Tag Archives: Jamal Khashoggi murder

Opportunities Abound After Khashoggi-Gate, by Tom Luongo

Slimy financial and political opportunists will make hay while the sun shines on the Khashoggi murder. From Tom Luongo at strategic-culture.org:

Every crisis is also an opportunity.  Don’t worry I’m not about to go all Rahm Emmanuel, Mr. Realpolitik, on you today.  The disappearance/death/dismemberment of Jamal Khashoggi is both a crisis and an opportunity for the worst people in the world.

And all of them are seizing the day, as it were.

Frankly, most of it makes me sick to my stomach. Because where were these virtue-signaling champions of human rights like Jamie Dimon of J.P. Morgan or Lindsay Graham (R – AIPAC) for the past three years as Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MbS) prosecuted a starvation campaign in Yemen with U.S. complicity?

Does Lindsay not know that MbS is funding the U.S. occupation in eastern Syria he’s so in love with?

Now all of a sudden, every war-monger in Washington and Wall St. wants to cut ties with him because killing a political opponent is “beyond the pale?”  Even Christine LaGarde of the IMF will be a no-show at MbS’s big “Davos in the Desert” conference.

This is a political hit job.

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Converting Khashoggi into Cash, by James George Jatras

The question isn’t whether or not Muhammad bin Salman will proffer a lot of cash to try to make his current difficulties disappear. That’s a certainty. The question is whether it will work. From James George Jatras at strategic-culture.org:

The hazard of writing about the Saudis’ absurd gyrations as they seek to avoid blame for the murder of the late, not notably great journalist and Muslim Brotherhood activist Jamal Khashoggi is that by the time a sentence is finished, the landscape may have changed again.

As though right on cue, the narrative has just taken another sharp turn.

After two weeks of denying any connection to Khashoggi’s disappearance, Riyadh has ‘fessed up (sorta) and admitted that he was killed by Saudi operatives but it wasn’t really on purpose:

Y’see, it was kinda’f an ‘accident.’

Oops…

Y’see the guys were arguing, and … uh … a fistfight broke out.

Yeah, that’s it … a ‘fistfight.’

And before you know it poor Jamal had gone all to pieces.

Y’see?

Must’ve been a helluva fistfight.

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Settling The Khashoggi Case Is A Difficult Matter, by Moon of Alabama

The Khashoggi case may never be “settled” to anyone’s satisfaction. From Moon of Alabama at moonofalabama.org:

The negotiation over the Khashoggi case will be extremely difficult. The protagonists are headstrong and dangerous people. The issue could easily escalate.

The Ottoman empire ruled over much of the Arab world. The neo-Ottoman wannabe-Sultan Recep Tayyip Erdogan would like to regain that historic position for Turkey. His main competition in this are the al-Sauds. They have much more money and are strategically aligned with Israel and the United States, while Turkey under Erdogan is more or less isolated. The religious-political element of the competition is represented on one side by the Muslim Brotherhood, ‘democratic’ Islamists to which Erdogan belongs, and the Wahhabi absolutists on the other side.

There are more tactical aspects to this historic conflict. When the Saudis cut ties with Qatar it was Turkey that sent its military to prevent a Saudi invasion of the tiny but extremely rich country. This gave Erdogan the financial backing he urgently needs. In response to that the Saudis offered several $100 millions to prop up the YPK/PKK proxy force the U.S. uses to occupy north-east Syria. These Kurdish groups fight a guerrilla war within Turkey and are a threat to its unity.

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‘Mohammad bin Salman Must Go’, but US-Saudi Ties Are Here to Stay, by Federico Pieraccini

Regime change in Saudi Arabia? It might well serve Deep State interests. From Federico Pieraccini at strategic-culture.org:

'Mohammad bin Salman Must Go’, but US-Saudi Ties Are Here to Stay

Mohammad bin Salman is fully aware of the Western elite’s understanding of its own values. While he may be given a pass to bomb Yemen and kill thousands of innocent civilians, he should know better than to dare touch a Washington Post columnist – “one of ours”, as one MSNBC host said. Did he not realize there would be consequences?

As more information came out, many analysts began to confront the most obvious question. Was it possible that Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) was so arrogant that he could not imagine the consequences of such a heinous crime? How could MBS betray Trump this way, not anticipating that the Democrats and the mainstream media would jump all over Trump’s friendship with him? Could he be so foolish as to place in jeopardy foreign investments planned at the Davos in the Desert conference on October 23? The answer to that question is apparently: yes, he could.

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Be Skeptical Whenever The Political/Media Class Converges On A Single Narrative, by Caitlin Johnstone

Words to the wise from Caitlin Johnstone. From Johnstone at caitlinjohnstone.com:

The Trump administration has ended its weeks-long silence on the disappearance of the Saudi Arabian Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Following a briefing from Secretary of State Pompeo who has just returned from a visit to Riyadh and Ankara, the president has said that contrary to some hopeful speculation that had emerged early on after his disappearance, Khashoggi does indeed appear to have been killed at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. If it is determined that the Saudis were responsible, Trump warned that there will be “very severe” consequences. Secretary of the Treasury Steve Mnuchin has announced that he will not be attending the Future Investment Initiative summit in Riyadh next week.

I’ve been following this story with some interest, but I haven’t been writing about it until now. This is one of those rare stories that has drawn the focus of both mainstream and alternative media, the latter because it’s seen as an opportunity to criticize the west’s extremely immoral involvement in the depraved activities of a murderous theocracy, and because it’s an opportunity to attack the hypocrisy of the establishment in decrying the murder of a single man while ignoring Saudi Arabia’s far more unconscionable behavior like its war crimes in Yemen and facilitation of bloodshed in Syria. Killing one man is very, very far from the top of the list of the most horrific things Saudi Arabia has done; criticizing them for that is like criticizing Henry Kissinger for not tipping well at restaurants.

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