Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi criticised the regime – and paid with his life

By Dilip -
NB: This is one of the most poisonous and thuggish regimes in the modern world. DS

Jamal Khashoggi is not the first Saudi exile to be killed. No one today remembers Nassir al-Sa’id, who disappeared in Beirut in 1979 and has not been seen since. Prince Sultan bin Turki was kidnapped in Geneva in 2003. Prince Turki bin Bandar al-Saud, who applied for asylum in France, disappeared in 2015. Maj Gen Ali al-Qahtani, an officer in the Saudi National Guard who died while in custody, showed signs of abuse: his neck appeared twisted and his body was badly swollen. There are many, many others. Thousands languish in jail. Human rights activists branded as terrorists are on death row on charges that Human Rights Watch says “do not resemble recognisable crimes”. I know of one business leader who was strung upside down and tortured. Nothing has been heard of him since. In Saudi Arabia, you are one social media post away from death.

A Saudi plane dropped a US-made bomb on a school bus in Yemen killing 40 boys and 11 adults on a school trip. Death is delivered by remote control, but no western ally or arms supplier demands an explanation. No contracts are lost. No stock market will decline the mouth-watering prospect of the largest initial public offering in history. What difference does one more dead Saudi make?

And yet Khashoggi’s death is different. It’s right up close. One minute he is sitting across the table at breakfast, in a creased shirt, apologising in his mumbled, staccato English for giving you his cold. The next, a Turkish government contact tells you what they did to his body inside the consulate in Istanbul. Last Saturday, Khashoggi told a Middle East Monitor conference in London that the kingdom realised it had gone too far in encouraging President Donald Trump’s “deal of the century” by promoting Abu Dis as the future capital of a Palestinian state, and has backed away from what is proving to be a burning issue in Saudi Arabia.


“This proves a very important point. It is only the Palestinians who will decide, not the Saudis, not the Egyptians. No matter how much they control the payroll of the Palestinian government, no one can decide for them,” he said. A week later, his voice is no more... read more:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/oct/08/saudi-journalist-jamal-khashoggi-istanbul

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