Byzantine Logic At the Very Best....

"[Saudi leaders, including the crown prince], assured me that they will conduct a complete, thorough investigation of all of the facts surrounding Mr. Khashoggi, and that they will do so in a timely fashion, and that this report itself will be transparent for everyone to see, to ask questions about, and to enquire with respect to its thoroughness."
"They're [long-standing U.S.-Saudi partnership] an important strategic ally of the United States, and we need to be mindful of that."
"I told President Trump this morning that we ought to give them a few more days to complete that [the ongoing investigation] so that we, too, have a complete understanding of the facts surrounding that, at which point we can make decisions about how, or if, the United States should respond to the incident surrounding Mr.[Jamal] Khashoggi."
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Washington

The world's press is spending more time on the disappearance and likely murder of Saudi writer Jamal Khashoggi, a man who had fallen out with the Kingdom's Saud family with which he was once close, and whose criticisms of the royal family have earned him Saudi scorn and anger, than space and time devoted to the Saudi military's ongoing bombing of Yemenites causing massive relocations, refugees and deaths, both presumably engineered by the modernizing Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

Turkey, which wins the international prize for silencing, imprisoning and threatening more journalist and news media than any other repressive regime, is playing the honour card here, revealing a now-very-public but initially very covert conspiracy to murder a pestiferous critic of the rulers of a collegial Islamist nation. This, of course, is the same Turkey responsible for slaughtering countless Kurds critical of Turkish rule over ancestral Kurdish lands. Recep Tayyip Erdogan has overturned Turkey's Islam-style democracy but suddenly he is sanctimoniously outing an atrocity.

The truth of the matter is, there are few instances of Islamic countries whose governance equals the standards set by democratic, peaceful nations of the West. Chaos and disorder, conflict and punishment are standards of Islamic rule. Tyranny and compliance and violent response to what in the west is mildly termed conscientious objection and civil disobedience merit incarceration, torture and frequently, death. The Syrian civil war whose victims number a half-million when the regime responded to dissent with the use of chemical weapons, barrel bombs and child-torture is old news.

 

Patrick Poole @pspoole

I didn’t realize until yesterday that Jamal Khashoggi was the author of this notorious 1988 Arab News article of him tooling around Afghanistan with Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda co-founder Abdullah Azzam. He’s just a democrat reformer journalist holding a RPG with jihadists.

 

The new news is that a man whose Islamist fundamentalist credentials include a friendly acquaintance with Osame bin Laden, support and admiration for Hamas, and the destruction of Israel, and though he complained in his last article for The Washington Post, published posthumously, that Arab journalists are badly in need of an unbiased press not controlled by the governments in the countries in which they are published, he forgets how the world has embraced Al Jazeera, Qatar's flagship news outlet, deemed by the West to be a reliable purveyor of news.

And then there is, of course, Saudi Arabia's Al Aribaya, which goes out of its way to publish utterly neutral news perspectives, leaning heavily on Associated Press-derived articles, an agency which has its own very un-neutral biases. But oops, nothing critical of the regime.  "The Arab world needs a modern version of the old transnational media so citizens can be informed about global events. More important, we need to provide a platform for Arab voices", he wrote, the ingrate. He was grateful to The Washington Post for providing that platform for his very particular Arab voice.

And though Jamal Khashoggi was very well aware of the vulnerable position his criticisms had placed him in, with the very thin-skinned Saudi rulers, he proceeded to make himself available to them in a country that disposes of journalists like used facial tissues, within a diplomatic mission whose presence was as good as being in Riyadh, as though he was courting death in the greater interests of becoming the story of the year himself, and succeeding handily....