 |
Hillary’s
Shariah Law Expert Khizir Khan Folds His Tent |
By
Yoichi Shimatsu |
| Khizir Khan, the father of the celebrated dead Muslim soldier, has much
to hide from the American electorate, judging from the fact that the website
of KM Khan, immigration attorney and Shariah law scholar, has been pulled
from the Internet. He’s packed his tent to ride off into the sunset on a
camel. Hook, line and sinker, the mainstream news is dangling like a sucker fish chummed by that Shariah-espousing shyster for the Saudi lobby, namely Khizir Khan, Esq. The shameless press corps simply repeated his partisan diatribe at the Democratic party convention at face value without fact-checking or even the slightest pretense of balance. Nor was the circumstances of his soldier son's death put in the context of an illegal war in Iraq and subsequent jihadist upsurge. The televised subversion of American democracy was accomplished flawlessly by a planted agent of the Sunni Salafist regime, who sat next to Hillary Clinton on the night of her nomination. Gasping with a barb on its fat lip, the Daily Beast has since spewed a steady stream of denial, in its refusal to face the facts about Khan’s espousal of Shariah law. Instead, the gutter press flings puerile insults at Walid and Theodore Shoebat for their brilliant expose of Khan’s shady background as an immigration attorney and co-founder of the Journal of Contemporary Issues in Muslim Law (Islamic Shariah). At issue here, you imbeciles at the Beast, is not the political leanings of the Shoebats, who are conservative Christian Palestinian-Americans, but the hidden agenda of the Pakistan-born father of the Muslim-American soldier, whose actual military conduct and loyalties are now open to public scrutiny due to the partisanship and propaganda uses of his memory by his own father. Chiming in with the Saudi sycophants on the Clinton team, Muslim-born President Barack Obama took his swipe at Donald Trump. Like a little boy with hurt in his eyes, the president showed his deep emotional attachments to Sunni Salafist belief in divinely ordained leadership. The scion of a Kenyan clan and proud stepson of his Indonesian stepfather, a loyalist of the brutal and corrupt Suharto dictatorship, Obama is acting more like an Emir or Caliph of the Subjugated States rather than the elected representative of a sovereign American people. The president spoke alongside the Singaporean prime minister. Both leaders are implicated in the Malaysian corruption case involving the embezzlement of billions of dollars from the 1MDB state investment fund, with much of that money-laundered through the Goldman Sachs branch in Singapore. The radical transformation of the Democratic Party into a Fifth Column of criminal Muslim interests worldwide is a done deal. Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel, and Khan is one of those dubious patriots in the company of Mrs. Clinton and her running partner. Not by coincidence, Tim Kaine is a senator and former governor of Virginistan, a state sold down the river to Salafist sponsors of the global jihad. If anyone owes an apology to the public and military veterans, it’s Khan, Clinton and Kaine for perpetrating a treacherous fraud against American democracy and the public’s right to know. A Basic Ethical Dilemma What we are witnessing in the case of Khizir Khan and his son is the resurfacing of the fundamental conflict between private belief and public consent, a choice between the values of the old world and the new land. As to ultimate loyalty, radical Muslims assert that all governments should be subservient to divine will, as conveyed by their religious authorities. On the other hand, the United States was founded upon the principle of popular sovereignty, that government must be based on the rational consent of the people without resort to religious dogma. The right of personal religious belief is protected under the Constitution, but it cannot be a dominant factor in political debate and decision, other than as a rhetorical flourish, or there would inevitably arise government by Inquisition. Multiculturalism cannot paper over this conflict of identity, which reaches critical mass in times of crisis. While many unthinking people choose to keep their heads low and avoid trouble, those who serve their country in key positions of leadership or military service must decide about their loyalties and live with the consequences. The danger of back-tracking is shown in the cases of Muslim-American soldiers who ultimately chose their attachment to religious community over loyalty to nation, resulting in the murders of their fellow U.S. soldiers. This problem is magnified when tens of thousands of Muslims are either serving in or training under the U.S. military worldwide, which provides weapons and combat training to the armed forces of Arab and other Islamic nations. Many Muslims have served alongside or with the U.S. military for different reasons, and allegations have been raised that Capt. Humayun Khan played a double role as a Salafist sleeper agent. The suspicion gains credence given the rise of ISIS out of the ranks of the U.S.