Who Was Jamal Khashoggi?

In regard to the martyrdom of Jamal Khashoggi, Andrew McCarthy offers us a few enlightening details at National Review Online.

Strangely, our media, even our conservative media, seems largely to have ignored these details.

Beginning with Khashoggi’s close friendship with Osama bin Laden and his membership in the Muslim Brotherhood. At a time when everyone considers Khashoggi a champion of liberal democracy, in the employ of the Washington Post, the truth seems to lie elsewhere.

“We were hoping to establish an Islamic state anywhere.” That is how the late Jamal Khashoggi described the objective he shared with his boyhood friend, Osama bin Laden. Yes, that Osama bin Laden, the al-Qaeda founder and the leader of its global jihad against the United States. Khashoggi was reminiscing about their younger days, when he and bin Laden joined the Muslim Brotherhood. They believed, he said, that if they could just establish a state under the dominion of sharia — Islam’s brutal, authoritarian, and systematically discriminatory societal framework cum legal code — “the first one would lead to another, and kind of have a domino effect which could reverse the history of mankind.”

Anyway, for the record, the Biden administration, in its grossly maladroit dealing with Saudi Arabia has decided that it is willing to tank our bilateral relations with the kingdom in order to defend Jamal Khashoggi. Apparently, and as I have reported in the past, the Biden administration contains more than few supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood:

Why are we in this mess? Because Biden, whose administration and party are rife with Brotherhood sympathizers, has made Khashoggi’s murder the focal point of the U.S.–Saudi relationship. Khashoggi was undoubtedly executed with MBS’s approval, and probably at his direction, as U.S. spy agencies believe.

This does not mean that Khashoggi was not executed on orders coming from the Crown Prince. And yet, foreign policy, when conducted by adults, sometimes requires unsavory compromises:

To be clear, I am as opposed as the next guy to barbaric killing. That’s why I’m most incensed by state-sponsored anti-American terrorism. I mention that for some balance. Biden tried to turn MBS into a pariah because he killed a Saudi national. Yet Biden, like his former boss Barack Obama, can’t go fast enough to cut a deal that would rain billions of dollars in sanctions relief on Iran, the world’s leading state sponsor of anti-American jihadist terror. The deal would put Tehran’s mullahs on a glide path to acquiring nuclear weapons even as they brutalize Iranian protesters, prominently including women suffocating under sharia strictures — just as they brutalized them with impunity during the Obama–Biden administration.

So, Khashoggi became a martyr because the Biden people, like the Obama people, wanted to suck up to Iran. As the saying goes, pick your poison. In truth, Saudi Arabia and the Emirates and other Gulf Arab states are reforming Islam. Iran is working to murder Americans. As I said, pick your poison:

Attention: There is a civil war going on in the Muslim Middle East. Both sides are execrable, but if one has to choose, Biden has chosen the wrong side, and now America is paying the price.