A Muslim, Khizr Kahn, spoke at the Democratic convention last week of his son’s death in Iraq serving as a US soldier, implying that he, the father, has thus made a “sacrifice”. He leveled a strange accusation at Donald Trump, saying “you have sacrificed nothing and no one” for the U.S..

By viewing his soldier son’s death in combat as his “sacrifice”, this father turns an honorable death – that of a soldier doing his  job, fulfilling his promise, doing his  duty –  into a religious martyrdom. Such a view accords with a meretricious calibration of praiseworthiness: an unlucky, or weak, or not well enough trained soldier is wounded in action or is taken prisoner: he becomes a “hero”. That in itself is taking his praise a little too far. (He may bear his wounds or captivity heroically.) Another soldier is killed and he becomes a “sacrifice”, a “martyr”?  Fighting for one’s country – if it is a civilized country – must be done by rational men who know their job is to kill, who are willing to kill, and who want to survive. Bravery may be part of their character, but is trained into becoming a lethal aggression – not love of death. 

Suicide-bombers are self-sacrificers and “martyrs”. They are not rational people. They are not fighting for civilization.

With the view of combat deaths as “sacrifices”, the war itself becomes mystical. But it is not. If an army were trained to think of war in mystical terms – a ritual blood-letting –  it would diminish the soldiers’ will to win, to return victorious after having got the job – the job of killing – done. 

As “sacrifice” arises in the Khan versus Trump matter, it is particularly disgusting. There is no question that Khan is using the death of his Muslim soldier son to make a political point that there is no Islamic threat. And that is shameless grief-mongering, because his son was killed by Iraqis in a war started by Islamic terrorism.

If his death is to be considered a sacrifice at all, it can only be so in the general context of the terrorist-denying, enemy-denying, rules of engagement imposed by the “win-hearts-and-minds” policy of a decadent America happy to sacrifice its warriors on the altar of “nation-building”. Captain Humayan Khan died when he approached a vehicle that blew up. Had his orders been to shoot on sight at any vehicle breaking the barricade, he might have saved himself, the two Iraqi civilians who were also killed by the explosion, and his men who were injured. But he had been trained to regard civilians as friends although they were in enemy territory.

During his three months in Iraq, Khan helped put Iraqi civilians to work for $5 an hour patrolling the streets of Baquba under the U.S. Army, his father said.

The political point Khan was making was: had there been Trump’s moratorium policy in place when he wanted to come to America, his family (from Pakistan and UAE) would not have been able to make their sacrifice, and his son would not have been here to fight for America. By exactly the same logic, had those policies been in place for Major Hasan’s parents (from “Palestine”), Hasan would not have killed American soldiers at Fort Hood. Were Hasan’s victims “sacrifices”?  Yes, to the see-no-Islam, speak-no-Islam, hear-no-Islam policies in all government branches, which allowed a Muslim officer who openly declared his hatred of America and its military to carry on as one of America’s finest. 

Khan’s son’s death should be – as it has been – acknowledged as an honorable death. He got medals. To regard his death as a martyrdom in the Muslim style – and for political purposes! – does not become acceptable just because it is wrapped in the American flag.

The parents of Major Hasan’s victims are entitled to have their sons and daughters acknowledged as dying in combat against the same Islamic enemy as Khan died fighting. They too should get their medals – as they did, at last. 

Robert Spencer writes at Front Page:

The mainstream media is wild with enthusiasm these days over Khizr Khan, the father of a Muslim soldier, Humayun Khan, who was killed fighting in Iraq in 2004. Khizr Khan, brimming with self-righteous anger, spoke at the Democratic National Convention, where he delivered what the Washington Post dubbed a “brutal repudiation of Donald Trump”. … There’s just one catch: Khizr is using his son’s memory not to advance the cause of the United States, as his son apparently died trying to do, but to advance a quite different cause: that of the global umma.

The well-heeled and powerful backers of the global jihad – those who have enabled the Islamic State (ISIS), al-Qaeda, and other jihad groups to grow as powerful as they have today — are enraged at Donald Trump. They are deeply worried by his call for a temporary moratorium on Muslim immigration into the United States, as that will make it much more difficult for jihadis to get into this country. They are anxious to stigmatize any and all resistance to jihad terror – and so, happily enough for them, is the Democratic Party, which has eagerly signed on to the longtime strategy employed by Islamic supremacist advocacy groups in the U.S., to demonize all effective measures against jihad terror as “bigoted” and “Islamophobic”. 

So it was that Khizr Khan, in the full fury of his indignation at the DNC, trotted out a straw man, falsely claiming that Trump wanted to “ban us from this country”.  Trump has said nothing about banning Muslim citizens of the U.S. from the country, only about a temporary moratorium on immigration from terror states.

Coming clean: we advocate the deportation of all Muslims living in a Western state who will not renounce jihad and sharia. We like Trump’s “temporary moratorium” on more Muslims coming into the US as a step in the right direction.

 Even worse, all the effusive praise being showered on Khizr Khan in the last few days overlooks one central point: he is one man. His family is one family. There are no doubt many others like his, but this fact does not mean that there is no jihad, or that all Muslims in the U.S. are loyal citizens.

Khizr Khan is enraged at Donald Trump, but is Trump really the cause of his problem? Jihad terrorists, not Donald Trump or “Islamophobes”,  killed his son in Iraq. And if Donald Trump or anyone else looks upon Muslims in the U.S. military with suspicion, it is with good reason: does any other demographic have as high a rate of treason as Muslims in the U.S. military? In 2003, a convert to Islam, Sgt. Hasan Akbar, murdered two of his commanding officers in Kuwait. In 2009, Major Nidal Malik Hasan murdered 13 Americans at Fort Hood.

Other than those attacks, a Muslim in the U.S. Navy discussed sniper attacks on military personnel. A Muslim U.S. naval engineer allegedly gave an Egyptian agent information on how to sink a U.S. carrier. In 2015, a Muslim National Guard soldier in Illinois planned an Islamic State jihad attack against a U.S. military base. Last February, a U.S. Army enlistee who vowed to “bring the Islamic State straight to your doorstep” pleaded guilty to attempting to detonate a car bomb at Fort Riley military base in Kansas. Just days ago, a U.S. Air Force veteran was convicted of trying to join the Islamic State.

Then there is the U.S. Muslim who gave the Islamic State U.S. military uniforms, combat boots, tactical gear, firearms accessories, and thousands in cash. Where are those uniforms now?

It is good that there are Muslims in the U.S. military who are loyal. But can we have a discussion about those who aren’t, and why they aren’t, and what can be done about it? Such a discussion is vitally necessary, but it wouldn’t serve the classic objective of the global umma, to increase the dar al-Islam (house of Islam) at the dar al-harb (house of war). Nor would an open discussion of Khan’s Sunday morning assertion on Meet the Press that terrorists “have nothing to do with Islam”. 

We constantly are told this, but the repetition doesn’t make it true. In the first place, jihadis repeatedly make clear that they think what they’re doing has everything to do with Islam …

Spencer quotes seven Muslims, six terrorists and a scholar, whose declarations amply prove his assertion. And he follows that with twelve of “many passages of the Qur’an exhorting Muslims to commit acts of violence”.

Finally he asks:

How does Khizr Khan explain all that? He doesn’t — and he knows that no one in the mainstream media will ask him to. All this disinformation and obfuscation he is perpetrating serves the interests of the global umma – but not in any sense those of the United States.

It needs to be known that Khizr Kahn is a passionately devoted member of, and agent and propagandist for, the Muslim Brotherhood. He works zealously to import Muslims and change America into an Islamic State.

Find more about him in our next post.