-Iraq Sponsorship Program , an intelligence and militia-building project organized by Capt. Khan. As an example of dual loyalty, the late ISIS field commander Umar al-Shishani (Tarkhan Tayumurazovich Batirashvili) had earlier been a “star pupil” of U.S. Special Forces training in the country of Georgia. Then he went on to crucify and behead local Christians and Westerners until he had to be taken out by a U.S. airstrike. This is not the first or last ethical struggle of American democracy to overcome religious-based authoritarianism. It’s happened before in the federal campaign against the attempt of the Church of Latter Day Saints to establish a Deseret theocracy (which explains why Mitt Romney is so hostile to Donald Trump and supportive of Khizir Khan). It was a family-splitting debate among Japanese-Americans to break from absolute loyalty to Imperial divinity, and many of those democratic-minded volunteers left their embittered fathers in wartime internment camps to join the 442nd Regiment, which sustained the highest percentage of casualties in the history of the U.S. Army. My father went through that moral struggle to defend democracy but never got over its effects, and passed on the trauma to the next generation, which has grappled with these issues of identity and loyalty, especially during the Vietnam War. A troubling point is that U.S. citizens of Muslim belief have yet to take on a critical self-examination of their choice of whether to maintain the tenets of their worldwide faith community or to adopt wholeheartedly the democratic principles inherent to American citizenship. Walking along both paths comes to a end when the roads separate. A grievous problem is the widely accepted Muslim injunction that is not a sin to deceive infidels in the service of jihad. That is a green light for subversion. This ethical duplicity presents a security threat to any society that is not already Islam-dominant and, unfortunately, casts the Muslim minority into suspicion as active or potential traitors. The self-righteous sanction of deceit impels many in Christian and Buddhist predominant societies to conclude that Muslims are much too self-fixated to be assimilated culturally, politically or even in the economy, and should therefore be expelled. In short, the ball is now on the Muslim side of the court to answer these most difficult questions. The Rebirth of Radical Jihadism Here in the follow-up on my earlier questions about the Khans, father and son, the retracing of their steps now has tighter focus thanks to the facts uncovered by the Shoebats. It is astonishing how the career path of that Clinton supporter reflects the evolution of America’s troubled relationship with Sunni Salafist jihadism from the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan to 911, the Iraq Wars and disastrous outcome of Hillary Clinton’s Arab Spring. Khizir Khan, a Pakistan national, was named after the jihadist founder of the Sayyid Dynasty, which restored the Delhi Sultanate in the 15th century, following the invasion of the Central Asian conqueror Timur (Tamerlane). Khan attended the nation’s leading law school, at Punjab University on its law campus then in Lahore. In his twenties, Khan relocated to Dubai in the mid-1970s to practice trade law in next-door Saudi Arabia, a country whose only exports were oil and gas. This was the era of the “Arab Oil Shocks” when the Saudis forced OPEC (Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries) to drastically cut oil production and embargo shipments to the United States. The Arab embargo caused the gasoline price at the pump to quadruple overnight, triggering an economic depression across the United States. The Saudi embargo was in retaliation for American weapons shipments to Israel, which was nearly defeated by the combined military attack by Egypt (led by Anwar Sadat and Hosni Mubarak) and Syria under Hafez al-Assad, which came to be known as the Yom Kippur War. The two oil shocks in the 1970s motivated the United States to adopt the energy policies that still prevail: strategic reserves, greater reliance on natural gas, diversification of energy sources, exploration in non-OPEC countries, power conservation, efficient technologies, increased mileage per gallon for vehicles, and sustainable architecture. The knock-on effects of fuel shortages led to layoffs of millions of American workers, killed reinvestment in the Rust Belt, spurred industry and retirees to relocate to the Sun Belt, made food stamps a necessity for survival for millions, and erased all hope of advancement for the African American ghettos and Latino barrios. American society has never fully recovered by the Arab embargo. What was law graduate Khizir Khan doing at that time? The man who would become a self-proclaimed American patriot wrote a research paper titled “In Defense of OPEC”. Little did anyone conjecture back then that economic warfare over energy would steadily descend into shooting