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An unexpected controversy took root after the July 2016 Democratic National Convention (DNC) involving key speaker Khizr Khan, who took to the convention stage to speak about Donald Trump, Muslims in America, and the loss of his son, U.S. Army Captain Humayun Khan: Khan's speech was preceded by brief introductory footage of Hillary Clinton describing his immigration to the United States, and how his son was killed in action in Iraq while guarding his Army unit. Khan reiterated his son's story and challenged Donald Trump (who has at times proposed barring Muslims from entering the United States) to read the U.S. Constitution: Trump repeatedly issued comments about Khan via Twitter as the Khans were being interviewed about the speech and about Trump's reaction to it: On 31 July 2016, the dispute escalated when Trump suggested to ABC's George Stephanopoulos and the New York Times' Maureen Dowd that Khan's wife Ghazala was silent during her husband's DNC speech because, as a Muslim female, she was not permitted to speak: A day earlier, Mrs. Khan told MSNBC that she was unable to bring herself to speak at the convention due to her ongoing grief over her son's death: On 31 July, Ghazala Khan wrote an editorial for the Washington Post addressing the ongoing controversy. The same day Mrs. Khan's editorial appeared, bloggers Theodore and Walid Shoebat published a lengthy polemic stitching together circumstantial evidence to suggest Khizr Khan was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood: The Shoebats went on to cite two papers written by Khan in 1983 and 1984 pertaining to the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, or OPEC, described as an intergovernmental oil company consisting of mainly Islamic countries and a second titled Juristic Classification of Islamic Law (both of which were written prior to the family's move to the United States). With respect to the latter, Shoebat bracketed a not-present Sharia in the title and included a snapshot of the only page of the paper freely available (which in no part suggested support for Sharia law or membership in the Muslim brotherhood and appeared to be an academic piece, not an advocacy paper). The Shoebats maintained that in the paper Khan shows his appreciation for the icon of the Muslim Brotherhood, referencing a citation holding that The contribution to this article of S. Ramadan’s writing is greatly acknowledged. However, the quoted text was suspiciously elided from the screenshot that appeared on Shoebat and looked far less damning in its actual context as an academic footnote: The elided citation was offered as support of the assertion that Khan's work was undersigned by the Saudi Wahhabist religious institution and cited a recent report that Khan had moved from Pakistan to the United Arab Emirates, a hotbed for the Muslim Brotherhood. That recent report was a Politico article that described the Khan family’s journey from Pakistan to the United Arab Emirates, and from there to Boston, which in turn referenced Khan's 2005 interview with the Washington Post about the recent loss of his son Humayun. In its original context, the interview revealed a very different picture than the one painted by the Shoebats: Khan recounted the details of his son's death to the paper in 2005, noting that by all accounts his son sent his unit to safety before running towards a suicide bomber: The Shoebat page was something of a Gish Gallop, patching together a pile of loosely or unrelated details to paint a picture of a Muslim Brotherhood infiltrator in the Army who was killed before he could complete some undescribed subversive mission: The Shoebats' insinuations about the younger Khan directly conflict with all other published accounts about him. Had Humayun's intent in joining the Army been one of sabotage, there would be no reason to expect he'd ultimately lay down his life to stop a suicide bomber from killing scores of other American soldiers — yet by every telling, that is exactly how Capt. Humayun Khan died. The other big smoking gun Shoebat cited to support their theory that Khizr Khan is a Muslim Brotherhood operative is his work as an immigration lawyer. By their rationale, Khan bears a grudge against Donald Trump for the candidate's myriad statements about Muslims and immigration — but although it's true that Khizr Khan and his sons were Muslims immigrants to the United States, none of the evidence presented by Shoebat remotely supported the idea that Khan is an operative of the Muslim brotherhood. Not only were most of the points made about Khan by Shoebat unrevealing and tenuous, the heroic death of Humayun Khan flies in the face of claims the family were Muslims operatives seeking to harm Americans or work against U.S. interests. Capt. Khan enlisted in the U.S. Army by choice and died protecting his fellow soldiers; by contrast, the only evidence linking his family to the Muslim Brotherhood are irrelevant, decades-old papers written about OPEC and Islamic law by Khizr Khan before he immigrated to America.
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