Even though some Republicans are denouncing Donald Trump for his verbal feud with Khizr Khan in past days, Khan deserves scrutiny for his Islamist views, says a national defense analyst.

Khan, an attorney, is known among fellow Muslims for “embracing sharia law and rejecting the U.S. Constitution,” alleges Bob Maginnis, a retired U.S. Army colonel now with the Family Research Council.

Yet the feud between Khan and Trump began when Khan waved a copy of the Constitution at the Democratic National Convention during a verbal barrage against the Republican nominee.

Khan and his wife, who stood beside him, lost their son, a U.S. Army captain, in Iraq in 2004. That loss provided immediate sympathy for their message denouncing Trump’s anti-Muslim views but the real estate mogul predictably shot back anyway, drawing rebuke from his own party and the Veterans of Foreign Wars among others.

Gary Bauer of American Families says while it’s true that the son was a hero, “that doesn’t mean that his parents then get to decide, without anybody arguing with them, what American immigration policy ought to be.”

Trump, he says, has “prudently” called for a pause in immigration from countries where terrorism has a presence.

Maginnis smells a rat and wonders if the incident was a setup by the Clinton campaign to lure the trash-talking Trump into attacking a “Gold Star” family during the presidential campaign.

“They knew that Trump would respond by attacking the concept,” Maginnis says. “The question is whether or not this setup is more than that.”

Amid the backlash against Trump, some conservative media have tied Khan to anti-Western Sharia teachings. Pro-Trump website Breitbart News investigated Khan’s personal writings, including his praise for a former Pakistani official who supported Sharia law. Breitbart also cited an academic paper written by Khan in 1983 when he studied in Saud Arabia.

Maginnis

There are no known writings from Khan about the Constitution, the Breitbart story alleged, but his views on Sharia law are widely used and read in law classes.

When Khan was given the chance to address his critics in a CNN interview, Breitbart noted that he oddly claimed twice that there is “no such thing” as Sharia law. The laws in Muslim counties, he said, are a “hodgepodge” of laws originating from Great Britain and other countries.

According to Maginnis, Khan should be considered an “Islamist,” which is someone who is “focused exclusively on the promotion of his radical religion.”