Why his murder should never have been the focal point of U.S.–Saudi relations.
Why his murder should never have been the focal point of U.S.–Saudi relations
‘W e 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.” Khashoggi was essentially a Saudi government operative when he wrote for regime-controlled outlets. This was beginning in the 1980s: back when the Saudis, then the world’s leading propagators of virulently anti-Western fundamentalist Islam, were tightly allied with the Muslim Brotherhood — back when Khashoggi embedded with the forces of bin Laden and the warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar in the jihad against the Soviets and the Afghan civil war that never really ended. Indeed, in the heyday of the Saudi–Brotherhood symbiosis, Khashoggi functioned as an aide to Turki Al Faisal, the regime’s intelligence chief in the decades from its underwriting of the Afghan mujahideen until 2001, when 15 of the 19 suicide-hijackers who slaughtered nearly 3,000 Americans in the 9/11 atrocities were Saudis.
A decade later, things changed with the “Arab Spring,” a deliriously mislabeled phenomenon that transnational progressives would have you believe was a democratic flourishing in a region struggling to throw off corrupt, iron-fisted despots. The despots, to be sure, are only too real, but the so-called Arab Spring was mainly a drive for the ascendancy of sharia supremacism in what were already bastions of fundamentalist Islam. One casualty was the Saudi–Brotherhood partnership.
The Arab Spring was not about establishing democracy in any Western sense of that Western concept. Exploited by the entrenched, disciplined, and politically savvy Brotherhood, the uprisings co-opted the language of democracy and agitated for some procedural features of democracy — specifically, elections, which Islamists were rightly confident they would win in sharia societies. The objective, however, was not to establish substantive democracy — as in citizenship, civil rights, free expression, due process, and equal protection under the law. The aim was to establish sharia. Islamists don’t do Western democracy. As Khashoggi wrote in one Washington Post column a year before his murder, “We avoid the term ‘constitution’ because of its secular interpretation and often say that the Koran is our constitution.”
The Arab Spring, in conjunction with the Muslim Middle East’s internecine bloodletting that followed the American exit from Iraq and continued unabated in the barbaric war in Syria, reshuffled the Islamist deck. The Saudi regime and the Brotherhood became bitter enemies.
The regime is among the despots still clinging to power. The House of Saud’s partnership with the Brothers, like its underwriting of the jihadists, was premised on the understanding that the sharia propagation — whether by the Brothers’ sophisticated proselytizing (dawa) or al-Qaeda’s terrorism — would be directed away from the kingdom, mainly toward the West. The Arab Spring upended that calculation.
The Brotherhood collaborated with Sunni jihadists to foment the uprising against Bashar al-Assad in Syria — just as it had done decades earlier against Assad’s father, until Hafez al-Assad brutally put down a revolt with the Hama massacre of 1982. Meantime, the Brotherhood spearheaded Arab Spring uprisings against other regimes it limned as America’s lapdogs — apostates paying mere lip service to their obligation to rule in accordance with Allah’s law.
In Egypt, for a time, the revolution was a smashing success. It toppled the dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak, an American ally against jihadists. It established a popularly elected Islamist government led by the Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi — to the delight of the Obama-Biden administration, as well as Democrats and other transnational progressives who delusionally regard the anti-Western Brothers as avatars of democracy.
Two things flowed out of this development. First, once the aspirational democracy talk gave way to actual sharia governance, the Brotherhood regime proved predictably corrupt, inept, and monstrous. As the country teetered on the brink of economic collapse, Egyptians revolted en masse. The minority of secular Muslim moderates, the beleaguered Coptic Christians, the Brotherhood’s rival Islamists, and the anti-jihadist military brass — all of them poured into the streets. Morsi was ejected, ushering in an order-restoring coup under the leadership of General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, much to the chagrin of the Brotherhood’s progressive fans in Washington.
Second, the Saudi regime grasped that it, too, was a target, and that if it happened in Cairo it could happen in Riyadh. The Saudis formally designated the Brotherhood as a terrorist organization. They even turned their back on their most notorious client, Hamas — the jihadists also known as the Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestinian branch.
I delved into this history over a decade ago in two books, The Grand Jihad and Spring Fever. So why retrace it now? Because we stubbornly refuse to learn it and what it portends for the here and now.
In President Biden’s latest debacle, the Saudi regime has told him to save his fist bumps and instead pound sand. The crown prince who runs the country, Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), has teamed with Kremlin strongman Vladimir Putin to induce the so-called OPEC+ cartel to cut oil production by what may turn out to be 2 million barrels per day. (Memo to Democrats: That’s what actual collusion with Russia looks like.)
