National Review
Lee Smith

On October 2, Saudi national and U.S. green-card holder Jamal Khashoggi reportedly walked into the Saudi consulate to resolve issues related to his marital status. Through anonymous leaks to the press, Turkish sources claim he did not leave the diplomatic facility alive. More anonymous sources claim he was tortured and murdered, allegations repeated in the U.S. press without evidence.

It is possible that the circumstances around Khashoggi’s disappearance will soon come to light. However, it’s equally likely that the passage of time will only further obscure events. To cast some light on the issue, I thought it was worthwhile asking what seem to me the central questions.

1. Is There Evidence Khashoggi Was Murdered?

Turkish sources say there is. The U.S. press has reported that unnamed Turkish officials have told them—or unnamed second-hand Turkish sources had told them—they have evidence, audio and video, that a team of Saudi officials detained, tortured, and killed Khashoggi.

However, no reporters, neither Western nor Turkish, have seen that evidence. If it exists, the Turks have not made it public. In one of the few leaks from the U.S. government, an intelligence official told CNN there is no hard evidence as to whether Khashoggi is dead or alive.

2. Why Has Turkey Asked Saudi Arabia to Join Its Khashoggi Investigative Team?
According to press reports, the government in Ankara has asked Riyadh to help investigate what happened to Khashoggi. The Turkish foreign minister recently complained that the “[Saudis] aren’t cooperating in full extent to uncover the circumstances of Khashoggi’s disappearance. We would like to see a genuine cooperation from them.”

This makes no sense. If Saudi Arabia is suspected of abducting or killing Khashoggi, its involvement in the investigation would compromise the probe, even giving a potential suspect opportunity to tamper with evidence. Further, if there is audio and video evidence that a Saudi team killed Khashoggi, as Turkish and U.S. media report, there is no need for an investigation—the case has already been solved.

The Turks’ two irreconcilable diplomatic tracks—official channels offering Saudi a role in the investigation while unnamed sources accuse it of murder—suggest that Ankara is negotiating with Riyadh. It’s unclear what the terms are.

3. Are Internal Turkish Issues a Factor in the Khashoggi Affair?

Because the Turkish figures and officials leaking to the press are anonymous, it’s not clear if, or to what extent, they represent President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Could the sources be hostile to Erdogan?

Two years ago, his opponents attempted to overthrow him, leaving hundreds of Turks dead. Erdogan responded by rounding up followers of the former ally he blames for the coup, Fethullah Gulen, a Muslim cleric who has lived in Pennsylvania for nearly two decades. Gulen, like Khashoggi, has a green card, reportedly facilitated by CIA officials.

Presumably, Erdogan has mostly rid his police force of the Gulenists who once dominated it. However, some sources identifying as police are challenging pieces of evidence that the Ankara government is using to illustrate Saudi guilt.

The discipline shown in the messaging campaign—accuse Riyadh through leaks and reveal nothing in public—suggests Erdogan is managing the Khashoggi file directly. However, his overall management of the crisis may make him vulnerable, again, to domestic rivals.

4. What Does the Khashoggi Affair Have to Do with the Gulf Cooperation Council Cold War?

Since spring 2017, the Gulf Cooperation Council has been split, with senior partner Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) pitted against another U.S. ally, Qatar. Riyadh and Abu Dhabi accused Doha of supporting terrorism and getting too close to Iran, and imposed an embargo on their junior partner.

Turkey sided with Qatar, where it has a military base. Erdogan has sought to heal relations with Riyadh but still has problems with the UAE as well as Abu Dhabi’s sprawling client, Egypt.

Qatari media outlets are leading the information campaign, publishing the most garish rumors, like the prospect that Khashoggi was cut into pieces. It’s not known what role Doha may be playing behind the scenes, but it’s clear that Erdogan sees the Khashoggi affair as an opportunity to advance Turkish interests against Qatar’s rivals.

Thus the Khashoggi affair is another battleground in the GCC Cold War.

5. Is the Release of Pastor Brunson Related to the Khashoggi Affair?

Turkish press sources say no. Trump said there was no deal to get back Andrew Brunson. However, the timing of the pastor’s release seems to say otherwise.

There were rumors in July of a deal to free Brunson. The United States helped win the release of a Turkish terror suspect held by Israel, but instead of releasing Brunson, Ankara put him under house arrest. The Trump administration sanctioned Turkish officials, and warned that an already damaged Turkish economy was vulnerable to more sanctions.