wars in Afghanistan, Somalia and Sudan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and dozens of other countries. (Shukran, thanks a lot, Mr. Khan, your OPEC-caused collapse of the American economy forced me to quit grad school and to instead shovel pig manure at a feed lot in Indiana. I would be more than happy to offer you some choice cuts of pork for a Fourth of July barbecue, since I can’t still stand the stench of the stuff due to those working conditions. On the bright side, I was finally able to get a job at a steel mill in Gary, Indiana, producing seamless pipes for the Alaska Pipeline, America’s last resort for energy self-reliance.) Shariah Law and the Muslim Brotherhood Yes, the world is interconnected across distance, time, thought and dreams in both good ways and bad. As the Shoebats elucidated, Khan became engrossed in Shariah law under the personal influence of Said Ramadan, the Malaysian son-in-law of a founder of the Muslim Brotherhood named Hassan al-Bannah. At the time, the Brotherhood was flourishing due to its role in the public assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat at a military parade. Never mind the fact that Sadat was the only Arab leader to ever inflict sufficient damage on the Israeli war military to force return of Arab territories. The extremist Brotherhood denounced him as a sell-out and traitor for signing the Camp David peace accords with Israel. The Muslim Brotherhood, which cautiously hides its ties with the CIA and MI-6, is the tap root for the flowering of radical Islamic groups from Al Qaeda to Al Nusra and ISIS. Brotherhood members were involved in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center and the 911 airline hijackings. (In fact, none of the suspects in 911 were members of the Taliban in Afghanistan, which arose separately from the Deobandi movement in India. Despite the implausibility of its role in organizing 911, the Afghans were blamed and the country invaded in a completely illegal act of war based on media deception.) Hillary Clinton has cultivated close personal ties with the Muslim Brotherhood through: - her aide Huma Abedin, whose family is related to another founder of that militant group; - her financial patron, the former Emir of Qatar, a powerful disciple of Brotherhood ideologist Youssef al-Qawadari and patron of Al Qaeda, Al Nusra and ISIS; - the secret liaison initiated by her Ambassador to Cairo Anne Patterson, who established an alliance with the Brotherhood to launch the Arab Spring at Tahrir Square; and - now her “minder” and propagandist, the Saudi-run Shariah law expert Khizir Khan. The Muslim Brotherhood is the glue that binds Khizir Khan to Hillary Clinton, figurehead of the Salafist Fifth Column, and her running mate Tim Kaine, whose home state of “Virginistan” is a safe haven for Muslim migrants. Clinton is covered in the blood and ashes of 911. The Rise of Bin Laden and Al Qaeda In those same mid-to-late 1970s, Sunni Salafists allied with Nixon’s strongman Henry Kissinger agitated to overthrow the populist democrat Prime Minister of Pakistan, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto of the People’s Party. A thinly disguised agent of world Zionism, Kissinger was dead-set against Bhutto’s patronage of A.Q. Khan, the creator of “the Arab bomb,” Pakistan’s independent atomic-warhead program was directed against India’s growing undeclared strategic arsenal. Islamic extremists were hotly opposed to Bhutto’s support for mass education for women and girls, and its public expression in dating, fashion and cosmetics. The alliance forged in hell between Salafists and Zionists led to Bhutto’s assassination by Gen. Zia ul-Haq, whose brutal dictatorship was generously rewarded by the Saudis for saving Islam from the evils of democracy. As a legal scholar of Shariah law, Khizir Khan was by no stretch of the imagination espousing Constitutional Democracy in his homeland against the military dictatorship that his radical movement fervently supported. Then again, the Clintons never met a dictator that they wouldn’t slavishly bend a knee before, in order to receive a doggie treat. Amid the turmoil in Pakistan, hardly anyone would take notice of a Pakistani Sunni Salafist legal expert of Shariah practicing in Saudi Arabia and Dubai. The one exception was a significant personage, who was in the greatest need for a lawyer educated at the University of Punjab School of Law to arrange immigration papers for thousands of men from across the Muslim world: Osama Bin Laden. From the onset of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in late 1979, the rising star of the CIA-armed Muslim resistance in Afghanistan needed visas for his gunmen to enter Pakistan, the staging ground for the Afghan jihad. In the 1980 American presidential campaign, Jimmy Carter’s war in the middle of nowhere was transformed into Ronald Reagan’s crusade of God-fearing freedom fighters against the godless atheism of the Evil Empire. West Point cadets and military veterans, take note of the real history of why