Team Trump Mainstreams Theodore Shoebat with Smear Attack on Khizr Khan and his Dead Son

From Think Progress (emphasis and link added):

An official adviser to the Trump campaign has escalated the attacks on Khizr Khan, the gold star father who was critical of Trump at the Democratic convention, baselessly accusing him of being a “Muslim Brotherhood agent.”

The adviser, Al Baldasaro, tweeted a link to an article from Shoebat.com, a fringe anti-Islam conspiracy website. The article also suggests (without any evidence) that Humayun Khan, who was awarded a Purple Heart and Bronze, was a jihadist who joined the military to kill Americans.

That last aspect of the Shoebat post risks being overlooked and/or downplayed, hence the added bold. The post, by Theodore Shoebat opines that

In regards to his son and his sacrifice, on the other side of the coin, many were the ‘Muslim martyrs’ who joined the US military. Ali Abdul Saoud Mohamed, for example, enlisted in the Special Forces of the US Army; he was a double agent for Al-Qaeda.

…These Muslim soldiers were “heroes” of course, until the snow melted later on. Is it likely that Khan’s son was killed before the snow melted? Only another type of investigation will determine that.  Does Hillary’s man ever mention how many soldiers have died because of Muslim traitors?… But soon everything we need to know will be uncovered as a Middle Eastern proverb says: the snow always melts and the sh*t under it will soon be revealed.

The claim that Khizr Khan is a “Muslim Brotherhood agent” is derived from a paper he published in 1983, in which he acknowledges the writings of Said Ramadan as a source in a footnote. The paper, entitled “Juristic Classification of Islamic Law“, appeared in the Houston Journal of International Law (volume 6, number 23).

This is all presented as something that “the media is not telling you”, and as such it is now being hyped in certain quarters in a – somewhat desperate – attempt to re-frame the narrative away from what Trump’s outburst against Khizr and Ghazala Khan reveals about Trump’s disordered personality and fragile ego (as eloquently dissected here by Robert Kagan) to how the “real” story is about how Khan is secretly some awful person.

Those on the bandwagon promoting Shoebat’s post include none other than veteran conservative Richard Viguerie, who promptly blocked me on Twitter when I remonstrated; Fox News’s Lou Dobbs, who suggests that the post reveals “questions” about Khan; and Roger Stone. Theodore Shoebat’s father Walid Shoebat has also been interviewed about the subject by Michael Savage. The post is also linked in passing by Breitbart, in an article about Khan’s past association with the international law firm Hogan Lovells (which employs more than 2,500 lawyers). These sources commend Shoebat as a source on Khan and the Muslim Brotherhood, although they avoid mentioning Shoebat’s slur against his son.

Meanwhile, although not citing Shoebat directly, Trump’s spokeswoman Katrina Pierson stated on The Kelly File that “this father apparently has been a strong proponent of Sharia law”, and that he has reportedly written “law briefs for Sharia law”. As such, according Pierson, it is not “a far fetched assumption” by Trump that Ghazala Khan had not been allowed to speak by her husband (Pierson similarly excelled on CNN, explaining that “it was under Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton that changed the rules of engagement that probably cost [Humayun Khan] his life” – even though Humayun Khan was killed in action in 2004, halfway through the Bush presidency).

Oddly enough, I speculated in January that Trump’s rise might herald a Shoebat revival – a few years ago now, Walid Shoebat was part of the conservative and evangelical speaker circuit, but more recently the Shoebat family business become something of a fringe operation, especially since the Shoebats decided to adopt a form of Catholic traditionalism that is viscerally anti-Protestant (Martin Luther is apparently “a spiritual Jezebel and a Balaam”, while John Wycliffe is an “evil heretic”). Theodore’s anti-gay hatred is so obessive that he recently repelled even Peter LaBarbera with his calls for gay people to be executed – with typical Shoebat crudity, LaBarbera was then denounced as a “filthy pig” and a “traitor”.

It should also be noted that although the Shoebats highlight acts of Islamist and Jihadist barbarity as evidence of the evils of Muslims, they often don’t care too much for their victims either; in particular, the Bataclan attack prompted “Don’t Pray For France, France Is A Godless Nation That Deserved To Be Attacked. France Supports Terrorists And Kills Christians, And Needs To Be Punished“. That kind of thing is probably too much for the majority of US churchgoers – but it did occur to me that Trump’s successes were revealing a cruder constituency for whom there is no stigma in appealing to the worst instincts.

UPDATE: Walid Shoebat has now followed up with a post of his own:

Hillary Is Busted: Read The Real Booklet Hillary’s Man Was Carrying For Years. It Was The Muslim Shari’ah Constitution And NOT The U.S Constitution

It includes a photo, which is also being promoted on social media:

Khan Shoebat

Obviously, with this photo Shoebat is attempting to imply that he’s spotted something odd about the back of the document that Khan held aloft at the DNC, although his post doesn’t in fact make the claim that Khan was not holding a pocket constitution (such a suggestion would in any case be unsustainable). Instead, Shoebat writes (links in original):

Khizr Muazzam Khan’s photo carrying a booklet of the U.S. Constitution made him a celebrity to millions of bleeding liberal hearts. While Khan never once wrote complementing the U.S. Constitution until Trump,  instead, in his booklet, The Sharia Explained (we copied shocking excerpts) of what the media failed to vet:  Khan’s real booklet clearly upholds Shari’ah while denouncing any other including any modern reforms to Islam. He concludes that Sharia should be “upheld in its original form” and that it has “no room for change” insisting that Muslims worldwide must be “subordinated to the Shari’ah”…

Both links in fact click through to the Houston Journal of International Law article “Juristic Classification of Islamic Law” mentioned above. It is not a “booklet”; it is not called The Sharia Explained; and it is a descriptive account of Islamic law for the benefit of a wider audience rather than a prescriptive theological treatise. The “Sharia Law” image on the left is unrelated to the paper, and has no connection with Khan.

Shoebat focuses in particular on one section (underlining here in Shoebat’s quote, although not in the original):

“The Shari’ah-was completed during the lifetime of Prophet Muhammed, in the Quran and Sunnah. This brings up an important fact which is generally overlooked, that the invariable and basic rules of Islamic Law are only those prescribed in the Shari’ah (Quran and Sunnah), which are few and limited,” Khan continues to write: “All other juridical works which have been written during more than thirteen centuries are very rich and indispensable, but they must always be subordinated to the Shari’ah and open to reconsideration by all Muslims.”

Shoebat says that this shows that it is “as clear as the sun” that Khan has a view of Islam in which “there is no room for any modernization”.

However, Shoebat here completely misrepresents his source. Khan is not saying that later juridical works must be disregarded, and the Quran and Sunnah approached fundamentalistically; rather, he’s saying that the “basic rules” are “few and limited” and that later works must be “open to reconsideration”. This in fact highlights flexibility and openness to reform.

Meanwhile, Snopes has an overview and assessment here. The short version:

No credible evidence supports the assertion that Khan is an operative of the Muslim Brotherhood.

One Response

  1. Trump answered, were he the president then, Khan would never have been to Iraq in the first place, Trumps words is but telling the wicked & violent policy the US has been taking for a long time & in this Zionist middle east policy itself has seen millions killed in Iraq, Libya Syria etc even as they side by side push in Sodom & its Agendas worldwide. A curse unto mankind.against a khan’s so called martyrdom, fooled into it.

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