After July’s events, Brunson’s lawyer filed a motion, and it was expected the pastor would be released from house arrest, although his passport would not yet be returned. Then Friday, Turkey sentenced and released him with time served.

The fact that Ankara is bargaining with Riyadh suggests that the Turks were looking to improve their position by giving the Trump administration something it wanted. Thus the release of Brunson is almost certainly related to the Khashoggi affair.

6. Did U.S. Intelligence Know the Saudis Were Planning an Operation Targeting Khashoggi?

According to press reports, U.S. intercepts captured Saudi communications about an operation to detain Khashoggi. A CNN story indicates that the United States likely found the information in reviewing its intercepts after Khashoggi went missing. Was U.S. intelligence asleep at the wheel while an ally was planning an operation conducted on the soil of a NATO member that was likely to have regional, and even international consequences?

Should Riyadh have notified its U.S. ally that it was planning an operation against a U.S. person? Saudi intelligence officials have historically enjoyed a close relationship with their U.S. counterparts, especially since 9/11, which raises an important question: Did the Saudis in fact tell the United States they were planning an operation targeting Khashoggi? Did anyone else know the Saudis were going after him?

7. How Did a Man with Extensive Ties to Intelligence Services as Well as Extremist Groups Get a Green Card?

Khashoggi writes a column for the Washington Post and worked at a number of Saudi media organizations, print and broadcast. Broadly speaking, he is a journalist, as the U.S. press is describing him—with the caveat that most Arab journalists primarily serve the political masters who pay and protect them, and often represent the interests of intelligence services.

Khashoggi was an adviser to former Saudi intelligence chief Turki al-Faisal when he was ambassador to London, then Washington. Khashoggi reportedly joined the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1970s and continues to advocate for political Islam. He called the late Saudi dissident Osama Bin Laden a friend and mourned his death. It appears that Khasshogi may have been something like Riyadh’s back channel to al-Qaeda, at least prior to 9/11.

So how did a former Saudi official with ties to intelligence services, connections to the Muslim Brotherhood, and a long history with a terrorist responsible for nearly 3,000 deaths on U.S. soil obtain permanent resident status?

Khashoggi must have important American patrons, because even though he reportedly moved to the United States in 2017, he already had a green card. According to the Washington Post’s David Ignatius: “Friends helped Khashoggi obtain a visa that allowed him to stay in the United States as a permanent resident.” So who vouched for him and why?

It might be useful to put these questions to former CIA director John Brennan. He was station chief in Riyadh from 1996-1999, when Khashoggi’s patron Turki al-Faisal was head of Saudi’s general intelligence directorate.

8. How Much of U.S. Press Coverage and Expert Opinion Is Shaped by the Pro-Iran ‘Echo Chamber’?

To market the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, commonly referred to as the Iran nuclear deal, the Obama administration built an echo chamber out of government officials, policy experts, and a supine press corps. But Obama’s signature foreign policy initiative was not only or even primarily an arms control deal. Rather, the JCPOA was purposed to realign U.S. interests in the Middle East, with Iran as the favored partner and traditional American allies, especially Israel and Saudi Arabia, downgraded.

Obama-era officials rightly saw the Trump administration as a threat to undo Obama’s policies. Trump not only got out of the Iran deal but also underscored the centrality of America’s traditional alliances. He made his first foreign visit to Saudi Arabia and moved the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem.

Soon after Khashoggi fell out of public view, former Obama aides and other echo chamber associates went into action. To punish Saudi, they named specific policies. In particular, they argued that the administration should withdraw support for Riyadh’s war against the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen.

It’s hardly coincidental that Khashoggi himself had made similar points in a September Washington Post column: “Saudi Arabia’s crown prince must restore dignity to his country — by ending Yemen’s cruel war.” In the article, Khashoggi questioned the crown prince’s legitimacy as ruler of Saudi Arabia and custodian of Islam’s two holiest shrines.

The inability, Khashoggi wrote, “of Saudi authorities in preventing Houthi missiles from being fired in the first place serves as an embarrassing reminder that the kingdom’s leadership is unable to restrain their Iranian-backed opponent.” Khashoggi’s criticism of other policies implemented by Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman (MBS)—like trying to rein in Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri—also synchronized with echo chamber talking points.

It should come as no surprise that the Obama echo chamber used the Khashoggi affair as an opportunity to sound its anti-Saudi talking points. As a Saudi voice critical of MBS, Khashoggi’s work at the Post was integrated into the echo chamber’s anti-Saudi and pro-Iran messaging campaign. How much is U.S. reporting and opinion regarding the Khashoggi affair shaped by the pro-Iran echo chamber? Nearly all of it.

