Mythmaking about Khashoggi Has Disastrously Backfired on Biden

Why his murder should never have been the focal point of U.S.–Saudi relations.

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.”

Oh, I’m sorry. I forgot that we’re not supposed to remember the friendship and Islamist sympathies Khashoggi shared with bin Laden, as recounted by Lawrence Wright in The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, for whom Khashoggi was a go-to source. We’re supposed to mention only Khashoggi’s later incarnation as a Saudi “dissident” and Washington Post “journalist.” We’re supposed to think of him only as the “democratic reformer” savagely murdered and dismembered by the Saudi regime at its consulate in Istanbul in October 2018.

That’s some mythmaking. As recently observed in the Atlantic by Graeme Wood — who, like Wright, knew and thought well of Khashoggi and is intellectually honest enough to peer beyond the myth — “some inconsistencies between the Jamal of legend and the real Jamal are simply a matter of record.”

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