and how American troopers were subsequently shipped off to die in Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Chechnya, Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen and dozens of other Muslim lands. It’s not a tale of honor. The White House and State Department needed to parade “our friends in need of firepower”, the bearded mujaheedin. In those days of innocence, mujaheed and jihadist translated as “America-friendly heroes of religious rights”. And what better translator and guide than a grad student in law at the Kissinger school, Harvard? Khan had the necessary credentials as a genuine Salafist supporter of Al Qaeda and so was admitted to Harvard Law in 1980. Yet at the DNC, in his own words, said he came to America as a “penniless immigrant”. Give me a break, Khizir, you’re starting to sound Jewish with your nonsensical kvetching. It was at Harvard Law that Khizir Khan received the legal training to pen his masterpiece The Juristic Classification of Islamic Law, completed on his return to Saudi Arabic after receiving his master’s degree. In his rather dogmatic tract, Khan upholds Shariah as superior to all other legal codes and rejects modern-day attempts to reform of Islamic law. As for Muslims, including citizens of Western countries, “must subordinate themselves to the Shariah.” Some defender of the U.S. Constitution. Let the stoning commence, folks, and by way which Article in the Bill of Rights protects the cutting off the hand that offends? The Shoebat article contains screen captures of entire pages of this stunning legal paper. It’s mandatory reading for Hillary and Kaine while kneeling on a prayer carpet. OK, alright, Khizir Khan may be a bald-faced liar, but he lied for a good reason: To get two crooks into the highest office. Disappearance Before 911 The Khan record goes blank for a decade after conferral of his master’s degree and before his hire at the British-American law firm Hogan & Hartson and Lovells, lobbyist for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia as listed with the Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA). He was apparently in Saudi Arabia, where he completed his opus on Shariah law, yet this was while Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda were massively expanding their forces in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Dubai. Was Khizir Khan a go-between for Bin Laden and the CIA? There are few individuals as qualified, and professional manpower was in short supply. The next logical question is: Was Khizir Khan a member of Al Qaeda? Where was Khizir Khan on September 11, 2001? Who were the immigration lawyers who filed the entry visa papers for Atta, Shehhu, Jarrah, Hamzi, Mindhar and Hanjour? Is it any wonder that Khizir Khan’s former law firm Hogan Lovells is lobbying on behalf of the Royal Embassy of Saudi Arabia to block congressional disclosure of the remaining 911 files? No wonder Khizir Khan was called back to be a minder over the Democrats. Hillary does not employ Khan, it’s the other way around, the Saudis and Qataris own Clinton. Khan’s fluency in Arabic and Urdu were obviously prized by the Hogan law firm in its courtship of Saudi princes, who favored New York, Washington and London in those halcyon days of discos, whiskey and girls. Partying aside, the favorite Saudi foreign-relations project called Al Qaeda was a military contractor for the CIA in Afghanistan and Chechnya. Hogan still processes immigration papers for the Saudis. One specialty areas of law that HHL (renamed Hogan Lovells in 2010) is Shariah banking, conducted through its office in Abu Dhabi, since moved to Dubai and Jeddah. Khan was an expert in Shariah law whose advise was useful for Shariah banking. In the Heart of Virginistan His residence in 2004, the year of his son’s death, was in the bedroom community of Bristow, Virginia, an equidistant 30 miles from the Pentagon or Langley. Then in 2009, apparently after leaving Hogan, Khizir started a private law practice called KM Khan in New York City. His residence, however, was relocated to Charlottesville, central Virginia, a boom town for Sunni Muslim migrants from Somalia, Iraq and Bosnians from Serbia or Croatia. Khizir Khan does “legal consulting” in Charlottesville, which is an official resettlement city for the International Rescue Committee (IRC), an international immigration group that serves as an intelligence-gathering and covert operations front for the CIA, MI-6 and the Mossad. Charlottesville was selected because of its being its strategic location in the American South, spearheaded by the University of Virginia (UVa), a leading center for Islamic studies and advocacy of Muslim immigration rights. University of Virginia is where Humayan Khan earned a bachelor’s degree in law, and his hopes for veteran’s funding for a master’s degree in law at UVa was the reason for his joining the Army. UVa has since joined Khizir Khan’s Gold Mother bandwagon with announcements and a celebration. A former UVa professor based his support for the on-campus pro-Muslim