On June 8, 2004, Captain Humayun S. M. Khan was serving a tour of duty in Iraq with the 201st Forward Support Battalion, 1st Infantry Division at a road checkpoint when a vehicle with two men inside approached. Khan yelled for his squad to “hit the dirt” after the driver failed to comply with his demand to stop. Khan continued to walk toward the vehicle as his brothers-in-arms followed his orders. Then the vehicle exploded, killing Kahn.
On that day, Kahn sacrificed his life for the American soldiers under his command. For his bravery and sacrifice, he was posthumously awarded the Bronze Star and Purple Heart and buried with full honors at Arlington National Cemetery, the final resting place of hundreds of thousands of other men and women who have given their lives for this country since the Civil War.
Khan was born in the United Arab Emirates to Pakistani parents and moved to the United States at the age of two, where the family settled in Virginia. They moved here because they respected American values and wanted to be a part of the land of the free
But ever since the San Bernardino mass shooting earlier this month, Donald Trump and conservatives have been calling for banning Muslim immigrants from entering this country, an idea that horrifies Khan’s father, Khizr Khan.
In response to Trump, Khizr told Vocativ that the billionaire Republican front-runner does not represent the American values that inspired his family to move to the United States back in the 1970s.
“Muslims are American, Muslims are citizens, Muslims participat[e] in the well-being of this country as American citizens. We are proud American citizens. It’s the values [of this country] that brought us here, not our religion. Trump’s position on these issues do not represent those values.”
Those values, Khizr said, are what made his son put his life at risk for this country and his fellow soldiers.
“We still wonder what made him take those 10 steps [towards the car]. Maybe that’s the point where all the values, all the service to country, all the things he learned in this country kicked in. It was those values that made him take those 10 steps. Those 10 steps told us we did not make [a] mistake in moving to this country. These were the values we wanted to adopt. Not religious values, human values.”
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