Khizr Khan on being vilified by Trump: 'The far right feels that their voice has been heard'
Wednesday 21 December 2016 00.00 AEDT
As you look out from Khizr Khan’s home in Virginia, the Blue Ridge mountains sweep magnificently to one side. Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s idyllic estate, is a few miles in the other direction. And in between, still spiked into his neighbour Richard’s front lawn, is a plastic campaign sign that says “TRUMP”.
“Maybe he’s going to leave it up for the next four years,” says Khan, with a smile that turns into a sigh. Shaking his head, he takes a sip of tea and reaches for a small box of chocolates.
It is a month since the man who taunted Khan and his wife Ghazala following their headline-making appearance at the Democratic convention was elected to the world’s most powerful office, and reminders of Trump’s victory are everywhere.
But around the Khans’ living room, so too are mementos of having lived through much worse. Their late son Humayun stares down from one wall, handsome and steadfast in his army portrait. His posthumous Bronze Star and Purple Heart awards are nearby. Humayun, a captain who was killed defending his unit from a suicide bomber in Iraq in 2004, would have turned 40 this year. “We miss him so very much,” says Khan.
Still, Khan is shaken by Trump’s win and a subsequent spike in hate crimes across the US. Muslim friends say their children are being bullied. A doctor from Long Island told him a new patient refused to be treated by her when he saw her headscarf. Hostility toward Muslims is more intense than at any time since Khan arrived in America in 1980, he says.
“The far right feels that their voice has been heard and they have a licence to commit these crimes,” he says. “I have seen the fear of immigrants heighten after turmoil in the past. But never to this degree.”
Khan has taken advice from the police about securing his home. He advises women in his family not to travel alone. He is furious at Trump for not doing more to help. “These are your people, who you have encouraged to commit these crimes,” he says. “You have a responsibility as a leader to end it.”
Rather than move to calm the anti-Muslim fervour, Trump has made one of its most prominent advocates his national security adviser. Mike Flynn, a retired army lieutenant general who described Islam as “a vicious cancer” and said “fear of Muslims is rational”, will help Trump direct US military policy. Suggesting that Flynn is “ill, mentally”, Khan is deeply concerned about the implications for foreign relations.
Not that the appointment should be surprising. Having dismissed Mexican migrants as rapists and criminals in his first campaign speech, Trump told voters rattled by terrorist attacks in California and Paris that he would ban all Muslims from entering the US. He later proposed barring only those from countries compromised by extremism.
Khan doesn’t expect Trump to actually implement the ban, nor a new “registry” of Muslims he also floated. These were more likely cynical ploys “to get votes from the simple-minded people that fell for it”, he says. But damage has still been done.
It was Trump’s announcement of the Muslim ban last year that led a reporter to call Khan, who was quoted hailing his son’s patriotism and sharply criticising Trump. “Muslims are American, Muslims are citizens,” he said. An aide to Hillary Clinton saw the article, and invited Khan to appear at July’s convention in Philadelphia. His six-minute speech, with Ghazala at his side, caused a sensation.
Khan holds up the US constitution at Democratic national convention.
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Khan holds up the US constitution at Democratic national convention. Photograph: Alex Wong/Getty Images
“You have sacrificed nothing and no one,” he told Trump, who avoided serving in Vietnam because of alleged bone spurs on his feet. Waving a miniature US constitution that he’d pulled from his jacket pocket, Khan asked Trump if he’d even read the document. “I will gladly lend you my copy,” he said, to thundering applause. Khan keeps a stack of the booklets on a table beneath Humayun’s portrait. Visitors struggle to leave without one.
Incapable of letting a slight go unanswered, Trump called Khan “very emotional” and suggested he didn’t allow Ghazala to speak because of their religion. He moaned on Twitter: “Mr Khan, who does not know me, viciously attacked me from the stage of the DNC and is now all over TV doing the same – Nice!”
Horrified Republicans disowned Trump. Khan said he had a “black soul”. The dispute was pencilled in as a chapter in the political obituary Trump seemed to be writing for himself.
Things turned out differently. As the results rolled in last month, the Khans were VIP guests at Clinton’s election night event in Manhattan, where Ghazala was treated as a rockstar by actual rockstars. “A lady comes to Mrs Khan and says: ‘Mrs Khan, can I take a picture with you?’,” he recalls. “She pulled the hood on her hoodie down … and it was Cher.” Katy Perry and Lady Gaga did the same, he said.
But then, “it all got quieter”. Tearful supporters, who had been dancing in the aisles, traipsed out of the hall as the outcome became clear.
Khan, 66 and on a break from work as a legal consultant, has tried to stay upbeat by stepping up a speaking tour that grew out of his convention appearance. He has been preaching tolerance and pluralism to schoolchildren across the US. “Never be disheartened,” he tells them.