policy to Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom of 1786, enacted two years before the U.S. Constitution. The university also created a visiting faculty seat named after Abd El-Kader, the leader of Islamic resistance to French colonization. The Virginia faculty conveniently ignore the fact that Jefferson presidency ordered the two Barbary Wars against Algeria, the American republic’s first-ever overseas military interventions, which paved the way for colonist France’s seizure of Algeria and also served as precedent for all future U.S. military involvement against the Muslim world. Selective memory is typical of those sorts of professors who quietly receive various kinds of enticement from their foreign masters and the IRC-CIA. Let’s one point clear: Without unjustified U.S. intervention in the Islamic realm, which began with President Thomas Jefferson, there would be no need to bring refugees and migrants into North America. The oil industry, their banks and the big corporations benefit from subjugating and exploiting the Muslim world, and leave the burden of upkeep for displaced people to the American public. Without disclosure of the geopolitics that drives immigration, all talk of charity for sojourners is self-serving rhetoric on behalf of the Rockefellers, Bushes, Rothschilds and their ilk. Women’s rights is yet another casualty of this grand political fraud. Why should UVa create a visiting faculty position to abet the rather bizarre theatrics of an African American female Christian professor who caused an uproar for wearing a hijab at an evangelical college that gave her tenure? Is this just a bad joke, an SNL skit? Why not for the next act don a Catholic nun’s habit at a stripper club, since that actually might bring on applause. To trade places, would universities in the Muslim world, say Al-Azhar University in Cairo, be awarding faculty positions to feminists who teach class in bikinis? Cultural sensitivities may be difficult for an outsider to accept, but we should be very cautious in challenging the norms of any community. Hijab feminism is the latest mutation in a sub-cultural evolution that began with bra-burning in the 1970s. Women in hijab, speak out for your rights, but don’t open your mouths in public. Donald Trump made an astute point in noticing that Mrs. Khan did not say a single word on stage at the DNC, not even expressing a “thank you”. It was certainly a giveaway of the dirty game being played. Could it be that only 15 years ago the international feminist movement was demanding the Western powers oust the Taliban government in Afghanistan for “forcing Afghan women to wear burqas”? Did the women’s rights movement bother to ask whether Mullah Omar gained his support base from Afghan mothers who were fearful of the abduction of their daughters by the U.S.-sponsored warlords? This why Taliban order a strict cover-up regulation: to prevent the sexual abuse of women and girls. Look at the epidemic of rape sweeping across Northern Europe, due to a patriarchal mindset among Muslim men in absolute disrespect toward women. So feminists of Europe, wear a hijab, or a burqa for your own protection. Another less-known fact is that Mullah Omar allowed Afghan women to carry handguns under their burqas to shoot down rapists. Has there ever been a more realistic defender of women’s rights? Now, the paid-off city council of Charlottesville has imposed gun control. This is after Paris and Brussels. Sad to say, virginity would safer if the Taliban controlled that absurdity of a city. Besides the city’s mosque, another attraction of Charlottesville is the Green Mountain retreat run by Nooruddeen (Stephen) Durkee, a white American guru who emerged out of Zen and Tibetan Buddhism to become a Sufi master of Illumination. Virginistan is starting to look like Saylorville in the Poconos, home in exile of Fettulah Gulen, another great place to cash in this life for 24 virgins in the next one. This absurd experiment in multiculturalism is being implanted by IRC, a CIA front group that is largely responsible for the inbound migration of 90,000 foreigners a year into the United States, most of them of dubious eligibility for refugee status. That NGO’s staff expenses are paid by the State Department’s Office of Migration. Of course, most of the resettlement costs are passed down to states and townships that are straddled a huge debt for social services for their own residents and U.S. citizens. At the daily level, Muslims in the U.S. are accorded the same rights as others, even when some of their customs offend the American notion of public civility. Arguably, most Muslim newcomers enjoy better economic conditions than most native-born African Americans, Latinos, poor whites and Asians such as refugee Cambodians. To give preferential treatment to Muslims, many of them on scholarships or stipends from the Gulf states, is unfair toward citizens and other residents of the U.S., especially minorities. American society, for all its residual racist expressions and police violence, is