Donald Trump takes on slain Muslim soldier’s father again

WASHINGTON: Donald Trump responded to Khizr and Ghazala Khan, parents of a fallen American Muslim soldier, in the only way he is known to: by disparaging and insulting

WASHINGTON: Donald Trump responded to Khizr and Ghazala Khan, parents of a fallen American Muslim soldier, in the only way he is known to: by disparaging and insulting them.

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“Who wrote that? Did Hillary’s script writers write it?” Trump said in an interview that aired on Sunday, about Khan’s now-famous remark, “You have sacrificed nothing and no one.”

“I think I’ve made a lot of sacrifices ... I work very, very hard .” Pressed for details, it was still just his work and how he employed thousands of people.

Trump then turned upon Ghazala Khan. “If you look a this wife, she was standing there. She had nothing to say ... maybe she wasn’ t allowed to have anything to say .”

His attacks on a family that lost their son triggered a national, bipartisan outrage, with furious commentators warning he may have gone “way over the line” this time.

Trump later said Captain Humayun Khan was a hero and should be honoured, but insisted the issue at hand was “radical Islamic” terrorism.

His campaign released a transcript of the interview, trying to show Trump may have been quoted out of context.

No one is convinced, the Khans least so. At the Democratic convention last week, Khizr Khan had attacked Trump in a speech that reverberated around the country and the world.

He called Trump campaign’s statement about his son being a hero “faked empathy”.

The trained lawyer from Harvard said Trump’s words were “typical of a person without a soul”.

His wife Ghazala Khan explained her silence in a piece in the Washington Post: “I cannot walk into a room with pictures of Humayun. For all these years, I haven’t been able to clean the closet where his things are — I had to ask my daughter-in-law to do it.

“Walking onto the convention stage, with a huge picture of my son behind me, I could hardly control myself. What mother could?

She went on to call Trump “ignorant” about Islam: “If he studied the real Islam and Koran, all the ideas he gets from terrorists would change, because terrorism is a different religion.”