This weekend's outrage from the campaign trail has been Donald Trump's bizarre vendetta against the family of Captain Humayun Khan, a Muslim-American officer of the United States Army who lost his life in Iraq in 2004, inspecting a suspicious vehicle himself while instructing his subordinates to hold back. Donald Trump, responding to a speech by Khizr Khan, the father of Captain Khan, made light of Mr Khan's loss by trying to claim that he had made comparable sacrifices. Even worse, he intimated that Ghazala Khan, Captain Khan's mother was prevented from speaking from a culture of subservience that seems to exist only in Trump's head:
“He was very emotional and probably looked like a nice guy to me. His wife … if you look at his wife, she was standing there. She had nothing to say. She probably, maybe she wasn’t allowed to have anything to say, you tell me,” Trump continued. “But a plenty of people have written that. She was extremely quiet and it looked like she had nothing to say. A lot of people have said that.”
The fact that Donald Trump couldn't recognize Ghazala Khan's silent grief as something as old as death and as universal as life is proof of his bigotry- he is inferring a sinister otherness from a reaction that would be seen as stoicism if it had come someone he considered a 'real American'. Thankfully, Ghazala Khan is far from silent, as her eloquent rebuttal in the Washington Post amply demonstrates.
Trump's attack on this fine family would be inconceivable, except for the fact that Trump is a solipsistic sociopath, unable to consider that any opponents could be honorable people. The fact that he was able to conduct a sustained attack on the Khans is a evidence that he has no campaign personnel who are able to check his id, or even to filter his communications so he avoids showing his true black soul. Trump's entire weekend of lambasting Khizr and Ghazala Khan can be summed up in one sustained howl of rage:
Let's just say that William Shatner wears a toupée better than Trump.
The Khans represent the best of American society, while Donald Trump represents the worst... I'd much rather have the Khans as neighbors than the conman.
P.S.: I hope this experience, especially the bigoted crack about being silenced by religious-fundamentalism inspired subservience, inspires Ghazala Khan to run for public office. It would be heartening to see a Muslim woman of South Asian descent in the Congress... far from being silent, she would make an eloquent speaker for the people in her district.
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4 comments:
What a useless scandal for him. Any candidate for dog catcher would have been smart enough to thank the Khans for their son's service and let it go at that.
The good news is that the Khans have now been seen by many millions more than they were at the convention.
Alas, this is Trumpism at its core. White American resentment - that guy might have been a soldier, but he was also a 'Muslim', which automatically disqualifies him from equal consideration as a participant in the American system.
That said, I'd push back on what sounds like a willingness to accept or even normalize the Muslim view of women. Whether or not Mrs. Khan is subservient to her husband (and I'd be willing to bet she is in many ways), Muslim family doctrine is even more horrific and cruel than that of the Christianists. I'm fine with honoring their sacrifice - despite the fact that American military losses in Iraq and Afghanistan were totally in vain, a pointless waste that I hesitate to do anything to encourage - but their bizarre seventh century belief system is antithetical to a modern liberal democracy and should always be condemned...
The best ally HRC has in this campaign is Donald Trump.
The reverse is also true.
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Thunder is absolutely right. The reason this election will be a cakewalk rather than a nailbiter is that the Republicans crowdsourced their nominee and ended up with this repulsive lizard Boaty McBoatface...
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