipated.
Nonetheless, Trump’s comments about Mrs. Khan were certainly not the wisest choice; more prudent was a later tweet the candidate sent in which he pointed out, referencing the scene of Captain Khan’s tragic death, that “Hillary voted for the Iraq war” — he didn’t. Yet the big story here shouldn’t be that Khan fired first or Trump fired back, but that Khan misfired and peddled a lie.
Consider columnist Byron York’s analysis of Khan’s DNC speech: Khan “suggested that Trump’s Muslim ban and Mexican border wall proposals are unconstitutional. Specifically, Khan cited the words ‘liberty’ and ‘equal protection of the law’ in suggesting that Trump’s policies violate the Constitution.”
Ironically, Khan claimed in his speech that Trump was ignorant of the Constitution, yet the above is silly beyond words. As York pointed out, “There’s simply no sense in which a border wall violates the Constitution” nor is there anything “unconstitutional about deporting people who are in the United States illegally.”
Then there’s Khan’s implication that Trump’s proposal to temporarily ban or limit Muslim immigration is a violation of the 14th Amendment’s “equal protection” clause. Stating the obvious, York writes that this amendment “makes clear that its protections apply to ‘all persons born or naturalized’ in the U.S.; persons ‘subject to the jurisdiction thereof’; and persons ‘within its jurisdiction.’ None refers to foreign persons in foreign countries.”
And of course, the norm for nations — the U.S. being no exception — is to pick and choose among immigrants. For more than 40 years American immigration was governed by the National Origins Act, which, as the name suggest, limited or excluded certain prospective immigrants based on national origin. And WWII-era liberal icon Franklin Roosevelt was “Trump on Steroids,” wrote the American Spectator last December, “using his presidential powers to declare Germans, Italians, and Japanese in America ‘enemy aliens,’ slapping curfews on them, registering them, taking away everything from their guns to their binoculars to their right to travel to their jobs.” In fact, controlling who enters our nation is so vital for national security that the idea we must be forbidden from doing so could be considered treasonous.
As for confused statements, Khan also told CNN that Muslim terrorists “have nothing to do with Islam,” but also said that Muslims “are the solution to terrorism.” If they’re not the problem, however, why should they be the solution? Why didn’t Khan rather say, “You can’t expect Muslims to be the solution because terrorism has nothing to do with us”? Moreover, if today’s terrorists “have nothing to do with Islam,” why do they all happen to claim Islamic status? If they’re co-opting the faith, why do they choose only Islam to co-opt? Why do a percentage of them not commit their acts in the name of Christianity, Judaism, Jainism, Buddhism, Hinduism, or libertarianism (perhaps screaming “Liberty Akbar!”)? Is there something about Islam that makes it uniquely co-optative?
One also might wonder how many Muslims are like Gamal Abdel-Hafiz — now a homeland-security advisor to Barack Obama — and if they can be a solution if they are. After all, as an FBI agent years ago, Abdel-Hafiz refused to do his duty investigating a terrorist suspect, saying, “A Muslim doesn’t record another Muslim.” And this raises another question: If terrorists “have nothing to do with Islam,” why didn’t Abdel-Hafiz instead say, “I’ll be happy to record this man because if he’s a terrorist, he can’t really be Muslim”?
And while columnist Charles Hurt opines that Khan was “tricked” by Democrats into smearing Trump, other sources contend that he’s actually a much larger, and darker, part of the problem himself. As American Thinker writes:
According to Theodore Shoebat and Walid Shoebat [proprietors of Shoebat.com], Mr. Khizr Muazzam Khan is a promoter of Islamic Sharia law and a co-founder of the Journal of Contemporary Issues in Muslim Law (Islamic Sharia). In fact, in the past, Khizr Khan has shown “his appreciation for an icon of the Muslim Brotherhood,” by the name of Said Ramadan who “wrote material for the Muslim Youth Movement of Malaysia, an organization that has been promoting Islamic revivalism and indoctrination to recruit young people in Malaysia to jihadism.” Mr. Said Ramadan was the son-in-law of Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood including Ahmad Bahefzallah, the boss of Huma Abedin (Hillary Clinton’s aide)[.]”
… Shoebat writes that “Khizr Khan currently runs a law firm in New York called KM Khan Law Office, a firm that specializes in ‘immigration services.'”
After earlier pointing out that Khan also once wrote a paper entitled In Defense of OPEC, the Shoebats then theorize, “It is likely that Khan is a Muslim plant working with the Hillary Clinton campaign, probably for the interest of Muslim oil companies as well as Muslim immigration into the U.S.” And continuing to pull no punches and opining on Khan’s motives, the Shoebats write, “It is obvious that Khan is upset, that a Trump victory will eliminate and destroy decades of hard work to bring in Islamic immigration into the United States which was spearheaded by agents in Saudi Arabia like Khan and Huma Abedin’s father (Sayed Z. Abedin).”
Whether or not the above is accurate, it certainly is true that Hillary Clinton will, just as her former boss Barack Obama has, encourage Muslim immigration into the United States. And this is no surprise since, according to retired Air Force general Tom McInerney, the leftists in power have even welcomed the Muslim Brotherhood — into the very halls of Washington, D.C. As he said in 2014, “I haven’t got their names exactly but there’s a list of them, at least 10 or 15 of them in the U.S. government.”
And this is why many critics contend that jihadists aside, Hillary Clinton and her fellow travelers are more problem than solution themselves.
