RUTHFULLY YOURS

“Khan’s speech not only successfully baited Trump into playing the fool; it gave Nevertrumps an opportunity to feel good about themselves. We noticed this Sunday tweet from Max Boot of the Council on Foreign Relations: “Either you stand with Khizr & Ghazala Khan or Donald Trump. No middle ground. Choose your side. I’m with #KhizrKhan.” But neither Khan is running for president. The actual choice is between Mrs. Clinton and Trump, but by equivocating in this way, Boot transfers his support for Mrs. Clinton to a sympathetic figure.

As for “no middle ground,” that isn’t even true in the election, as one does have the option of abstaining or voting third-party. It certainly isn’t true of the Trump-Khan dustup. We think Trump has handled it appallingly, but we also find plenty of fault with the Democrat-media narrative that has arisen around it.

Take Khan’s j’accuse, “You have sacrificed nothing,” and Stephanopoulos’s question, “What sacrifice have you made for your country?” Do these not apply equally well to Mrs. Clinton? She didn’t serve in the military, nor did her husband (a fact Republicans hoped vainly would work against him in 1992), and their daughter has lived quite a pampered life. As David French—an Army Reserve major, Iraq veteran and Nevertrump stalwart—observes:

Hillary Clinton hasn’t sacrificed—she’s lived the progressive dream. And she’s certainly not a “public servant”—she’s a cynical, grasping, and ambitious politician. Her accomplishments are meager, and her one guiding star is her own self-advancement.

A Daily Beast column Saturday carried the headline “Chicken Hawk Trump Mocks Captain Khan’s Mother.” We’ve heard that epithet before, but isn’t hawkishness a necessary element? Trump is running as the less hawkish candidate, faulting Mrs. Clinton for voting in favor of the Iraq war and pushing for the 2011 Libya intervention.

During his DNC speech, Khan cited Trump’s proposal for a temporary ban on Muslim immigration (on which he seems to have equivocated of late, as in the Pence statement above) and answered as follows:

Let me ask you: have you even read the United States Constitution? I will gladly lend you my copy. In this document, look for the words “liberty” and “equal protection of law.”

But as the Washington Examiner’s Byron York and National Review’s Andy McCarthy point out—and as we explained back in December, when Trump first put the idea forward—the Constitution places almost no limit on Congress’s power to regulate immigration, and none at all on its power to control entry of unadmitted nonresident aliens. The legal term of art is the plenary power doctrine.

As NR’s Jim Geraghty points out, the media are highly selective in their treatment of grieving parents:

Hey, remember when the first night of the Republican convention featured Patricia Smith, mother of Sean Smith, one of the Americans slain in Benghazi? Remember how her speech was called a “cynical exploitation of grief”? Or the “unabashed exploitation of private people’s grief” or “the weaponization of grief”? Remember how she “ruined the evening”? How it was, “a spectacle so offensive, it was hard to even comprehend”? How some liberal commentators said, “Mrs. Smith was really most interested in drinking blood rather than healing”? How her speech represented an “early dip into the gutter”? Remember how a GQ writer publicly expressed a desire to beat her to death?

As is often the case, Trump’s outrageous behavior finds a precedent in his critics’ behavior—in this case, their behavior just the week before.

To be sure, the critics Geraghty cites are all journalists; none of them are seeking to become president. But do you remember John Kerry?

He launched his public career in 1971 by testifying to a series of outrageous slanders against American servicemen. Subsequently he was elected lieutenant governor of, and U.S. senator from, Massachusetts. He was the Democratic nominee for president in 2004, when he presented himself as a war hero.

Kerry has never apologized for his calumnies against his fellow Vietnam veterans, which the liberal media played down as he was pursuing the Democratic nomination. When a group of vets eventually called him out on it, Democrats and journalists smeared them.

In 2013 Kerry left the Senate after the president nominated him as secretary of state. If by Obama’s standards Trump is unfit to serve because of his obnoxious comments, how is Kerry fit?”

Army Capt. Humayun Khan, was killed in action during an extended tour in Iraq. Deployed at Baquabah, Khan served in a force protection role, and oversaw a unit securing and maintaining his base. June 8, 2004, Khan died after ordering his soldiers to stay back, and “hit the dirt,” when he approached a suspicious taxi. While Khan was moving towards the vehicle, and motioning for it to stop, two men in the taxi detonated their explosives, killing themselves, Khan, and two Iraqi soldiers. Because of his heroic sacrifice, none of Khan’s soldiers were killed in the blast. When Khan was laid to rest at Arlington National Cemetery, he received full military honors at the burial, and his commanding officer observed in a letter,

He died selflessly and courageously, tackling the enemy head on. We will not forget him and the noble ideas he stood for.

Simply put, Humayun Khan died defending the uniquely Western conceptions of freedom articulated in the US Constitution, and Bill of Rights.