overall relatively tolerant compared with most cultures around the world, including and especially Islamist states, and that’s because it is not ruled by a religious state but under an ideal of governance of, for and by its people regardless of one’s personal beliefs. Many Muslims from war-torn nations have legitimate grievances against U.S. foreign policy, but that is no justification for violent and often arbitrary attacks on American citizens. The geopolitical tensions between great powers and oppressed nations cannot be resolved overnight, since that is a long historical process that takes sustained effort to remedy. Newcomers anywhere should show genuine respect toward their host society, that being a minimum level of reasonable expectation. When that code of civility breaks down, the net result is what’s happened in Paris and Brussels, and the majority backlash yet to be unleashed. Khizir Khan was, if anything, deceitful and rude, and so it is Muslims in the United States who should be out front criticizing him. It is disgraceful to treat such a deceiver as an icon. Hiding behind Gold Star skirts Supporters of the recurrently treasonous Hillary Clinton are hiding behind the skirts of a Gold Star mother. Here, the record of Capt. Khan must be reexamined, and this intrusive probe would never have happened if his father hadn’t open his big mouth for venal reasons. Khizir Khan made a partisan statement to the world that his son died as a war hero in Iraq, a claim that opens his son’s record to public scrutiny. Due to his father’s claims, this is no longer sacred space and nothing is off-limits for political review. My earlier article showed that Humayan Khan joined the military in order to get veterans benefits for this tuition for a planned masters of law degree. His prime motivation, as clearly spelled out in the official obituary, was not to defend his adopted country but was impelled by financial reasons. His record indicates the captain was an ordnance specialist assigned to Baquba, where the Iraqi resistance easily gathered bombs and detonators for IEDS from the vast abandoned arsenal at the local airbase. Capt. Khan’s ordnance unit failed to clean up much less protect this site, according to National Guardsmen who discovered a trove of chemical weapons there. Those 20-foot-long airborne dispensers of VX nerve gas were produced by Conoco and secretly shipped to Saddam Hussein by Donald Rumsfeld following the First Gulf War in the early 1990s as a deterrent against Iran. It was the patriotic duty of an ordnance specialist to report this find to Congress and the American public, even if it meant violating his military orders. At its core, the U.S. Constitution provides safeguards, including protection of its citizens against an unrepresentative government, especially a militarized state. His prior stationing at Rose Barracks, Vilseck, Germany, implies his role in military intelligence work due to his fluency in Arabic. This was further confirmed by his assignment to hire Iraqis as guards and informers. The Shoebat report claims Captain Khan was an Islamic radical planted inside the U.S. Army. If indeed he was, then his leadership role in the U.S.-Iraqi Sponsorship Program, which paid local recruits 5 dollars a day was an ideal position to organize Sunni Salafist recruits into paramilitary groups to counter the strong influence of Shiites inside the provisional government. The Saudis, Kuwaitis and Qatari were certainly eager then to keep Iraq out of Iran’s orbit, so there is a plausible case for Capt. Khan’s involvement with a larger geopolitical strategy. Extreme Islamist groups, including Nusra and ISIS, are comprised of private military contractors, identical to the Sunnis recruited by Capt. Khan inside the Sunni Triangle. An unfettered and uncompromising investigation will likely reveal that Humayan Khan planted one of the seeds that sprouted into ISIS, and so you can bet that Barack Obama or a President Hillary Clinton, and their Saudi and Qatari paymasters, will never allow those classified files marked Capt. Khan to ever be opened. As for his heroic death, it was not under gunfire or on the road toward a combat zone. As described in his obituary: the captain “watched as several of his soldiers prepared to do a routine vehicle inspection. His unit was charged with the day-to-day security and maintenance of the camp. When an orange-colored taxi drove toward them, Khan ordered his soldiers to ‘hit the dirt,’ said his father, who received details of his son's death from his commanding officer. Khan walked toward the car, motioning for it to stop, his father said. A makeshift bomb inside it exploded, killing him and two Iraqi civilians in addition to the two suicide bombers. Ten soldiers and six Iraqi citizens were also wounded, the Army said.” If this account comprises all there is to that episode, then Capt. Khan was an incompetent officer who made serious errors of judgment in showing unnecessary bravado and, had he survived, would be subject to an inquiry and possibly a court