9. Why Are Some DC Public Relations Firms Now Worried about Representing the Saudis?

Washington DC lobbyists and public relations firms, who represent some of the world’s worst, now appear to believe that the Saudis are beyond the pale. Is it because some of their other clients—like African despots, Central Asian oligarchs, and Latin American drug lords—don’t like the odor? No, it’s again a function of the GCC Cold War—and domestic American politics.

Both sides, Saudi Arabia/UAE and Qatar, have spent lavishly in their efforts to win the exclusive love of the American government. Many inside the Beltway have profited handsomely from the GCC conflict. Others, however, paid a price for putting themselves in the middle of warring tribes. For instance, the UAE-allied former finance chairman of the Republican National Committee chairman Elliott Broidy was targeted by the Qataris, who hacked his wife’s emails and leaked them to the New York Times.

Having acquired over the last several years the customs and manners of Arab media outlets, it’s only fitting the U..S press has taken sides against certain Arab regimes, just as it has taken sides against the current White House. Since Trump looks with favor on Saudi and the UAE, the media considers them enemies, too.

That’s why Congress’s hometown paper, the Washington Post, is warning the Saudis’ friends, allies, and employees to abandon Riyadh lest they forfeit their respectability. In other words, as long as publicists and lobbyists work for the Saudis, they can hardly expect the Post to give their other clients a fair hearing. It’s blackmail.

10. Why Are Conservative Policy Analysts and Journalists Advising Trump to Go Hard on Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman?

The dynamic public relations blitz waged on behalf of the 30-something heir to the throne appears to have backfired. It raised expectations way too high.

After winning praise from columnists like Thomas Friedman and Washington policy experts impressed by his favorable views toward political reform, Israel, women’s empowerment, and privatizing the economy, MBS stock has tumbled precipitously the last two weeks. Many of his former fans are barking the loudest because after they gave him the seal of approval, MBS embarrassed them in front of their peers.

Prominent GOP policy experts and neoconservative journalists were lured into the anti-MBS campaign led by former Obama hands and “resistance” media. Now, they, too, demand that the Trump administration should punish the crown prince.

They propose, however, no back-up plan should the shaming campaign by Saudi’s American patron weaken MBS’ position, or even remove him from the line of succession. After all, plenty of members of his family have it out for him after he locked down and penalized hundreds of princes last year as part of an anti-corruption campaign.

Most of the foreign policy establishment’s MBS advocates misunderstood his appeal from the start. They liked him because he appeared to be a liberal, and he encouraged that conviction, casting trifles in their path—movie theatres, music concerts, women behind the wheel, etc.

No, what’s most attractive about MBS is that he is young. His youth is important not because it signals a tech-savvy reformer with liberal impulses who will come to turn the kingdom into a democracy. He sees that Saudi Arabia is in a vulnerable position. Oil is not a long-term solution. Nor are there easy fixes found in the freedom agenda slogans chanted by those who now want to hobble him. His youth matters because, with luck, it will afford him time to figure out how to temper, maybe even solve, some of the country’s most daunting issues.

If he doesn’t, Saudi Arabia is in big trouble and so is everyone else. A meltdown in the Persian Gulf may affect global stability in ways that no one can fathom—including the experts, analysts, and pundits who now counsel punishing MBS, even though they, like virtually everyone else, have no idea what is at the bottom of the Khashoggi affair.

Link

So the audio has been leaked and has been reported to have the murder which takes 7 minutes for him to die will they dismembered him alive.

Jeez louise......imagine that.

This happened at the embassy- which is considered Saudi Arabian soil. By Saudis on Saudi soil. Besides the left pushing this, why does anyone care ?

quote:

they dismembered him alive.

Well, supposedly it was just his fingers before decapitating him. Oh, wait, still not cool.

quote:

Originally posted by oldbill123:
This happened at the embassy- which is considered Saudi Arabian soil. By Saudis on Saudi soil. Besides the left pushing this, why does anyone care ?

Because it’s 2018 and barbarism like this in a civilized world should be eradicated. He was a resident of the US and we do business with these fucking animals. In your day to day job you wouldn’t mind working with people who dismember people alive? If a foreign country murders someone in their embassy here in the states you would be totally ok with that?

I didn't invent diplomatic immunity. Unfortunately, we let all kinds of animals live in the states.
Much worse happens in many area of the world.
And yes, I am ok with it happening to a radical islamist.
Not our bidness

quote:

Originally posted by Dusty78:

quote:

Originally posted by oldbill123:
This happened at the embassy- which is considered Saudi Arabian soil. By Saudis on Saudi soil. Besides the left pushing this, why does anyone care ?

