Mohammed bin salman

Millions of innocent civilians uprooted from their homes. Residential areas turned into dust, rubble and wire. Thousands of people killed in errant airstrikes. Store shelves emptied of basic staples. A humanitarian crisis dominating the everyday lives of a large swath of the population, who just want to escape the shelling and the fighting. This is the scene the world now equates with Ukraine, which has been subjected to a barbaric war of choice courtesy of Russian president Vladimir Putin. Yet for one poverty-stricken nation more than 2,400 miles to the south, this has been the grim reality for years.

An executive in charge of a security company based in Arkansas has given the New York Times a document confirming that they trained four members of Saudi Arabia’s so-called Tiger Squad, responsible for murdering the dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi. As has now been established by several different investigations, Khashoggi was lured to the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, injected with a drug — perhaps morphine — and suffocated with a plastic bag, his body then cut into pieces, apparently on the Saudi deputy consul’s desk. This latest information raises the question of what the US might have known about the Tiger Squad and its operations. Could the US intelligence agencies have warned Khashoggi not to go to Istanbul?

A few weeks ago, the Saudi human rights activist Loujain al-Hathloul was summoned to the offices of the General Directorate of Investigation at the Interior Ministry in Riyadh. Ostensibly, the Saudi secret police — the Mabahith — simply wanted to tell her that her appeal against her conviction for ‘treason and terrorism’ had been turned down. But her brother, Walid told me it was really a warning: Keep quiet, we’re watching you; the Americans may have got you out of prison; we can send you back whenever we want. She has been out of prison since February, serving the rest of her sentence on probation. Though aged 31, her long black hair is now streaked with gray, the outward sign perhaps of what her family say was an attempt to ‘break’ her in prison.

I suit up most days (thank you, casual Fridays) and with the stress of New York’s walking speeds and tremendous cleanliness of its streets, the closet life of suits falls somewhere between the lifespan of a monarch butterfly and a succulent fathered by a man in his twenties, another way of saying: cherish life.So, we will call it a Tuesday of last week. I found myself either a) running from hired guns of a Memphis law firm after I had uncovered their Cayman Islands-based money laundering scheme or b) catching my pocket on the armrest of a conference room chair, when I split my dress pants down the leg.

It fell under the radar when it was announced, but a new project with some major names from the political right have come together to fight fraud and corruption in the Middle East at a pivotal time for US relations in the tumultuous region. Launched last month at the National Press Club in Washington, the Global Justice Foundation includes former Clinton-era independent counsel Kenneth Starr and Sidney Powell, a former federal prosecutor who has been outspoken in calling out corruption in the Deep State’s war against President Donald Trump. The first case the group has highlighted is Tameer Holding, which they claim is among the largest-ever cases of real estate fraud in the Middle East.

Donald Trump has many faults. So does John Bolton. But their unwillingness to listen to a recording of Jamal Khashoggi being butchered is not wrong. In fact, it’s cheeringly sane. For starters, Bolton and Trump don’t speak Arabic, so there is no point. As Tom Rogan notes, they have the CIA to analyze such things. Why are reporters and endless Twitterers so eager to know whether Trump and Bolton are listening to the snuff tape? Trump and Bolton, they say, are ducking responsibility. America’s government doesn’t want to be accountable for its policy of standing by the Crown Prince, Mohammed Bin Salman, who is believed to have ordered the killing. But there is something perverted about this strong wish for leaders to listen to a murder.

You have probably never heard of journalist Turki bin Abdul Aziz Al Jaser. He was beaten to death last month by the Saudi regime in one of the kingdom’s notorious torture chambers. He had been ‘forcibly disappeared’ by the security forces in March, after a spy at Twitter’s headquarters in Dubai reportedly connected him to an account highlighting the regime’s human-rights abuses. Contrast the scant American media interest in that outrage with the ongoing frenzy surrounding the slaughter of Jamal Khashoggi by a Saudi hit squad in Istanbul.

Nine days after Jamal Khashoggi was butchered like an animal in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul by a 15-strong hit team almost certainly sent on their mission by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, The Spectator published a cover story by me on his murder and the political intrigue that I believed lay behind it. The essay was reprinted here, the UK magazine’s USA website, under the headline ‘What the Media Aren't Telling You About Jamal Khashoggi’. It was contemptuously dismissed by American policy wonks. And in an especially scurrilous hit piece by Khashoggi’s former colleagues at the Washington Post, I was indirectly accused of dredging up Khashoggi’s Islamist past to ‘smear’ him. What had I done to earn such wrath?

There’s a joke, not terribly politically correct, about a very rich man called Costas who complains he has employed thousands of people, built hospitals and schools, but is still not respected. ‘Do they call me Costas the provider of opportunity? Do they call me Costas the healer? Do they call me Costas the educator? No.’ Then he adds a sad addendum. ‘But you make love to just one goat…’ Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler Mohammed bin Salman, or MBS, must understand how Costas felt. Until the start of this month he was lionised throughout the West for his efforts to modernise his kingdom in order to attract the multi-trillion dollar foreign investment it needs to prevent it from going bankrupt.

Political correctness is the yoga of the modern Western mind. The salutations and poses of rationalised irrationality are nowhere aped more sedulously than in the American university. At the same time, the infinite cupidity of the American university, its appetite for money from parents, corporations and even foreign powers, brings the soft conscience into contact with hard cash from the kind of regimes for whom ‘political correctness’ retains its original sense, which is repeating the regime’s propaganda so you don’t get shot or sent for re-education in the local equivalent of a liberal arts facility.