Saudi arabia

Few contemporary American political figures generate such unique disdain as Tulsi Gabbard, the Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii. The disdain is not unique for its tenacity – plenty of figures are on the receiving end of bitter criticism – but for its political composition. Gabbard straddles an ideological fissure that spans the Democratic and Republican party coalitions in ways that are difficult to pin down. Despite being an avowed progressive on policy issues and a frequent critic of President Trump, her most committed antagonists appear on the left.

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.

If ever a history of botched cover-ups that made things even worse for the criminal conspirators is written, the official explanation from Riyadh of why Jamal Khashoggi died in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul – it was an argument that turned into a brawl – will rank right up there with Watergate and the Dreyfus affair. The most obvious problem for the Saudis is that Turkey – Saudi Arabia’s rival for regional hegemony – has video and audio of what actually took place. And they insist that Khashoggi was slaughtered like an animal on the Saudi consul’s desk just minutes after entering the building.

The Washington Post is upset. That’s understandable: one of its contributors seems to have been tortured and killed. Many of the senior staff were close to Jamal Khashoggi, and are perhaps grieving. But the trouble with journalists being upset is that they tend to turn themselves or their grief into the story. This exacerbates an already massive problem in Washington, where journalism is elevated into such a high civic duty it becomes almost religion. Well-known journalists here start to behave like bishops, incanting the accepted pieties and occasionally acting like a mafia to ensure nobody hurts the free speech church by speaking freely. That’s exactly what is happening with the Khashoggi story.

The media frenzy over Jamal Khashoggi shows no sign of abating. Reporters can’t get enough of the gory details and the international intrigue. But they seem to have forgotten the need to report basic facts, question their single-sourced material, and ask difficult questions of those who know far more than they let on. Instead, they just trot out the same biased narratives, devised to lay blame at President Trump’s feet, presumably in order to use this episode as a wedge issue in the upcoming midterm elections. This trend was on vivid display on MSNBC on Wednesday. The channel missed crucial opportunities to set the record straight when they hosted Khashoggi’s Washington Post colleague, David Ignatius, on Morning Joe, and then again with former Obama-era CIA director John Brennan.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo arrives in Saudi Arabia today, dispatched at short notice by President Donald Trump. His mission near-impossible? To help orchestrate a believable cover-up for the kingdom's brutal murder at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul two weeks ago of Muslim Brotherhood activist, and one-time Saudi intelligence officer, Jamal Khashoggi. CNN says the Saudi regime may finally be ready to admit that Khashoggi was murdered, but will portray it as an accident during an attempted abduction gone wrong. The blame will be placed on (in Trump’s words) ‘rogue elements’ in the Saudi security apparatus, who improbably undertook the task without the consent or knowledge of the Saudi leadership.