{"id":11349,"date":"2018-10-19T12:45:28","date_gmt":"2018-10-19T18:45:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/?p=11349"},"modified":"2018-10-19T12:47:17","modified_gmt":"2018-10-19T18:47:17","slug":"what-about-jamal-khashoggi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/2018\/10\/what-about-jamal-khashoggi.html","title":{"rendered":"What about Jamal Khashoggi?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\"\"<\/p>\n

What should we make of the killing of Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi journalist-activist?<\/p>\n

Here are three observations:<\/p>\n

The enemy of my enemy is not always my friend.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Turkey is behaving, well, suspiciously, in its actions here.\u00a0 As Hot Air<\/a> reports, Turkey has asserted repeatedly that it has ironclad evidence that not only did the Saudis kill Khashoggi, but that they did so in a particularly gruesome manner, but at the same time, Turkey refuses to share any of its evidence.\u00a0 They certainly have their own agenda here, and it\u2019s not the furtherance of democracy in the Middle East.\u00a0 They are instead more keenly interested in using this to their political advantage \u2014 whether it\u2019s a power play against the Saudis in general or against\u00a0Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman specifically, and whether there are connections to the overall \u201ccold war\u201d in the Arab world\/Mideast, as this Federalist article suggests<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Which means that we should be careful before lapping up Turkey\u2019s narrative, and avoid doing what Turkey wants us to do.<\/p>\n

Yes, it\u2019s bad that the Saudis (almost certainly) killed Khashoggi.\u00a0 But we shouldn\u2019t add to the outrage because he was \u201can American.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

Khashoggi was a Saudi journalist who lived in any number of places during his lifetime.\u00a0 In September 2017, he acquired a U.S. green card through, apparently, some political connections.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s the Washington Post<\/em>, reporting on events chronologically<\/a>; after becoming a Post<\/em> columnist in September 2017,<\/p>\n

Friends helped Khashoggi obtain a visa that allowed him to stay in the United States as a permanent resident.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Who were these \u201cfriends\u201d?\u00a0 This is not reported as a visa obtained by the Post<\/em>\u00a0as his employer.\u00a0 The Conservative Review<\/a> suggests that this was line-skipping due to connections to Saudi billionaires who were themselves connected to U.S. government officials.\u00a0 A reader at Daily Kos<\/a> comments that Khashoggi\u2019s fiance was a Turkish resident, with no intention to live anywhere else.\u00a0 Was Khashoggi establishing a residence in Turkey?\u00a0 Continuing to globe-trot?\u00a0 Was the U.S. green card intended to enable him to split to the U.S. without needing to trouble himself with seeking a visa at a later point in time?\u00a0 Was it intended, by himself or his sponsors, as a means of placing him under the individual equivalent of a U.S. \u201cnuclear umbrella\u201d, with those sponsors intending to place the U.S. in a position of being obliged to object to any future imprisonment just as much as a \u201creal\u201d U.S. national?\u00a0 Maybe this is just standard practice; I don\u2019t know<\/p>\n

There is no obvious U.S. response.<\/strong><\/p>\n

One reads calls for the U.S. to impose some sort of sanctions in this case, or to cancel weapons contracts, or cut off diplomatic relations.\u00a0 But does that really make sense?\u00a0 Is there a specific behavior of the Saudis that we are attempting to change in the future, with some metric by which we\u2019ll know they\u2019ve changed it?\u00a0 That\u2019s what sanctions are intended for \u2014 we demand a nation end its nuclear weapons development program, or remove its army from a third country, or stop persecuting an ethnic minority.<\/p>\n

Setting aside\u00a0the relatively small possibility that this was Henry II and Thomas Becket all over again, and that MBS did not really intend to murder JK, let\u2019s consider this:<\/p>\n

Justice in Sharia law is very transactional, isn\u2019t it?\u00a0 Murders can compensate the victim\u2019s family rather than being jailed.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s Wikipedia on the matter<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Families of someone unlawfully killed can choose between demanding the death penalty or granting clemency in return for a payment of diyya, or blood money, by the perpetrator. There has been a growing trend of exorbitant blood-money demands, for example a sum of $11 million was reported as being recently demanded. Saudi officials and religious figures have criticized this trend and said that the practise of diyya has become corrupted.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So on the one hand, he has certainly revealed to anyone who thought otherwise, that he has no particular interest in human rights but that, like China, he\u2019s more keen on advancing national interests and we would be as mistaken to see a commitment\u00a0to women\u2019s rights in their new permission to drive as we would be in seeing a concern about the well-being of the Chinese people eventually extending to human rights, in the\u00a0Chinese government\u2019s interest in economic prosperity.\u00a0 But at the same time, one presumes that he really viewed his actions as simply within the norm for acceptable behavior for a Saudi monarch.\u00a0\u00a0Khashoggi was not just a Saudi citizen, but highly connected with the royal family, and it\u2019s not as if the Saudis haven\u2019t committed extrajudicial killings before, or judicial killings based on unfair trials and for actions which any reasonable outsider would not only deem non-capital offenses, but not even crimes to begin with.<\/p>\n

But what if we used the Saudi justice transactionality and used it to tell MBS, \u201cthese are our requirements, to compensate for a U.S. green card holder being killed\u201d?\u00a0 What if we demanded that, in response to this sordid affair, they boost their refugee camp funding, release specific political\/religious prisoners, etc.\u00a0 If we\u2019re daring, we might call on him to repeal the requirement that all women have male \u201cguardians.\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the only way forward that I really see here.<\/p>\n

What about you?<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Image:\u00a0https:\/\/pixabay.com\/en\/mecca-mekkah-saudi-arabia-saudi-66970\/.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What should we make of the killing of Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi journalist-activist? Here are three observations: The enemy of my enemy is not always my friend. Turkey is behaving, well, suspiciously, in its actions here.\u00a0 As Hot Air reports, Turkey has asserted repeatedly that it has ironclad evidence that not only did the Saudis […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2209,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1095,236],"class_list":["post-11349","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-jamal-khashoggi","tag-saudi-arabia"],"yoast_head":"\nWhat about Jamal Khashoggi?<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"What should we make of the killing of Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi journalist-activist? 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