Trump and the Khan Controversy

Vincent J. Curtis

31 July 2016

At an especially low point in the Democrat convention, the Hillary campaign put up Mr. Khizr Khan and his wife to accuse Donald Trump over the death of their son, Captain Humayum Khan, killed by an IED in Iraq in 2004.

The emotional Mr. Khan accused Trump of not sacrificing anything for America and of not having read the United States constitution.  The highly emotional spectacle was an off-set of the appearance at the Republican convention of the mother of Sean Smith, killed at Benghazi, and to whom Hillary lied about a video being responsible.

Trump, of course, had absolutely nothing to do with the death of Captain Khan in Iraq in 2004, as he was not even in politics at the time to vote for or against the war.  The visual impression of Mr. and Mrs. Khan on stage was to implicitly accuse Trump of somehow being bad as a result their son’s death.  Their appearance may have been overtly intended to attack Trump for his policy of halting Muslim immigration – all immigration in fact – from countries that have a history of committing terrorist acts against America and America’s allies.

It is a particularly vicious practice of rhetoric to employ the extreme suffering of someone against the candidacy of another.  The suffering person is often given a moral pass on account of their grief, and are not held responsible for what they say, since these are only expressions of their grief.

But that does not give the suffering the right to say anything, or to have what they say go without being countered.

The reference to what has Trump sacrificed for the benefit of America is just as easily turned upon Hillary and Bill Clinton.  That pair have not sacrificed anything either upon the account of Mr. Khan.

The reference to the constitution concerns Article VI, which holds that there can be no religious test for the holding of public office in the United States.  As a lawyer, Mr. Khan ought to know that banning a religious test for office holding in the United States is not a ban on religious tests for immigration.  And the freedom of religion protected under the First Amendment applies to American citizens and to people resident in the United States, not to foreigners wishing to immigrate to the United States because the constitution does not have extra-territorial application to foreigners.

Mr. Khan may hold great animosity towards Trump because Trump appears hostile to Islam, but upon examination Mr. Khan’s argument against Trump’s candidacy falls to the ground.

It is also indisputable that if Trump’s ban on Muslim immigration had prevented the Khans from migrating to the United States decades ago, his son would not have been killed.  His son would not have been able to join the US military, and would not have been deployed to Iraq.  Therefore, he would not have been killed in Iraq by an IED.

The Democrats and the media are laboring mightily to discredit Trump.  With Khan, they presented him with outrageous accusations that seem to say that Trump shouldn’t be president because he hurt the feelings of this family whose Muslim son was killed in Iraq, one of 4,000 others over the course of that war.  Never mind that Hillary voted for the war that killed their son because she wanted the creds as a hawk and to look tough.  And if it wasn’t the Khan affair, it was the discrediting accusation that the Russians favored Trump because of the release of the 19,000 DNC emails that showed the fix was in for Hillary.  And if it wasn’t that the Russians favored Trump, it was that Trump was treasonous for asking the Russians to release the 33,000 of Hillary’s missing “private” emails that the FBI couldn’t recover because Hillary destroyed the contents of her private server before she handed it over to the FBI.

The question as the campaign progresses will be to what extent the undecided of the electorate are moved by these low blows at Trump.  Trump is able to return low blow for low blow, a feature previously unknown in Republican presidential candidates and on which the Clintons thought they owned the patent.  The novelty of this is refreshing to some and appalling to many old-line Republicans who grew up in a world of extreme enforcement of political correctness against Republicans.  Like adults beaten as children, they can’t get over what indiscipline Trump is able to get away with.

-30-