Because it’s 2018 and barbarism like this in a civilized world should be eradicated. He was a resident of the US and we do business with these fucking animals. In your day to day job you wouldn’t mind working with people who dismember people alive? If a foreign country murders someone in their embassy here in the states you would be totally ok with that?

I'm still meh with it. Politics is a dirty business at times and that's just the way it is, as upsetting as it is from time to time.

How is this situation different than the US bombing American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki? He was a US citizen afforded due process rights that all citizens have.

I'm also OK with the al-Awalki death too.

quote:

Originally posted by Georgeair:

quote:

they dismembered him alive.

Well, supposedly it was just his fingers before decapitating him. Oh, wait, still not cool.

source? any point in waiting for evidence beyond "Turkey reports""? while we're waiting on that, and measuring an appropriate response to facts, a little background on Khashoggi:

The Ugly Terror Truth About Jamal Khashoggi

In high school, Jamal Khashoggi had a good friend. His name was Osama bin Laden.

“We were hoping to establish an Islamic state anywhere,” Khashoggi reminisced about their time together in the Muslim Brotherhood. “We believed that the first one would lead to another, and that would have a domino effect which could reverse the history of mankind.”

The friendship endured with Jamal Khashoggi following Osama bin Laden to Afghanistan. Khashoggi credited Adel Batterjee, listed at one time as one of “the world’s foremost terrorist financiers” by the Treasury Department, with bringing him to Afghanistan to report on the fighting.

The media calls Khashoggi a journalist, but his writings from 80s Afghanistan read as Jihadist propaganda with titles like, "Arab Mujahadeen in Afghanistan II: Exemplifies the Unity of Islamic Ummah".

And when Osama bin Laden set up Al Qaeda, he called Khashoggi with the details.

After Afghanistan, Jamal Khashoggi went to work as a media adviser for former Saudi intel boss, Prince Turki bin Faisal, alleged to have links to Al Qaeda. Those allegations came from, among others, Zacarias Moussaoui, the alleged twentieth hijacker.

When the other 19 hijackers perpetrated the attacks of September 11, Khashoggi wrote that the Saudis would not “give in” to American “demands” for “unconditional condemnation” and “total cooperation”.

"Saudis tend to link the ugliness of what happened in New York and Washington with what has happened and continues to happen in Palestine. It is time that the United States comes to understand the effect of its foreign policy and the consequences of that policy," he declared.

"A Muslim cannot be happy with the suffering of others. Even if this suffering is that of Americans who neglected the suffering of Palestinians for half a century."

That’s the real Khashoggi, a cynical and manipulative apologist for Islamic terrorism, not the mythical martyred dissident whose disappearance the media has spent the worst part of a week raving about.

Jamal Khashoggi was not a moderate. Some describe him as the leader of the Saudi Muslim Brotherhood. The Islamist network admires Hitler and seeks to impose Islamic law around the world. Nor was he a supporter of freedom of the press. In one of his Al Jazeera appearances, he complained that the Saudi government was allowing some journalists to report positively on Israel.

His final project, DAWN or Democracy for the Arab World Now was meant to aid Islamists. According to Azzam Al-Tamimi, an old Muslim Brotherhood ally aiding Jamal, "The Muslim Brothers and Islamists were the biggest victims of the foiled Arab spring." Al-Tamimi has endorsed suicide bombings.

But unlike Osama bin Laden, Khashoggi did not use the Muslim Brotherhood as a gateway drug to the pure and uncut violence of Al Qaeda or ISIS. He was still betting on a political takeover.

As he recently put it, “Democracy and political Islam go together.”

Khashoggi went on making the case for the Islamic state of the Muslim Brotherhood. He went on making that case even as the Saudis decided that the Brotherhood had become too dangerous.

Like his old friend, Jamal Khashoggi went into exile in a friendly Islamist country. Osama bin Laden found refuge in Pakistan and Khashoggi ended up in Turkey. The Khashoggi family had originated from Turkey. And Turkey was swiftly becoming the leading Sunni Islamist power in the region. Living in Turkey put Khashoggi at the intersection of the Turkish-Qatari backers of the Brotherhood and the Western media.

His disappearance has touched off fury and anger from the Islamist regime that harbored him. And it has also set off an unprecedented firestorm of rage and grief by the American media which adored him.

