RUTHFULLY YOURS

It has been a dereliction of duty on the part of the media not to probe into Khan’s political connections.

As Gold Star parents, Khizr Khan and his wife, Ghazala Khan, were deserving of every respect from Americans for the loss of their son, Captain Humayun Khan (US Army, 1st Infantry Division), killed while on a tour of duty in Iraq in June 2004. But the controversy they ignited by appearing on stage at the 2016 DNC in Philadelphia was entirely of their making. The result should be Americans learning more about Khizr Khan that otherwise would remain unexamined.

Humayun Khan was an American patriot who happened to be a Muslim by birth. There are, and have been, many Muslims who serve in the United States armed forces as proud and dedicated Americans. There has also been countless number of Muslims of various ethnicities at different times and circumstances who bore arms and sacrificed alongside Americans in wars waged for the defense of freedom and democracy. In World War II, for instance, there were over two million Indians and among them many were Muslims who voluntarily joined British India’s armed forces and fought against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan in the North African, European and Asian theatres of that immense struggle against fascist totalitarianism. And during the Cold War decades a majority of Muslim countries were allies of the West against the Soviet Union and communism.

At a time in contemporary Muslim history when growing numbers of Muslims, especially those from the greater Middle East and North Africa, are waging an asymmetrical conflict ignited by Islamists (or radical extremist Muslims) against the West, Khizr Khan was presented with a rare opportunity as a Gold Star parent to speak about how gravely misguided, even perverted, are those among Muslims who have declared jihad (holy war) of Islam against the West. His son had made the highest sacrifice any individual can be called upon to make in defense of freedom and individual rights as an American soldier. The sacrifice of his son bestowed upon Khizr Khan the credibility to draw upon the best of both American culture and Muslim tradition in putting to rest the false notion that Islam as a religion calls upon Muslims to make war on the ideals that America represents; and to point out that while the conflict since 9/11 between a segment of the world’s Muslim population and the West is undeniable, yet this is an old conflict periodically renewed between freedom and totalitarianism in which present day Islamists are freedom’s most recent enemy.

But Khizr Khan also knew that the opportunity he was given to speak to a vast audience from the DNC stage came with a price tag. He had to know that Hillary’s campaign team was using him cynically to denounce Donald Trump as a bigot, and that he was chosen as a Gold Star parent to entrap the Republican nominee in a public furor that might further inflate Trump’s negative approval rating in the polls. Khizr Khan had a choice, however, to make between being a shill for the Democratic Party and remaining true to the memory of his soldier son, buried in the Arlington National Cemetery as an American patriot and not as a Democrat or a Republican. Khizr Khan chose to be a shill and in making that choice he should have known he was trading the public respect reserved for Gold Star parents to be above criticism for public scrutiny of his past and present.

Just about the only thing most Americans know about Benedict Arnold is that he was a traitor, the turncoat par excellence of America’s founding. Today, his name is synonymous with “traitor.”

Beyond that, we tend to know as little about Arnold as we do about the rest of the American Revolution. To the extent that it is still taught in schools, the War of Independence is presented as a rather tidy affair. The Founders issued the Declaration of Independence, George Washington and his army spent a hard winter at Valley Forge and then crossed the Delaware, there was an exchange of musket fire and cannonry at Yorktown, and that was that. A new nation was born: Happy Fourth of July.

The reality is of course more complicated — and vastly more compelling. The American Revolution was anything but tidy, and the war was unlike any previous military conflict. It was a world war that lasted more than eight years, spanned two oceans and three continents, involved four European powers, and saw the largest deployment of ships and troops ever assembled by the British Empire. From it emerged a wholly new form of government, proclaimed by a fledgling and fractious republic clinging to the edge of a vast unsettled wilderness.

In the middle of all this was Benedict Arnold, a war hero who earned the title “American Hannibal” for his daring but unsuccessful assault on Quebec early in the war. He went on to distinguish himself as a patriot and valiant battlefield commander willing to risk everything for victory. In the end, of course, he convinced himself that the real enemy wasn’t Britain but his fellow Americans, who were tearing the country apart. As far as Arnold was concerned, he betrayed his country to save it from itself.

No contemporary author is better suited to reintroduce readers to this high drama than Nathaniel Philbrick. Author of the award-winning books Mayflower and In the Heart of the Sea, Philbrick has a knack for cinematic depictions and dramatic pacing, and he uses these to great effect in his new book.

The Revolutionary War, writes Philbrick in his new book Valiant Ambition: George Washington, Benedict Arnold, and the Fate of the American Revolution, wasn’t just a rebellion against Great Britain; it was also a civil war “so widespread and destructive that an entire continent was seeded with the dark inevitability of even more devastating cataclysms to come.” Along the ragged edge of British-occupied New York, “where neither side held sway, neighbor preyed upon neighbor in a swirling cat-and-dog fight that transformed large swaths of the Hudson River Valley, Long Island, and New Jersey into lawless wastelands.” It was the same along stretches of the New England coast, where Viking-style raids by alternating boatloads of patriots and loyalists harassed towns and villages.