Let’s remember that before he fled to the US a year before he was cruelly murdered in Istanbul, Khashoggi became rich working for a Saudi royal family that was, and remains, among the world’s worst persecutors of journalists. He edited government-controlled Saudi newspapers, which are without exception regime propaganda outlets, and headed TV news channels that were owned by Saudi princes.
Then he outdid himself by working as a media adviser to a senior Saudi prince in London and Washington. He embraced with unbridled enthusiasm his role of justifying Saudi regime atrocities in the Western media. He even denied on the BBC that anyone was ever tortured in Saudi Arabia. He wound up in Istanbul under the (not very useful, as it turned out) protection of his pal Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a fellow Muslim Brotherhood extremist who has jailed more journalists than any other leader on Earth. And his columns for the Post were a plea for the Saudi crown prince to embrace the political Islam espoused by the Muslim Brotherhood, an organization hardly known wherever it spreads its poisonous tentacles for its love of freedom of expression.
In reality, then, Khashoggi represented everything that is repressive and repugnant about journalism in the Arab world. His inclusion as a martyr for truth telling is an insult to the others, because he was the very last ‘journalist’ anyone should ever have trusted on whatever subject you care to mention. It’s well past time that everybody stopped pretending otherwise.
https://spectator.us/jamal-khashoggi-time-person-year/
Then he outdid himself by working as a media adviser to a senior Saudi prince in London and Washington. He embraced with unbridled enthusiasm his role of justifying Saudi regime atrocities in the Western media. He even denied on the BBC that anyone was ever tortured in Saudi Arabia. He wound up in Istanbul under the (not very useful, as it turned out) protection of his pal Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a fellow Muslim Brotherhood extremist who has jailed more journalists than any other leader on Earth. And his columns for the Post were a plea for the Saudi crown prince to embrace the political Islam espoused by the Muslim Brotherhood, an organization hardly known wherever it spreads its poisonous tentacles for its love of freedom of expression.
In reality, then, Khashoggi represented everything that is repressive and repugnant about journalism in the Arab world. His inclusion as a martyr for truth telling is an insult to the others, because he was the very last ‘journalist’ anyone should ever have trusted on whatever subject you care to mention. It’s well past time that everybody stopped pretending otherwise.
https://spectator.us/jamal-khashoggi-time-person-year/