Media spin describes Khashoggi as a dissident. And he certainly was that. But so was Osama bin Laden.

What Khashoggi wasn’t, was a moderate. No more so than the Muslim Brotherhood. He wasn’t a proponent of human rights, but of Islamic rule. He could be found on Al Jazeera, Qatar’s Jihadist propaganda network, bemoaning Saudi opposition to the Brotherhood and its friendliness to Israel.

"Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman should get rid of his complex against the Muslim Brotherhood and stop treating them as the enemy or a threat to Saudi Arabia," he complained, and urged the Saudis to fight Israel instead.

Jamal Khashoggi’s career of spouting Muslim Brotherhood propaganda for his new Turkish and Qatari masters came to an end in a curious way. Before Khashoggi allegedly entered the Saudi embassy, from which Turkey claims that he disappeared, he told his Turkish fiancé to call Yasin Aktay if he didn’t return.

Before the summer coup of 2016, Turkey was said to have 50,000 political prisoners. Many of them were members of the country’s oppressed Kurdish minority which is deprived of its most basic civil rights. These include even the use of their own language. Doing so can carry a prison sentence.

In that terrible summer, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey’s Islamic tyrant, finished securing his absolute hold on power with the coup as his Reichstag fire. The alleged coup became a blank check for the mass arrest and torture of countless thousands of political prisoners. Amnesty International estimated that 50,000 had been detained. The UN listed a figure as high as 180,000. They included 300 journalists.

Lawyers described clients being brought to them covered in blood.

Erdogan went after professors, judges, law enforcement, the military and the last remnants of a free press. A Human Rights Watch report documented electric shocks, beatings with truncheons and rubber hoses, and rape by Erdogan’s Islamic thugs. Heads were banged against walls. Men were forced to kneel on burning hot asphalt. Medical reports showed skull fractures, damage to testicles and dehydration.

The media didn’t show any of the hysterical outrage at these crimes that it has over the disappearance of Jamal Khashoggi. The media cares more about Khashoggi, a former media mouthpiece of the Saudi regime before it turned on his Muslim Brotherhood brothers, than about 300 Turkish reporters.

It’s not hypocrisy, it’s consistency.

Erdogan and Khashoggi are both militant Islamic activists. And their opponents, the victims of Erdogan’s Reichstag fire and the new Saudi king, had fallen afoul of them for being insufficiently militantly Islamist.

The media will always take the side of Islamists over non-Islamists. That’s why it bleeds for Khashoggi.

There was a reason why Jamal Khashoggi felt so comfortable in Turkey, while actual journalists in the country were terrified of being locked up, tortured and disappeared. If that was the fate that befell Khashoggi, it was a commonplace one in Turkey. And it may have been carried out by his own Turkish allies who decided that their Saudi subversive had more value as a false flag martyr than a house guest.

The media’s disproportionate outrage over Khashoggi has nothing to do with human rights. If it did, the media would have been just as outraged at the arrests and torture of tens of thousands in Turkey.

It’s not. And it won’t be.

And the politicians shrilly urging that we punish the Saudis never thought about curtailing arms sales to Turkey. Many of the same politicians were unhappy when President Trump used economic pressure on Erdogan in an effort to free American hostages, like Pastor Andrew Brunson, being held by Turkey.

This is about Islam.

The struggle between Saudi Arabia and the UAE on the one hand, and Turkey, Qatar and Iran on the other, is the next stage of the Arab Spring. And, from Yemen to Turkey, the media has made no secret of being on the Islamist side. Its outrage over Khashoggi, like its claims of a human rights crisis over the Saudi bombings in Yemen, are not journalism, they’re the political spin of the Islamist axis.

The media has reported every claim of victimhood by the Muslim Brotherhood and Qatar’s Al Jazeera propaganda arm, while giving as little attention as possible to the victims of Muslim Brotherhood church bombings. Its coverage of Israel has been little more than terrorist propaganda since Osama was in diapers. Its coverage of the Khashoggi case is every bit as dishonest as its slanted attacks on the Saudi embargo of Qatar, as its propaganda about the wars in Yemen and Libya, and just as devoid of context.

The Khashoggi case demands context.

Before the media and the politicians who listen to it drag the United States into a conflict with Saudi Arabia over a Muslim Brotherhood activist based on the word of an enemy country still holding Americans hostage, we deserve the context.

And we deserve the truth.

The media wants the Saudis to answer questions about Jamal Khashoggi. But maybe the media should be forced to answer why the Washington Post was working with a Muslim Brotherhood propagandist?

