US Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has responded to criticism from the father of a Muslim US soldier killed in Iraq.
In an impassioned speech at last week’s Democratic National Convention, Khizr Khan said Trump had sacrificed “nothing and no-one” for his country.
Trump said he had made “a lot of sacrifices” by creating jobs.
But he drew more controversy by mocking Khan’s wife, who had stood silently by her husband’s side as he spoke.
“If you look at his wife, she was standing there,” he said, in an interview with ABC’s This Week. “She had nothing to say… Maybe she wasn’t allowed to have anything to say. You tell me.”
Ghazala Khan said on Friday that she did not speak because she was still overcome with grief and could not look at her son’s photos without crying.
Democratic vice-presidential nominee Tim Kaine said Trump’s remarks were inappropriate.
“He was kind of trying to turn that into some kind of ridicule,” he said, quoted by AP. “It just demonstrates again kind of a temperamental unfitness. If you don’t have any more sense of empathy than that, then I’m not sure you can learn it.”
Trump’s campaign issued a statement on Saturday in which he praised Khan’s son Humayun.
“Captain Humayun Khan was a hero to our country and we should honour all who have made the ultimate sacrifice to keep our country safe,” he said.
“The real problem here are the radical Islamic terrorists who killed him, and the efforts of these radicals to enter our country to do us further harm.”
But Trump rejected Khan’s criticism.
“While I feel deeply for the loss of his son, Khan, who has never met me, has no right to stand in front of millions of people and claim I have never read the Constitution, (which is false) and say many other inaccurate things,” he said.
In the ABC interview to be broadcast on Sunday, a transcript of which was released by the Trump campaign, Trump was asked what sacrifices he had made.
“I work very, very hard. I’ve created thousands and thousands of jobs, tens of thousands of jobs, built great structures,” he said.
“…I’ve had tremendous success. I think I’ve done a lot.”
Khizr Khan, 65, told a rapturous crowd on Thursday, the final day of the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, that his son had sacrificed his life to save those of his fellow soldiers.
Humayun Khan was killed by a car bomb in 2004 at the age of 27, reports the BBC.
If it had been up to Trump, he said, his son would not have been in America.
Khan asked if Trump had “even read the United States Constitution”, and offered to lend him his copy.
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