Khashoggi and Middle Eastern Grotesqueries

By Olivia Pierson
​[First published on Incite 16/10/18] 

Before Jamal Khashoggi’s troubling vanishment, he wrote a final column for the Washington Post in September 2018, whereupon he exhorted Crown Prince Salman, of the House of Saud, to end the cruel war in Yemen by using his powerful “clout” to pressure the Iranians into an immediate ceasefire.  His admonishment included this appeal to his Prince:

“Saudi Arabia is defined and represented by its Islamic stature. We should not need to be reminded of the value of human life. Muslims around the world deserve to see [the] birthplace of Islam represent the ethics of Islam.”

This hapless cousin of Dodi Fayed, Princess Diana’s boyfriend and her partner in death, is now believed to have been murdered and dismembered by his own countrymen inside the Saudi consulate, on Turkey’s soil. The birthplace of Islam just gave the world a rather pointed lesson about the ethics of Islam – so much, then, for its “stature.”   

Khashoggi is not an American citizen, but he is currently an American resident, though that’s not the most pressing issue here.  That Saudi Arabia is a member of the United Nations Human Rights Council should not surprise anyone, so now is Eritrea – of all latrine-holes - as has the Republic of North Korea been for the last few years, so its membership means very little by any civilised standard of actual human rights.  What matters is the contempt with which Saudi Arabia’s rulers may have acted in this instance: i.e. that a man could be murdered in his own American-allied consulate on the soil of a NATO nation, is startlingly significant.  Such countries cannot give the civilised world the finger so blatantly and be allowed to get away with it, regardless of Islam’s delusional, oil-based “stature” in the modern world.

This is the trouble with Islamic nations, even those who have become Western allies.  Khashoggi has been supportive of the women in Saudi Arabia who have campaigned for their ‘right to drive’. In this respect Khashoggi commended Prince Salman and his belated reforms, belated by almost a century. 

Forgive me for not fully understanding the finer points of the Oriental mind, but here was I thinking that the right for Saudi Arabian women to keep their own goddamn genitals intact, let alone those of their own sisters’ and daughters’ may have trumped their urgent right to drive a vehicle, but apparently it has not.  Instead, aside from strongly opining about Saudi women having the right to drive, Khashoggi has been vocal against the ruling royal family as they seek to keep Iranian hegemony on their Yemeni border in check by the hideous use of brutal bombing campaigns on a cholera infected civilian population, with American support. 

As an aside, I, monitoring this kind of thing from the irrelevant, though oil dependent, detached nation of New Zealand, understand that to let Iran win in Yemen spells disaster for Israel, the most important ally in the Middle Eastern region. 

However, Western alliances start to look something like this to me:  A nation which mutilates female genitalia (to say nothing of what they do to homosexuals) has a seat on the Western-invented Human Rights Council, conducts a war to keep Iranian hegemony at bay (so it doesn’t end up looking like Syria, though it looks exactly like Syria minus the Russian factor) and then has murdered a dissident journalist inside its own consulate on the soil of another Islamic, albeit NATO nation. 

And the West is meant to respond how, exactly?
All this for oil and the arms business… or is it liberal human rights that truly carry the day?  Pffffft.

The quicker the West produces, unstintingly, its own oil for all of our daily demands, the better off we’ll be when we can disassociate ourselves completely from countries which operate on such a disgusting – and incompatible with our own – ethical basis.

I am highly aware that what is really going on here is an Iranian problem, which cannot and should not be diminished, considering Iran’s insidious intent to wipe Israel from the world map.  But my worry is that being forced to choose sides between backward Islamic nations, which still engage in grotesque sectarian power struggles about the correct interpretation of an indescribably stupid holy book, is just a losing strategy for the West all round.  If this is about the survival of Israel, then why not let Israel lead the narrative about it?  Those, like me, who are in eternal sympathy with her are intently listening.

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