The real mystery isn’t Khashoggi’s disappearance. It’s why Republicans aren’t asking those questions.

The media’s relationship with Khashoggi is far more damning than anything the Saudis might have done to him. And the media should be held accountable for its relationship with Osama bin Laden’s old friend.

http://sultanknish.blogspot.co...uth-about-jamal.html

"Because it’s 2018 and barbarism like this in a civilized world should be eradicated. He was a resident of the US and we do business with these fucking animals"

A proponent for barbarism is treated in a barbaric way, by a barbaric embassy, in a barbaric part of the world.

I could say Karma
Can't say I am outraged
What civilized world ?
Eradicated is pretty strong - maybe gently coaxed ??

I’ve been to Istanbul....barbaric isn’t what I would call it. Again by your statements it would totally cool if foreign embassy’s in the US went about butchering their citizens?

quote:

Originally posted by feersum dreadnaught:

quote:

Originally posted by Georgeair:

quote:

they dismembered him alive.

Well, supposedly it was just his fingers before decapitating him. Oh, wait, still not cool.

source? any point in waiting for evidence beyond "Turkey reports""? while we're waiting on that, and measuring an appropriate response to facts, a little background on Khashoggi:

The Ugly Terror Truth About Jamal Khashoggi

In high school, Jamal Khashoggi had a good friend. His name was Osama bin Laden.

“We were hoping to establish an Islamic state anywhere,” Khashoggi reminisced about their time together in the Muslim Brotherhood. “We believed that the first one would lead to another, and that would have a domino effect which could reverse the history of mankind.”

The friendship endured with Jamal Khashoggi following Osama bin Laden to Afghanistan. Khashoggi credited Adel Batterjee, listed at one time as one of “the world’s foremost terrorist financiers” by the Treasury Department, with bringing him to Afghanistan to report on the fighting.

The media calls Khashoggi a journalist, but his writings from 80s Afghanistan read as Jihadist propaganda with titles like, "Arab Mujahadeen in Afghanistan II: Exemplifies the Unity of Islamic Ummah".

And when Osama bin Laden set up Al Qaeda, he called Khashoggi with the details.

After Afghanistan, Jamal Khashoggi went to work as a media adviser for former Saudi intel boss, Prince Turki bin Faisal, alleged to have links to Al Qaeda. Those allegations came from, among others, Zacarias Moussaoui, the alleged twentieth hijacker.

When the other 19 hijackers perpetrated the attacks of September 11, Khashoggi wrote that the Saudis would not “give in” to American “demands” for “unconditional condemnation” and “total cooperation”.

"Saudis tend to link the ugliness of what happened in New York and Washington with what has happened and continues to happen in Palestine. It is time that the United States comes to understand the effect of its foreign policy and the consequences of that policy," he declared.

"A Muslim cannot be happy with the suffering of others. Even if this suffering is that of Americans who neglected the suffering of Palestinians for half a century."

That’s the real Khashoggi, a cynical and manipulative apologist for Islamic terrorism, not the mythical martyred dissident whose disappearance the media has spent the worst part of a week raving about.

Jamal Khashoggi was not a moderate. Some describe him as the leader of the Saudi Muslim Brotherhood. The Islamist network admires Hitler and seeks to impose Islamic law around the world. Nor was he a supporter of freedom of the press. In one of his Al Jazeera appearances, he complained that the Saudi government was allowing some journalists to report positively on Israel.

His final project, DAWN or Democracy for the Arab World Now was meant to aid Islamists. According to Azzam Al-Tamimi, an old Muslim Brotherhood ally aiding Jamal, "The Muslim Brothers and Islamists were the biggest victims of the foiled Arab spring." Al-Tamimi has endorsed suicide bombings.

But unlike Osama bin Laden, Khashoggi did not use the Muslim Brotherhood as a gateway drug to the pure and uncut violence of Al Qaeda or ISIS. He was still betting on a political takeover.

As he recently put it, “Democracy and political Islam go together.”

Khashoggi went on making the case for the Islamic state of the Muslim Brotherhood. He went on making that case even as the Saudis decided that the Brotherhood had become too dangerous.

Like his old friend, Jamal Khashoggi went into exile in a friendly Islamist country. Osama bin Laden found refuge in Pakistan and Khashoggi ended up in Turkey. The Khashoggi family had originated from Turkey. And Turkey was swiftly becoming the leading Sunni Islamist power in the region. Living in Turkey put Khashoggi at the intersection of the Turkish-Qatari backers of the Brotherhood and the Western media.

