The Awful Truth Behind the Khashoggi Assassination

Journalists are murdered and mistreated all the time — and Trump’s indifference is merely par for the course.

As much as it pains me to dignify anything the current occupant of the Oval Office has to say, I have to give him credit for at least one thing. For all his endless mendacity, Donald Trump has ironically forced us all to confront some ugly truths about America (and the world) by airing out the country’s dirty laundry in a fashion that few politicians would ever dream of doing. While past presidents have used dog whistles to disguise racism, Trump blasts his bigotry through his Twitter bullhorn. And while other presidents would no doubt have pretended to care about the murder of a prominent journalist and human rights critic while carrying on business-as-usual relations with repressive regimes that routinely kill such people, Trump clearly doesn’t give a shit — and makes no bones about shrugging off human rights concerns when money is at stake.

The ongoing saga of ex-pat Saudi Arabian journalist Jamal Khashoggi’s savage murder at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on October 2, 2018 by a sinister high-tech hit squad has been remarkable — not in the noteworthiness of the act in question but in the outrage it has provoked internationally, and in the United States in particular. Granted, there are facts about the Khashoggi killing that set it apart from other murders of journalists. For one, Jamal Khashoggi was a journalistic superstar familiar to the American public through his work for the Washington Post, and previously for his personal relationship with Osama bin Laden. For another, the attack on Khashoggi was particularly brazen, in what appeared to be the murder of a US-based reporter carried out in a US-aligned country by agents of yet another important US ally in a draconian attempt to silence a prominent critic of one of the world’s most repressive political regimes.

In other words, it was the stuff of suspense novels and Jason Bourne films — and one can only imagine that the Stephen Spielbergs and Oliver Stones of this world are already planning a cinematic retelling of the story.

That said, the real tragedy of the Khashoggi murder is that journalists are murdered and/or mistreated on a routine basis in countries around the world, and we barely hear…

Related posts:

model.summary in keras gives a very fine visualization of your model and it's very convenient when it comes to debugging the network. Here is a barebone code to try and mimic the same in PyTorch. The…

Il linguaggio della gente comune. Molti di quelli che una volta parlavano un linguaggio proprio, quello della burocrazia o di un potere lobbistico oggi dicono che è necessario parlare il linguaggio…

Bearing her eyes beaten, swollen and lips tore, Face puffed like a stuffed animal he shot At a carnival outside the city in the dark. Blue, Black and red of sorts Rainbow dots marked his favorite…