Selective Outrage: Why Jamal Khashoggi Matters To The Media

The legacy media went nuts on Tuesday because the President of the United States hosted the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), at the White House. 

They went nuts because back in 2018, there was a Washington Post journalist (we say journalist, but he really was more of an op-ed writer) named Jamal Khashoggi, who was linked to the Muslim-Brotherhood. Khashoggi was murdered in grisly fashion, apparently at the Saudi consulate in Turkey, according to intelligence estimates, on the orders of Mohammed bin Salman. 

The Biden administration decided to make this incident front and center in their campaign against Saudi Arabia in an attempt to create distance with the Saudi government in order to make overtures to the Iranian government. The Saudis and the Iranians are enemies, of course, because the Iranians wish to destroy the Saudis; that’s been true for a very long time. 

No one is making the case that Khashoggi should have been murdered by the Saudis. It also happens to be the case that the United States has relations with a wide variety of despotic regimes around the globe. Some are better for the American people. Some are worse for the American people. That’s just the way global politics works. 

The vast majority of places on planet Earth are not nice places, and terrible things happen there, and their leaders do terrible things. That is reality.

In fact, the realpolitik of the situation forced Joe Biden to go on bended knee to the Saudis to try and lower oil prices before the midterm elections in 2022. He started his administration by yelling at the Saudis about Jamal Khashoggi, and ended by bending the knee to the Saudis. 

The legacy media, however, have now decided to put tremendous focus on the Khashoggi murder. For some reason, they seem to have no such objections to Qatari ties to Hamas, or Qatari ties to Iran, which is responsible for the death and wounding of hundreds of Americans during the Iraq War. They seem to have no such complaints whenever President Erdogan visits from Turkey. Erdogan has participated in an extraordinary variety of human rights abuses.

But when MBS shows up, then it’s time to ask him endlessly about Jamal Khashoggi.  

He can answer those questions. That’s his problem. But I will note the outsized interest in Jamal Khashoggi — as opposed to all the other various human rights violations that are happening around the region — has more to do with the legacy media’s geopolitics.  

They don’t like Saudi Arabia because they believe that there ought to be some sort of Obama-esque “balance of power” benefiting the Turks and Iran at the expense of the Saudis and the Israelis, presumably. 

That’s why they focus on Jamal Khashoggi. But if you look at the history of Jamal Khashoggi, the attempt to paint him as some sort of liberal reformer should be counterposed by being accurate about who Jamal Khashoggi was. 

As The Jerusalem Post reported on Khashoggi in a 2024 article: 

In the months leading up to his death, he was in the process of launching an organization later known as DAWN – Democracy for the Arab World Now, working in close collaboration with Palestinian-American Nihad Awad, executive director and co-founder of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), and currently a board member of DAWN.

CAIR is a powerful U.S. Muslim advocacy group long known for its sympathies – and the denial of them – for Global Muslim Brotherhood (GMB) organizations in the West and in Muslim countries, including murky links to terrorists and terror funding that garnered public attention during the 2007 Holy Land Foundation trials and the conviction of CAIR affiliate Ghassan Elashi.

CAIR is deeply associated with the Muslim Brotherhood. They have close personal ties in the form of some of their leadership with people who are associated with Hamas. 

Khashoggi had a lot of those connections. You can say two things at once: He should not have been murdered, and he was not a liberal reformer in the Arab world. 

The media decided that they were going to ask the president about Mohammed bin Salman, and the proper answer from the president probably could have been something like, “The murder of Jamal Khashoggi was a tragic problem; also, we are in the business of geopolitics and pursuing America’s interests.” 

“He’s done a phenomenal job,” Trump stated. “You’re mentioning somebody that was extremely controversial. A lot of people didn’t like that gentleman that you’re talking about, whether you like him or didn’t like him. Things happen, but he knew nothing about it. And we can leave it at that. You don’t have to embarrass our guest by asking a question like that.”

I think that was a more aggressive response than was warranted, because it is true that the Saudi royal government has engaged in some pretty extraordinary brutality.

But what Trump was saying — that MBS is a transformative leader in the region and that the United States needs to work with the people who are there, that we don’t get to choose the leadership class in all of these countries — is accurate.

The media attention with regard to all of this is quite purposeful. I do not think that it is a coincidence that they are virtue-signaling about Jamal Khashoggi rather than dealing with the reality of actual geopolitics.

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