His disappearance has touched off fury and anger from the Islamist regime that harbored him. And it has also set off an unprecedented firestorm of rage and grief by the American media which adored him.

Media spin describes Khashoggi as a dissident. And he certainly was that. But so was Osama bin Laden.

What Khashoggi wasn’t, was a moderate. No more so than the Muslim Brotherhood. He wasn’t a proponent of human rights, but of Islamic rule. He could be found on Al Jazeera, Qatar’s Jihadist propaganda network, bemoaning Saudi opposition to the Brotherhood and its friendliness to Israel.

"Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman should get rid of his complex against the Muslim Brotherhood and stop treating them as the enemy or a threat to Saudi Arabia," he complained, and urged the Saudis to fight Israel instead.

Jamal Khashoggi’s career of spouting Muslim Brotherhood propaganda for his new Turkish and Qatari masters came to an end in a curious way. Before Khashoggi allegedly entered the Saudi embassy, from which Turkey claims that he disappeared, he told his Turkish fiancé to call Yasin Aktay if he didn’t return.

Before the summer coup of 2016, Turkey was said to have 50,000 political prisoners. Many of them were members of the country’s oppressed Kurdish minority which is deprived of its most basic civil rights. These include even the use of their own language. Doing so can carry a prison sentence.

In that terrible summer, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey’s Islamic tyrant, finished securing his absolute hold on power with the coup as his Reichstag fire. The alleged coup became a blank check for the mass arrest and torture of countless thousands of political prisoners. Amnesty International estimated that 50,000 had been detained. The UN listed a figure as high as 180,000. They included 300 journalists.

Lawyers described clients being brought to them covered in blood.

Erdogan went after professors, judges, law enforcement, the military and the last remnants of a free press. A Human Rights Watch report documented electric shocks, beatings with truncheons and rubber hoses, and rape by Erdogan’s Islamic thugs. Heads were banged against walls. Men were forced to kneel on burning hot asphalt. Medical reports showed skull fractures, damage to testicles and dehydration.

The media didn’t show any of the hysterical outrage at these crimes that it has over the disappearance of Jamal Khashoggi. The media cares more about Khashoggi, a former media mouthpiece of the Saudi regime before it turned on his Muslim Brotherhood brothers, than about 300 Turkish reporters.

It’s not hypocrisy, it’s consistency.

Erdogan and Khashoggi are both militant Islamic activists. And their opponents, the victims of Erdogan’s Reichstag fire and the new Saudi king, had fallen afoul of them for being insufficiently militantly Islamist.

The media will always take the side of Islamists over non-Islamists. That’s why it bleeds for Khashoggi.

There was a reason why Jamal Khashoggi felt so comfortable in Turkey, while actual journalists in the country were terrified of being locked up, tortured and disappeared. If that was the fate that befell Khashoggi, it was a commonplace one in Turkey. And it may have been carried out by his own Turkish allies who decided that their Saudi subversive had more value as a false flag martyr than a house guest.

The media’s disproportionate outrage over Khashoggi has nothing to do with human rights. If it did, the media would have been just as outraged at the arrests and torture of tens of thousands in Turkey.

It’s not. And it won’t be.

And the politicians shrilly urging that we punish the Saudis never thought about curtailing arms sales to Turkey. Many of the same politicians were unhappy when President Trump used economic pressure on Erdogan in an effort to free American hostages, like Pastor Andrew Brunson, being held by Turkey.

This is about Islam.

The struggle between Saudi Arabia and the UAE on the one hand, and Turkey, Qatar and Iran on the other, is the next stage of the Arab Spring. And, from Yemen to Turkey, the media has made no secret of being on the Islamist side. Its outrage over Khashoggi, like its claims of a human rights crisis over the Saudi bombings in Yemen, are not journalism, they’re the political spin of the Islamist axis.

The media has reported every claim of victimhood by the Muslim Brotherhood and Qatar’s Al Jazeera propaganda arm, while giving as little attention as possible to the victims of Muslim Brotherhood church bombings. Its coverage of Israel has been little more than terrorist propaganda since Osama was in diapers. Its coverage of the Khashoggi case is every bit as dishonest as its slanted attacks on the Saudi embargo of Qatar, as its propaganda about the wars in Yemen and Libya, and just as devoid of context.

The Khashoggi case demands context.

Before the media and the politicians who listen to it drag the United States into a conflict with Saudi Arabia over a Muslim Brotherhood activist based on the word of an enemy country still holding Americans hostage, we deserve the context.

