Saudi Arabian leaders preempted Jamal Khashoggi’s life before his agitation for Arab-Spring “democracy” had a chance to destabilize the House of Saud.
WASHINGTON:. “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.” So says Dick the Butcher in Shakespeare’s history “Henry The Sixth, part 2”. It’s one of the most famous quotations by a minor character created by the Bard.
Maybe we should revise it slightly.
“The first thing we do, let’s kill all the dissembling journalists.”
The Washington Post and most of the mainstream media are beside themselves over what appears to be the kidnapping, torture, murder, and dismemberment of Saudi-born journalist Jamal Khashoggi while he was on a visit to Istanbul, Turkey.
The bloody business allegedly occurred inside the Saudi Arabian consulate and was carried out by trained assassins from the kingdom.
Of late, Khashoggi was in the employ of the Washington Post as one of its Global Opinions columnists. Before this, he worked at various Arab news organizations. More often than not, his positions regarding female rights and press freedom inside Saudi Arabia put Khashoggi at odds with the kingdom’s absolute rulers.
The media is hounding the Trump administration to do something. And that something is likely to take the form of economic sanctions or the cancellation of weapons sales.
But with the Trump economy going gangbusters, any retaliatory disruptions in oil deliveries to the West by angry Saudi royals could sound the death nell for the boom.
Here’s the question before us. Is Khashoggi’s death worth stalling America’s recovering economy, which has been in recession, coupled with high unemployment, for nearly a decade?
So, who was Jamal Khashoggi?
One man who would know is no longer with us. His carcass lies at the bottom of the North Arabian Sea. That man was Osama bin Laden, whose Al Qaeda terror network carried out the attacks on New York City’s World Trade Center and the Pentagon in Washington, D. C., on Sept. 11,2001.
Bin Laden felt a kinship with Khashoggi by virtue of their shared Saudi heritage and fealty to a similar brand of Islam, Wahhabism.
In his book “ The Osama Bin Laden I Know: An Oral History of Al-Qaeda’s Leader,” author Peter Bergen writes:
“It was during the period of the Jaji [Afghanistan] battles in the spring of 1987 that bin Laden discovered for the first time the power of the press to burnish his image as a holy warrior. One of the first journalists from the mainstream Arab media to cover bin Laden was Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi. Khashoggi was studying in the United States as the Afghan war intensified during the early eighties.”
And no one was more eager to burnish bin Laden’s image as a holy warrior than journalist Khashoggi. And Khashoggi’s pals also included the boys of the Muslim Brotherhood.
According to the New York Times:
“Although he later stopped attending meetings of the Brotherhood, he [Khashoggi] remained conversant in its conservative, Islamist and often anti-Western rhetoric, which he could deploy or hide depending on whom he was seeking to befriend.”
Similar to his journalistic counterparts in the West, Khashoggi liked having it both ways. After the attacks of 9/11 and the death of nearly 3,000 Americans, he wrote that the violence of bin Laden and his hijackers “attacked Islam as a faith and the values of tolerance and coexistence that it preaches.”
Really? When have the Muslim Brotherhood or Al Qaeda preached tolerance? Much less coexistence with anyone unwilling to submit to their radical and superstitious primitivism?
So, why did the Saudi royal house decide to reach out and touch Khashoggi one last time?
In his final Washington Post column, Khashoggi wrote:
“The Arab world was ripe with hope during the spring of 2011. Journalists, academics and the general population were brimming with expectations of a bright and free Arab society within their respective countries. They expected to be emancipated from the hegemony of their governments and the consistent interventions and censorship of information. These expectations were quickly shattered; these societies either fell back to the old status quo or faced even harsher conditions than before.”
You may recall that the Western media met the so-called Arab Spring with wild enthusiasm. Newsrooms across America, especially the geniuses at the New York Times, waited with bated breath to see which Islamic nation would be the first to produce a democratic George Washington. In the case of Egypt, that man came in the form of Mohamed Morsi, head of the Muslim Brotherhood.
But the democratically elected Morsi consolidated power within the clenched fist of, you guessed it, the Muslim Brotherhood. And so, the Arab Spring’s George Washington quickly morphed into Napoleon Bonaparte.
The Arab Spring-loving New York Times forgot that Adolf Hitler did not shoot his way to power. In 1933, his Nazi Party won so many seats in the German parliament, Hitler was named Chancellor in a coalition government. And like Morsi did in Egypt nearly 80 years later, Hitler consolidated power for himself and his Nazis.
One-man-one-vote is not the key to a functioning Democracy. Instead, it’s dedication by a nation’s people and their political factions to the principle of pluralism and a respect for – or a grudging tolerance of – dissenting opinions. Unfortunately, that’s a bridge too far for the adherents of a religious ideology whose very name, Islam, translates to “submission.”
Having seen what Al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood have done in places like Afghanistan, Pakistan, Egypt, Libya, and Syria, Saudi Arabian King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud was understandably concerned about journalist Khashoggi and his friends.
Saudi Arabian leaders preempted Jamal Khashoggi’s life before his agitation for Arab-Spring “democracy” had a chance to destabilize the House of Saud. And pave the way for a fanatical, anti-Western Islamic regime with control of 18 percent of the globe’s oil reserves.
President Trump should remember that the same media who hates him also hates the United States of America. As well as Western Civilization as a whole. Why else would the Washington Post give a fake-news platform to Osama bin Laden friend and Muslim Brotherhood member, Jamal Khashoggi.