The packed schedule has exhausted him. Sniffing and coughing, he visibly drains over the course of our two-hour conversation. He is posing for photographs with a team of Japanese journalists as I arrive; an evening function beckons after I leave.
But he is energised by encounters while traversing the country as a recognisable face. Sitting in the eighth row on a recent flight home from Ohio, he was approached by two men sitting in first class. They shook his hand and offered him their seats. “We voted for Trump, but we want to thank you,” they told him. He politely declined.
As we speak, Ghazala, 65, is busy with one of their four grandchildren, who are between eight months and five years old. She and Khan were born in Pakistan and met at university in Lahore. They came to the US after a spell in Dubai, and live in a smart but unflashy four-bedroom house on a tranquil bluff a few miles outside Charlottesville. They have two adult sons, who advised them against getting involved in politics.
Sinking slowly into his sofa, Khan says the volume of abusive emails he received following the convention has declined, but he still deals with a couple of racist messages each day. He won’t show the worst, saying he erases them. In one new arrival on his iPhone, though, a man named Scott Glover felt the need to gleefully remind Khan: “Trump won the election and you, Hillary and the rest of the deplorable libs lost.”
Rightwing websites including Breitbart News, run until recently by Trump’s top adviser, went after the Khans with undisguised venom following the convention. One spurious story, based on a 33-year-old essay Khan wrote, claimed he championed sharia law. Another accused him of taking money from the Clintons. It was actually another lawyer named Khan.
Such was the vitriol that Clinton, who knows a bit about brutal media coverage, asked him when they met at a rally in New Hampshire: “Oh my God, how are you putting up with all this?” He told her it was worth it, and she assured him: “You’re doing something good.” He has no regrets about entering the political warzone: “There comes a time when one has to take a stand.”
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Khan at his son’s grave. Photograph: Brendan Smialowski/Getty Images
And much of the response has been cheering. Their dining room table is covered in fanmail from across the world. Letters addressed with only their names and Charlottesville now find their way to the house. Khan is particularly proud of one letter, which he pulls from an A4 brown envelope. “Mayor of London,” the header says.
“As Salaamu Alaikum,” meaning “peace be unto you”, the two-page handwritten letter from Sadiq Khan begins. Saying that he was “deeply moved” by the convention speech, London’s first Muslim mayor tells Khan it demonstrated the power of “diversity, tolerance and liberty”.
“These great American values are also Islamic values,” the mayor writes, “and your determination to live by these values has inspired many Londoners of all faiths and backgrounds.”
A bitter argument has broken out among Democrats since Clinton’s defeat about whether she spent too much time on these issues of identity and not enough appealing to struggling white males of the rust belt. Khan sides with those who dismiss this as a false dichotomy.
“I am biased,” he says, “but sometimes a moral stand has to be taken, and it’s worth the cost. I am glad that she spoke up. I believe in equal dignity. We all have equal rights regardless of our gender or our preferences.”
Nonetheless, Khan, a political independent who voted for both Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, does think Hillary also failed to stress the dangers of Trump’s wild economic threats against China for the farmers and factory workers of the midwest.
“You will not be able to sell your soybeans if we have a trade war with China,” he says. “They will rot right here, and we will have the same people who voted Trump in standing outside the White House trying to throw him out.”
He makes the case better than Clinton did, but has no interest in running for office. He reveals Terry McAuliffe, Virginia’s governor and a close ally of the Clintons, asked him to. “But it would limit me,” he says. “Just let me speak.” He is also, he notes, still not a Democrat.
It may be the tiredness talking, or the practised search for optimism of a parent who has lived through the worst possible grief. But Khan veers from despair about Trump’s election to predictions that maybe it won’t be as bad as it seems. “We just have to hang in there a little longer,” he says. “When he moves to Washington, things will surely be different.”
One thing he’s sure about, though, is “Trump needs to come off Twitter”. Khan stays away from social media, having seen its perils. In his legal career, Khan specialises in electronic evidence discovery. In one case he worked on, a driver involved in a deadly 2007 vehicle crash was told by his lawyer to erase a Facebook photo showing him holding a beer and wearing a T-shirt that read “I ♥ Hot Moms”. But the other side had already downloaded it. The lawyer is now serving a five-year suspension.
“Nobody is telling Trump the damage it can do,” says Khan. He does not, however, offer his services as a consultant to the president-elect.
At a loss for many more words of his own, Khan unfolds a printout he shows his student audiences. It is a quotation by Elie Wiesel, the writer and Auschwitz survivor, who died in July. It is what he believes.
“We must always take sides,” Wiesel said. “Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere.”