All Americans must acknowledge and honor the Khan family’s grief as parents of a heroic soldier killed in action. Their anguished perspective requires especial deference. But we should also take seriously the assertions made by Khizr Khan, Humayun’s father, and a lawyer, about the Constitution, at the Democratic National Committee (DNC) convention, which are contradicted by Khizr Khan’s earlier published opinions. Many Americans have their own copies of the Constitution (readers can get your own pocket Constitution here, for free, via Hillsdale College), and they know that Khizr Khan, perhaps in his lingering sorrow, egregiously misrepresented what our founding document states regarding immigration in the 14th amendment, as discussed recently by Byron York.

It was no doubt unintentional on Khizr Khan’s part that he appeared to attack the large majority of ordinary Americans who are concerned about the DNC’s support for admitting immigrants into the US without background checks (adequate databases for vetting Syrian Muslim refugees, as a prime example, don’t exist), even from countries with known risks for harboring jihad terrorists (i.e., like Syria). Americans want to disagree without being disagreeable, and being hectored that we have “black souls,” or lack compassion. We can have genuine, deep sympathy for the Khan family’s loss, and still disagree with Khizr Khan’s misrepresentation of the Constitution. With all due respect for his deprivation, we must review, gimlet-eyed, Mr. Khan’s published articles asserting the supremacy of Sharia over other politico-legal systems—opinions that are antithetical to the principles in the Constitution that he waved at Americans during his DNC convention address—and his own son died fighting to preserve.

Khizr Khan, the Muslim father of a slain American soldier, is an attorney who has previously written in a law journal about Islamic law. He specifically wrote about the purity of the Quran and the Sunnah over all other texts and interpretations.

Khan rose to fame after speaking at the Democratic National Convention Thursday and pulling out a pocket U.S. Constitution imploring if Donald Trump had even read it.

Khan wrote “Juristic Classification Of Islamic Law” in the Houston Journal of International Law in 1983. In it he breaks down different levels of Islamic law. Khan writes that the Quran and the Sunnah which were both directly created by the Muslim prophet Muhammad were the only sources in Muhammad’s lifetime that “were recognized as binding.”

“The Shari’ah-was completed during the lifetime of Prophet Muhammed, in the Quran and Sunnah. This brings up an important fact which is generally overlooked, that the invariable and basic rules of Islamic Law are only those prescribed in the Shari’ah (Quran and Sunnah), which are few and limited,” Khan continues to write. “All other juridical works which have been written during more than thirteen centuries are very rich and indispensable, but they must always be subordinated to the Shari’ah and open to reconsideration by all Muslims.”

In the journal article, Khan goes on to explain the importance of Islamic laws and interpretations to Muslim followers. He writes that: “The present form of the Quran is one and the same in every part of the Muslim world, and it has been so all through the centuries. This, Muslims believe, is due to the fact that the compilation and arrangement of chapters was completed-under divine instructions-by the Prophet himself.”

It is due to this that Khan writes, “to Muslims, the Quran being the very word of God, it is the absolute authority from which springs the very conception of legality and every legal obligation.”

The Muslim attorney writes that, “it has to be admitted, however, that the Quran, being basically a book of religious guidance, is not an easy reference for legal studies. It is more particularly an appeal to faith and the human soul rather than a classification of legal prescriptions.” Khan added that, “the major portion of the Quran is, as with every Holy Book, a code of divine exhortation and moral principals.”

My #NeverTrump colleagues and friends make valid points about Donald Trump. I know: I made them myself during the Republican primaries.

But it is vital to understand what happens if Hillary Clinton wins the presidency. This country will be so far from what the Founders wanted, so different from what the #NeverTrumpers have always fought for, that it is almost impossible to see how America would recover from her — or any Democrat’s — victory.

Thanks to the universities’ leftist indoctrination of two generations of Americans, and thanks to Bernie Sanders, the Democratic party is now in all but name a socialist party. In fact, it is actually to the left of many European socialist parties.

For example, if Clinton wins, the government will now tell companies how much they must pay employees: “If you believe that companies should share profits with their workers, not paid executive bonuses, join us,” she brazenly announced.

And if you think that this is unconstitutional, remember that it won’t matter, because she will appoint left-wing Supreme Court justices and left-wing federal judges who do not view their roles as protectors of the Constitution. They view their roles as promoting “social justice,” which has as much to do with justice as “people’s democracy” has to do with democracy.

There will still be a country called the United States, a geographic entity situated between Canada and Mexico, but it will not be the America envisioned by the Founders, or by most Americans until the middle of the 20th century.

A few days before Barack Obama was elected president in 2008, he promised that if elected, “we are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.”

He has been true to his word. And Hillary Clinton and the Democratic party will continue this fundamental transformation.