Stop Donald, STOP.

I’m not a political strategist but if I was, then my first rule for running a presidential campaign would be this: never pick a fight with the grieving family of an American soldier slain whilst serving his country.

It’s a fight, as Trump is now discovering, that you can’t possibly win, not least in the court of public opinion.

This savagely effective master of aggressive, populist rhetoric and feuding has seen off everyone from his 17 rivals for the Republican nomination to Pope Francis.

But in Khizr and Ghazala Khan he has finally met his match.

Trump has finally met his match in Khizr and Ghazala Khan, who have dominated the news agenda for the four days since the powerful DNC speech

Now Trump needs to stop digging. He badly misplayed his hand trying to counter-attack them in a very bad way

For four days now, ever since Khizr made his stunningly powerful speech at the Democratic convention, the Khans have dominated the election news agenda.

Trump has badly misplayed his hand by trying to counter-attack them in a manner which has rightly drawn widespread opprobrium by people on all sides of the political divide.

I watched Mr Khan’s speech live and understood immediately the potential scale of its importance.

He is a man of rare nobility and extraordinary eloquence who speaks in a simple, direct manner which cuts to the heart of anyone who listens to him.

The agony of losing a son in the Iraq War twelve years ago is still deeply and demonstrably embedded in both him and his wife.

When he pulled out his copy of the Constitution and brandished it at the cameras, I felt like standing and cheering myself.

Not because I hate Donald Trump.

I don’t, he’s a good friend of mine.

No, it was because I share Mr Khan’s anger that millions of decent, law-abiding U.S. Muslims have been unfairly denigrated and abused in the debate over Islamic terrorism.

Most notably those Muslim families, like the Khans, who lost children or other relatives on the battlefield as these heroes fought to safeguard the lives of their fellow Americans.

ISIS, it is worth repeating, kill many more Muslims than they kill people of any other creed.

If Captain Humayun Khan were still alive, ISIS would target him as the ultimate infidel – a Muslim fighting for America against them. There is self-evidently a massive problem with Islamic terror and Trumo identified it

Every single Muslim whom I have spoken in recent months loathes and detests these murderous medieval monsters as much as non-Muslims do.

If Captain Humayun Khan were still alive today, then ISIS would specifically target him as the ultimate infidel – a Muslim fighting for America against them to protect a democracy and freedom that they abhor.

There is self-evidently a massive problem with Islamic terror and Trump was right to identify and prioritise it.

I didn’t agree with his proposal after the appalling San Bernadinho attack to initiate a short-term ban on all Muslims coming into America.

That smacked of unfairness, bigotry and over-reaction.

But I do agree with his apparently revised position, as espoused by his VP running mate Mike Pence, that people, particularly Muslims, travelling to the States from terror-strewn countries like Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan should be subjected to far more rigorous background checks on entry to the U.S.

Every country should be doing this; it’s just common sense given the dreadful ISIS-inspired attacks we’ve been seeing across Europe in recent weeks.

As the FBI director James Comey warned last week, current successes in the conventional war against ISIS on military battlefields across the Middle East will inevitably lead to increased terror attacks on civilian targets in Western Europe and the United States as these Islamic State ‘soldiers’ disperse to safer ground.

So Trump’s essential message to Americans is correct: we’re in a very dangerous war with people who want to do immeasurable harm to us and we’ve got to make damn sure we know who we’re letting into the country.

Where there is dispute is over how best to deal with it.

Trump's essential message may be right, but the Khans have drawn a clear dividing line between the targeting of violent Muslim extremists and victimising peaceful, law-abiding Muslims and those serving their country in the fight against ISIS

What the Khans have done so brilliantly is to draw a clear dividing line between the targeting of violent Muslim extremists and victimising peaceful, law-abiding Muslims or those serving their country in the fight against ISIS.

This is absolutely vital to encouraging the latter to root out and expose the former. ISIS will never be defeated without the active co-operation of the wider Muslim population, among whom its followers and fighters live.

Donald Trump should have recognised this bigger picture and responded to the Khans’ criticism with good grace and understanding, not with his usual defensive Alpha male bombast.

His suggestion that Ms Khan had been silenced due to her husband’s presumed Muslim male misogyny was particularly distasteful, and factually inaccurate as the powerful op-ed column she wrote for the Washington Post yesterday proved.

So yes, Donald Trump got this spectacularly wrong and I urge him to stop digging an even bigger hole with the Khans.

But he’s not the only villain here.

Trump isn't the only villain. Hillary Clinton voted for the war and is using the Khans as a political weapon - which is despicable

Hillary Clinton, lest we forget, voted for the war which killed Captain Khan.

She was thus directly responsible for his death and the deaths of the thousands of other U.S. servicemen and women who died in Iraq.

Their blood, including Captain Khan’s, is on her hands.

And please don’t give me all this guff about her being the innocent victim of a pack of lies spun by President Bush and his neo-con mates Rumsfeld and Cheney.

She was a United States Senator, and it was her fundamental duty to ensure the merits of Bush’s case for war were legitimate.

Indeed, I can think of no greater duty for any Senator than to microscopically and forensically examine the case for committing any American troops to any war.

Hillary failed that duty, the Iraq War was an absolute shambles, hundreds of thousands of lives were lost, and the Middle East turned into a blazing tinder-box from which ISIS emerged emboldened to terrorise the world.

‘I made a mistake,’ she explained later.

You think?????

This was one of the biggest mistakes made in the history of modern America.

One of the victims of that mistake was Captain Khan.

It thus takes some shameless gall, having made such a lethal error, to then invite his two grieving parents to appear at your convention and act as your political attack dogs – doesn’t it?

There’s a stinking hypocrisy to Hillary’s very deliberate deployment of the Khans as vote-winners for her election campaign.

So yes, be offended by Donald Trump’s reaction to the Khans. That is deserved.

But reserve some of your scorn for the despicably two-faced conduct of Hillary Clinton.

‘I don’t know where the bottom is,’ sneered Hillary yesterday as she milked Khan-gate like a ravenous dairy farmer.

Let me help, Mrs Clinton.