If we weren’t headed for more economic pain, it would be hilarious to watch Biden officials fulminate over this. During the Trump administration, the United States became a net exporter of energy. Pre-Covid, as the Committee to Unleash Prosperity observes, American oil production peaked at 13 million barrels per day, and the Energy Information Agency projected that it could have reached 15 million if trend lines continued. Under Biden, post-Covid production lags under 12 million barrels a day, despite the fact that the price per barrel has surged.
Ordinarily, high prices mean more production. But production remains well below the Trump-era peak, even though it should be at a level that would prevent OPEC+ from threatening us, because of the Biden administration’s irrational climate alarmism, which has spurred a tireless war against production. Biden being Biden, his solution to the Saudi–Russia provocation is not to take the regulatory wraps off the American energy sector, for that would ignite mutiny in his base; rather, he has gone hat in hand to Nicolás Maduro, a Marxist outlaw the United States (at least officially) does not even recognize as Venezuela’s president.
Why are we in this mess? Because Biden, whose administration and party are rife with Brotherhood sympathizers, has made Khashoggi’s murder the focal point of the U.S.–Saudi relationship. Khashoggi was undoubtedly executed with MBS’s approval, and probably at his direction, as U.S. spy agencies believe.
To be clear, I am as opposed as the next guy to barbaric killing. That’s why I’m most incensed by state-sponsored anti-American terrorism. I mention that for some balance. Biden tried to turn MBS into a pariah because he killed a Saudi national. Yet Biden, like his former boss Barack Obama, can’t go fast enough to cut a deal that would rain billions of dollars in sanctions relief on Iran, the world’s leading state sponsor of anti-American jihadist terror. The deal would put Tehran’s mullahs on a glide path to acquiring nuclear weapons even as they brutalize Iranian protesters, prominently including women suffocating under sharia strictures — just as they brutalized them with impunity during the Obama–Biden administration.
Attention: There is a civil war going on in the Muslim Middle East. Both sides are execrable, but if one has to choose, Biden has chosen the wrong side, and now America is paying the price.
The civil war pits such despots as MBS and Sisi against Brotherhood Islamists and their allies (Turkey, Qatar, Iran, and sundry jihadist groups), which the Saudi and Egyptian regimes regard as an existential threat. Khashoggi got himself enmeshed in that war. Before the Arab Spring, before MBS, the House of Saud was willing to put up with his impertinences because he, like the Brotherhood, was seen as a net positive: a useful intermediary with the jihadists, who were then the chief concern. Now, the intermediaries are seen as enemies, too. If Khashoggi convinced himself that MBS’s henchmen wouldn’t dare touch him in a consulate, he was tragically mistaken.
Here is the unhappy reality: The Muslim Middle East is not poised for democratic flourishing. If decades pushing that boulder up the mountains in Afghanistan and Iraq didn’t teach us that, then watching the Arab Spring, the Benghazi massacre, and the war in Syria should have. This is not a democratic culture in any substantive way. Elections are not democracies. From third-graders to the Chinese Communist Party, everyone conducts exercises in majority voting. The exhibition does not a democracy make, not by a long shot.
Elections, for which the Brotherhood agitate, are just bunting if they are not occasioned by democratic culture. A movement dedicated to the implementation of sharia law is the antithesis of a democratic culture.
“Secularism can never enjoy a general acceptance in an Islamic society.” So said Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the Muslim Brotherhood’s compass and, when he died at 96 late last month, still the most influential Sunni sharia jurisprudent in modern history. By secularism, Qaradawi meant the Western conception of government by consent of the governed. It would be anathema to Islamic society, he instructed, because “the acceptance of secularism means abandonment of Shari’ah, a denial of the divine guidance and a rejection of Allah’s injunctions.” He went on: “Islam is a comprehensive system of worship (Ibadah) and legislation (Shari’ah)”; ergo, “the call for secularism among Muslims is atheism and a rejection of Islam. Its acceptance as a basis for rule in place of Shari’ah is downright apostasy.”
That last bit is not a throwaway line. In sharia, apostasy is a capital offense. Qaradawi, we’ll recall, was deemed a “moderate” by Western progressives, in part because he was of the “enlightened” view that private apostasy could be sufficiently punished by ostracism. Of course, the apostasy of secularism — of Muslims daring to live outside sharia’s liberty-devouring dictates — is very public. For that Qaradawi prescribed the traditional sentence, death.