And we deserve the truth.

The media wants the Saudis to answer questions about Jamal Khashoggi. But maybe the media should be forced to answer why the Washington Post was working with a Muslim Brotherhood propagandist?

The real mystery isn’t Khashoggi’s disappearance. It’s why Republicans aren’t asking those questions.

The media’s relationship with Khashoggi is far more damning than anything the Saudis might have done to him. And the media should be held accountable for its relationship with Osama bin Laden’s old friend.

http://sultanknish.blogspot.co...uth-about-jamal.html

That seems to be quite the story. While some of it may be true, the point that they were friends in high school seems to a creative exaggeration. That is unless you find CNN and several other outlets completely unworthy of facts. Outside of both being born in Saudi Arabia, they were more than a year apart in age, and from what I have read, Kashoggie lived near the capital and rubbed elbows with the elite (his father was the physician to the founding king). Furthermore, it looks like they first met in 1985 when Kashoggie interviewed OBL , when OBL would have been 28. It gets hard to believe this once the opening facts are compromised.

a) fuck the House of Saud, Saudi Arabia as a whole, and everything about Wahhabism.

b) fuck everything about any country murdering its citizens for speaking out against it.

c) double fuck everything about abject brutality such as dismemberment.

And how do you square away b) with the US action against al-Awalki?

If you're going to lament what SA did, to be consistent you should take an equal tone against the US or is it OK to deprive US citizens of their due process rights if we find them out of country?

quote:

Originally posted by 46and2:
a) fuck the House of Saud, Saudi Arabia as a whole, and everything about Wahhabism.

b) fuck everything about any country murdering its citizens for speaking out against it.

c) double fuck everything about abject brutality such as dismemberment.

You left out the swell folks running Turkey.

So how did Turkey come across the audio of the torture and murder?

quote:

Originally posted by saigonsmuggler:
So how did Turkey come across the audio of the torture and murder?

I don't think any of that is confirmed yet, there being an audio recording that is.

Reports are that he was injected with something and then cut up by a Saudi government pathologist. There apparently is an audio recording of the torture and dismembering.

From https://www.middleeasteye.net/...-khashoggi-829291552

quote:

It took seven minutes for Jamal Khashoggi to die, a Turkish source who has listened in full to an audio recording of the Saudi journalist's last moments told Middle East Eye.

Khashoggi was dragged from the consul-general’s office at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul and onto the table of his study next door, the Turkish source said.

Horrendous screams were then heard by a witness downstairs, the source said.

"The consul himself was taken out of the room. There was no attempt to interrogate him. They had come to kill him,” the source told MEE.

The screaming stopped when Khashoggi - who was last seen entering the Saudi consulate on 2 October - was injected with an as yet unknown substance.

Salah Muhammad al-Tubaigy, who has been identified as the head of forensic evidence in the Saudi general security department, was one of the 15-member squad who arrived in Ankara earlier that day on a private jet.

Tubaigy began to cut Khashoggi’s body up on a table in the study while he was still alive, the Turkish source said.

The killing took seven minutes, the source said.

As he started to dismember the body, Tubaigy put on earphones and listened to music. He advised other members of the squad to do the same.

“When I do this job, I listen to music. You should do [that] too,” Tubaigy was recorded as saying, the source told MEE.

A three-minute version of the audio tape has been given to Turkish newspaper Sabah, but they have yet to release it.

A Turkish source told the New York Times that Tubaigy was equipped with a bone saw. He is listed as the president of the Saudi Fellowship of Forensic Pathology and a member of the Saudi Association for Forensic Pathology.

In 2014, London-based Saudi newspaper Asharaq al-Awsat interviewed Tubaigy about a mobile clinic that allows coroners to perform autopsies in seven minutes to determine the cause of death of Hajj pilgrims.

The newspaper reported that the mobile clinic was partly designed by Tubaigy and could be used in "security cases that requires pathologist intervention to perform an autopsy or examine a body at the place of a crime”.

Word that I heard is that his Apple watch was recording to iCloud; he had given his girlfriend his iPhone before he went into the embassy.

Take that for what it is worth.

Yes an embassy is "their land" in our (or another's) land.

And if something like this happened on in our country, in another's embassy compound, it would be expected that we would tell them to take their dirt and go home.

They may wish to "re-apply" for an embassy consulate, but it would require a lot of focus on them and their actions.

Embassies, like houses of worship, hospitals, schools, courts and such are considered "safe haven" (or should be), where people can go without fear of being murdered.