The mother of a slain Muslim-American soldier on Sunday responded to Donald Trump’s criticism of her Democratic National Convention appearance, writing an emotional column in The Washington Post.
Ghazala Khan, whose son, US Army Captain Humayun Khan, was killed in Iraq in 2004, wrote in the Post, “Donald Trump said he has made a lot of sacrifices. He doesn’t know what the word sacrifice means.”
Her comments came after Trump criticized her and her husband’s appearance at the convention last week, hypothesizing that she might have stayed silent because she was not “allowed” to speak.
“If you look at his wife, she was standing there, she had nothing to say, she probably — maybe she wasn’t allowed to have anything to say, you tell me,” Trump told ABC.
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At the convention, Ghazala Khan stood by her husband Khizr Khan’s side as he criticized Trump in a heart-wrenching speech, saying the real estate mogul“consistently smears the character of Muslims.” He also questioned whether Trump had ever read the US Constitution, adding, “I will gladly lend you my copy.”
On Sunday, Ghazala Khan responded in the Post to Trump’s remarks, saying, “Donald Trump has asked why I did not speak at the Democratic convention. . . Here is my answer to Donald Trump: Because without saying a thing, all the world, all America, felt my pain.”
Ghazala said her husband asked her if she wanted to speak at the convention, but she decided not to because it would be too painful.
“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,” she wrote in the column. “Walking onto the convention stage, with a huge picture of my son behind me, I could hardly control myself. What mother could?”
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In the column, Khan also called Trump’s view on Islam “ignorant.”
“If he studied the real Islam and Koran, all the ideas he gets from terrorists would change, because terrorism is a different religion,” she wrote.