martial. The series of actions show that he died due to his own mistake in violating basic security rules, and therefore does not deserve a Bronze Star. This harsh estimate is based on my work as a field producer for two documentary films on the Japanese-American soldiers in World War II. (My father served as artillery specialist throughout the European campaign, from the first landing in Oran, Morocco, through the Sicilian, Italian Gothic Line, Rhone-Riviera and Jura campaigns, and crossed the Siegfried Line into Germany to open the gates of Dachau and occupy Munich. Despite being among the longest-serving individuals on the European Front and fighting the elite SS, he never received even a citation, probably due to political reasons linked to his successes as an interrogator of prisoners.) One of the debates within the 442nd Regimental Team was whether soldiers who make lethal errors that result in their own deaths should be posthumously awarded. The overwhelming opinion was no, absolutely not. The case in point was the medal for a bazooka operator who became so fixated by the sight of an exploding Panzer tank that the shorn-off turret flew toward him, ripping the head off his shoulders. He should have hit the ground as he was trained to do, and therefore did not deserve a medal or to be lauded as hero. As those heavily decorated veterans put it, “medals are not given for errors or stupidity.” Likewise, Capt. Khan’s reaction to an unauthorized vehicle at the gate of his base, should have been to order it to back off and leave, and then if it refused to budge for his men to take cover and open fire. As an Arabic speaker, there are no excuses based on poor communication. There is only one explanation of why he sauntered up to the car so confidently, and that is the captain recognized the passenger as one of his potential recruits or informers, an espionage agent. From the official account, it may well have been that he had arranged an appointment with that contact and was waiting for him. These types of tense scenes do not come under the scope of morality, ethics or patriotism. All’s fair in intelligence war, which is based on deception, stealth and duplicity. At its highest levels, agents killed in the line of duty are memorialized by a star on a blank wall at CIA headquarters and remain nameless. Intelligence operations are a game pitting the wits of one player against another, in this case the remnants of the Iraqi Republican Guard, many of them trained by the U.S. Department of Defense and the CIA. As in the sport of judo, there is attack that comes with the throw and active defense by the adversary responding with possible counter-throws. Capt. Khan attempted a weak throw but was checkmated by the counter-move. By his actions as described in detail in his obituary, Capt. Khan was naive at the least, which in a military situation is deemed a shortfall in professionalism. Those actions at the guard post do not therefore deserve a Bronze Star. He was a Muslim-American soldier but not a hero, since dying due to one’s own mistake against a more skillful adversary does not quality as heroic sacrifice, unless of course the Army’s objective had some propaganda value. For a veteran to rally unthinkingly to a fallen soldier is the sort of patriotism that Mark Twain derided. Knee-jerk camaraderie turns any army into a suicidal march of lemmings. American citizen-soldiers are expected to have moral judgment and ethical standards along with real-world military skills. It is not easy to be a serviceman with U.S. Armed Forces as compared with many other armies, which are hardly more than tribal savages. Warfare by its very nature is deadly, and only a very select few of the dead, if any, who can be accorded the honor of being a hero. It’s even harder to assess when the war is totally illegal like the invasion of Iraq, which “good Muslims” should have condemned and refused to support along with honest patriotic Americans instead of celebrating as they’re doing at the University of Virginia or on the stage of the Democratic National Convention. The back story of Khizir Khan opens a can of worms with the stench wafting over Hillary Clinton and her bought news media. From the standpoint of propaganda, today’s mainstream media in the United States is in fact far worse than any of the propaganda agencies in Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union. That a predominantly Jewish-owned and Zionist-favoring press would give uncritical blanket support to a Sunni Salafist with connections to the Saudi regime and jihadist groups is a story in its own right. As for Hillary’s leadership stature, it does not come from any divine authority no matter how much the Salafist plutocrats may adore her. Trump hit the nail on the head, for heaven’s sake, and the devil cringed. Yoichi Shimatsu is a Hong Kong-based investigative journalist who reported from Pakistan before and after 911 and during the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. |
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