Media Trying To Link Trump to Khashoggi’s Murder

Who Was Jamal Khashoggi?

RUSH: The Khashoggi situation, and there’s some things about this guy that I don’t think are being widely reported exactly who he is. The Drive-Bys…

Let me just tell you what the Drive-Bys purpose here is, again. The Drive-Bys are trying as hard as they can to link Donald Trump to Khashoggi’s murder.

The Drive-By are trying to say that Trump is responsible for his murder.

And the reason for that, or the way that is possible is that Trump has sidled up to MBS, Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, who is said to be the culprit here. The story is that Jamal Khashoggi dared to criticize the regime and dared to poke holes at the reforms of Mohammed bin Salman and pointed out they’re really not reforms, that this guy’s a phony and he’s a fake. So Mohammed bin Salman does not tolerate criticism.

I’m gonna take the occasion of your call to do a general biography of Jamal Khashoggi. I found a piece on him by John R. Bradley at Spectator.us, and Bradley has been following Saudi politics, Middle East politics, Muslim Brotherhood expertise for many, many moons. And his story ran three days ago, and you haven’t seen a thing about this anywhere in the Drive-By Media …

The piece is entitled, “What the Media Are Not Telling You About Jamal Khashoggi — The dissident’s fate says a lot about Saudi Arabia and the rise of the mobster state.” Now, here are just some biographical things. The fate of Khashoggi has at least provoked global outrage, but it’s for all the wrong reasons. We are told he was a liberal, Saudi progressive voice fighting for freedom and democracy, and a martyr who paid the ultimate price for telling the truth to power.

“This is not just wrong, but distracts us from understanding what the incident tells us about the internal power dynamics of a kingdom going through an unprecedented period of upheaval. It is also the story of how one man got entangled in a Saudi ruling family that operates like the Mafia. Once you join, it’s for life, and if you try to leave, you become disposable.” So the point this piece is gonna make is that Khashoggi’s not a distant and removed commentator/journalist writing about the Saudi kingdom from afar.

He used to be part of it. … This piece makes it clear (as you’ll hear in a moment) that Jamal Khashoggi — at one time in his life, at one point — was very, very tight with the ruling family, the royal family, was in the regime.

“This is not just wrong, but distracts us from understanding what the incident tells us about the internal power dynamics of a kingdom going through an unprecedented period of upheaval. It is also the story of how one man got entangled in a Saudi ruling family that operates like the Mafia. Once you join, it’s for life, and if you try to leave, you become disposable. In truth, Khashoggi never had much time for western-style pluralistic democracy.

“In the 1970s he joined the Muslim Brotherhood, which exists to rid the Islamic world of western influence.” Now, that right there will provide all of us the first source of serious conflict between Khashoggi and the current Saudi ruling royal family. “[T]he Muslim Brotherhood … exists to rid the Islamic world of western influence.” What’s Mohammed bin Salman doing? He’s trying to westernize the country! He’s a Millennial.

He’s trying to reform it in certain ways, letting women vote and letting women drive, but not much else. He wants the world to think that there’s massive reform happening in the kingdom. So he does something very visible, like letting women drive. But not much more. They’re still very subjugated. He’s meeting with all of the tech people in Silicon Valley and the Hollywood people. He wants to build a brand-new city from scratch — a huge, dynamic, brand-new city — that incorporates money from Silicon Valley and Hollywood and involves all of those people as developers and investors.

he’s the first of the ruling royal family to ever talk this way, to ever travel the world and set something up like this, and this is anathema to the Muslim Brotherhood! They can’t stand this! There’s something else that the royal family’s doing, and I mentioned this when I was talking about who Khashoggi was and Mohammed bin Salman last week. That is this: Up to 9/11 and even many years after 9/11, the ruling religious dominance in Saudi Arabia was Wahhabism.

All of the clerics, all of the imams were Wahhabi Islamists, and these are the terrorist-inspiring Islamists. These are the imams, the educators at all the universities which teach and recruit and inspire the Osama Bin Laden-type terrorism. Mohammed bin Salman wants to rid Saudi Arabia of the influence of Wahhabism. Well, that’s not gonna sit well with the Muslim Brotherhood. The Muslim Brotherhood is not particularly tied to Wahhabism.

Again here, according to Mr. Bradley, “Khashoggi never had much time for western-style pluralistic democracy. In the 1970s he joined the Muslim Brotherhood, which exists to rid the Islamic world of western influence.” Well, here comes Mohammed bin Salman incorporating Western influence in Saudi Arabia. Khashoggi “was a political Islamist until the end, recently praising the Muslim Brotherhood in the Washington Post.

“He championed the ‘moderate’ Islamist opposition in Syria, whose crimes against humanity are a matter of record. Khashoggi frequently sugarcoated his Islamist beliefs with constant references to freedom and democracy. But he never hid that he was in favor of a Muslim Brotherhood arc throughout the Middle East. His recurring plea to bin Salman in his columns was to embrace not western-style democracy, but the rise of political Islam which the Arab Spring had inadvertently given rise to. For Khashoggi, secularism was the enemy.”

He was not an Americanized Islamist. He was not pro-democracy. This was a Muslim Brotherhood advocate and member, and he is righteously indignant over the reforms of Mohammed bin Salman and wrote about them.

I am not in any way suggesting the guy deserved to have harm come his way. That’s not at all. I’m just trying to explain why. And, I tell you what. I’ll tell you what it exposes. And it is kind of a modified trapdoor for Trump. Because on the surface, this new, young crown prince is running around making it look like that he wants to reform Saudi Arabia.

He wants to bring in all this Western money and Western influence to branch out so that they’re not totally tied just petrodollars. So he’s talked to Hollywood.

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