https://www.truthdig.com/articles/what-the-mainstream-media-isnt-telling-you-about-jamal-khashoggi/
AS’AD ABUKHALIL: Well, I mean, he’s close to my age, so his name has been familiar to me since my early youthful days back in Lebanon. And in our progressive left-wing Marxist circles, he was always a symbol of reactionary advocacy on behalf of the Saudi regime and militant Salafi Islam. That’s what he stood for. The picture that is being painted in mainstream Western media is totally unrecognizable for anybody who bothers to read Arabic. Unfortunately, all the people who are commenting about the issue and commenting even about his record of journalism, so to speak, are people who have never read anything except in the Washington Post.
You cannot judge this man’s entire decades-long career of journalism by reading the English-language, edited articles he posted for the last year only. For much of his life, for the whole of his life mind this last year, this man was a passionate, enthusiastic, unabashed advocate of Saudi despotism. He started his career by joining bin Laden and being a comrade of bin Laden. There are pictures of him with weapons. He fought alongside the fanatic mujahideen, who were supported by the United States in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan among others, against the communist, progressive side in that war. And he was unrelenting in his advocacy on their behalf, as well as for his praise for bin Laden.
He got to be pretty close to bin Laden. That’s not being mentioned in the media as well. He only broke with bin Laden in the mid 1990s, what a coincidence. It was around the same time that the Saudi government broke with bin Laden. That tells you that he has been very consistently an advocate and loyal servant of the Saudi propaganda apparatus. Because when people say that he always cared about journalism, what journalism? There is no journalism under the Saudi regime. There’s only propaganda, crude and vulgar propaganda. And he excelled in the art of Saudi propaganda. He moved from one job to the other, and he was very ambitious early on. And he attached himself to various princes, because that’s how it works in Saudi Arabia.
He was close to Prince Turki al-Faisal, who was chief of foreign intelligence and the sponsor patron of bin Laden and the fanatical Islamists around the world. And he also was loyal to his brother, Prince Khalid al-Faisal, who owned Al Watan newspaper where he held his first editing job in that paper. In a recent interview he did only last year with a Turkey-based television station, in Arabic of course, he spoke about how his role was not only as an editor, but he was a censor. He was enforcer of the rigid dogmas of the Saudi government in the paper. And when people wrote he got trouble doing his job, it wasn’t for anything he wrote. He never wrote a word, never spoke a word against the wishes of the Saudi government. He got in trouble because some people in the paper were courageous, unlike him, and dared to challenge the orthodoxy of the government. That was the career of Jamal Khashoggi.
I also should say that for many years he continued, and he became a spokesperson for Prince Turki when he became ambassador in Washington, DC. And he got to be close to Western journalists because he was the man to go to. When they wanted to travel to Saudi Arabia, they wanted to interview this prince, that king, the crown prince, he was the fixer for them in that regard and that’s how they got to know him. And then, he attached himself to another prince, Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal, who got in trouble with the new crown prince. That’s where his troubles started. He did not bet on democracy in Saudi Arabia, he bet on the wrong princes.
There princes he bet on fell out of favor, Prince Turki, as well as Prince Al-Waleed, later who wound up in Ritz in Riyadh last year. And for that reason, he had no prince. According to his own testimony, in an article that was written by David Ignatius who was close to him, he tried to be an advisor to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, but he wouldn’t take him as an advisor because he always was suspicious about his Islamist past, the fact that he was a member and later close to the Muslim Brotherhood. So, he became – spoke the language of democracy upon leaving the country.
The reason why they wanted to go after him, it had nothing do with his courage or anything like that. It’s because he was so central in the ruling media and political establishment, that his departure from the kingdom was not seen as dissent. He was not a dissenter, he was not a dissident. He never saw himself as one, or even an opposition figure. He spoke of himself as somebody who believed that the crown prince was doing the right thing but going about it the wrong way. I basically believe that he was seen by the government as a defector, that one of their own left the country and joined the enemies rank. And he was also having an audience with Western audiences from Washington DC, from one of the major mainstream newspapers. That was highly embarrassing to the ruling family.
In Arabic, I should mention, even in the last year on Twitter, he spoke a very different tone than what he wrote in The Washington Post. In Arabic, he spoke passionately about Palestine. Notice, he never spoke about Palestine in English, never spoke about that. In Arabic, he said, “We all are Trump” when Trump ordered the bombing of Syria. He never spoke like that in the Washington Post. So, he was an agreeable token writing for The Washington Post who never challenged the Western media and their coverage of the Middle East. And for that, he was quite agreeable to them. He never spoke about the Palestinians. I bet you, if he was advocating for the Palestinians or for the Islamist line that he called for in Arabic, he wouldn’t have lasted in his gig in The Washington Post.