If you want to know what the Brotherhood is, what it wants, and why it has always been a gateway to hard-core jihadism for its more impatient adherents, it’s worth studying Qaradawi. Progressives who hand-wring over his supposedly “complicated” legacy (see, e.g., the respectful obituaries in the New York Times and Washington Post) like to point to his supposed condemnation of the 9/11 attacks. But Qaradawi’s opposition was tactical, not principled. He not only favored terrorist attacks; he issued fatwas (sharia edicts) so that women could participate in them. He adjudged 9/11 a misfire on cost–benefit grounds — it would stir America and the West to a fierce response. In 2004, when the heat of 9/11 was off, Qaradawi issued another fatwa calling Muslims to wage jihad against American troops in Iraq. In doing so, he clarified that, although after 9/11 he’d said Islam forbids killing “civilians,” one always has to ask, “Who is a civilian?” In Qaradawi’s mind, anyone who lent support to the “American army” was fair game for lethal attack. In the end, there was barely any daylight between him and bin Laden, who had rationalized that the mass killing of American civilians was halal because they pay taxes to a government that besieges Muslims.
Qaradawi’s sophisticated plan to “conquer Europe, conquer America” through sharia proselytism is sometimes described as voluntary apartheid. Muslims would emigrate to the West and co-opt the language but not the mores of secularism. They would gravitate into enclaves. When these reached a sufficient mass, they would pressure the host government to accede to their demand to govern their affairs autonomously, under sharia. Such a strategy, naturally, is coy about terrorism — the Islamists may not openly endorse jihad, at least in the local area, but they rely on the atmosphere of intimidation created by the omnipresent specter of violence. Over time, the enclaves would stitch together and effectively secede from the authority of the host Western society, evolving into “no-go zones” where police and other agents of the state feared entering.
“Democracy” in action, Brotherhood style.
Inevitably, Qaradawi condemned homosexuals, as sharia does. As for his views on women, progressives swooned because Qaradawi (who had four daughters) was supportive of women’s education, and of the capacity of women to vote and hold public office. Left unsaid is that sharia education was paramount, and that voting and holding office were simply seen as affirmation of sharia strictures, from which there was no authority to depart. Meanwhile, Qaradawi supported female genital mutilation, sharia rules that limit female inheritance to half of a man’s share, the right of men to have multiple wives, the right of men to beat their wives, and the punishment of female rape victims. (“For her to be absolved from guilt, a raped woman must have shown good conduct”; if she was dressed immodestly, she is deemed to have brought the sexual assault on herself.)
Qaradawi bristled at those who condemned Hamas’s suicide bombings. “They are not suicide operations. These are heroic martyrdom operations.” “The martyr operations,” he added, were “the greatest of all sorts of jihad in the cause of Allah.” It was the end he hoped for himself. As he put it in 2009:
The only thing I hope for is that, as my life approaches its end, Allah will give me an opportunity to go to the land of jihad and resistance, even if in a wheelchair. I will shoot Allah’s enemies, the Jews, and they will throw a bomb at me, and thus, I will seal my life with martyrdom.
Ah yes, the Jews. It should go without saying that the sheikh was an incorrigible antisemite, a position he proudly rooted in Islamic scripture:
This is what is told in the Hadith of Ibn-Omar and the Hadith of Abu-Hurairah: “You shall continue to fight the Jews and they will fight you, until the Muslims will kill them. And the Jew will hide behind the stone and the tree, and the stone and the tree will say: ‘Oh servant of Allah, Oh Muslim, this is a Jew behind me. Come and kill him!’ The resurrection will not come before this happens.” This is a text from the good omens in which we believe.
Among Jamal Khashoggi’s grievances against the Saudi regime was that its aggressive turn against the Brothers and their sympathizers has included imprisoning Islamist clerics. From MBS’s perspective, of course, there is nothing more threatening than Qaradawi imitators inspiring the masses to rise up against a government that is insufficiently sharia-adherent.
The blunt truth is that, for the foreseeable future, if you’d like to see in the Muslim Middle East the slow but gradual enhancement of civil rights — for women, authentic Muslim moderates of the pro-Western bent, and religious minorities — that is most likely to happen under the rule of hard men, such as MBS and Sisi. Realistically, it requires the rule of regimes that can keep the Brotherhood, the jihadists, and their state sponsors at bay.
Is MBS a monster? Of course he is. But we didn’t put him in charge, nor did we shape him. He is simply a complicated fact of life with which we have to deal — just like the Muslim Brotherhood. It is not our government’s burden, it is not within our government’s competence, to fix Saudi Arabia or the Muslim Middle East. Our government’s job is to pursue America’s interests in the world.
By the standards of his gruesome neighborhood, MBS is a dizzying reformer. He has lifted social restrictions on women, integrated them in the workforce, and curbed the sharia police. He insists that the Wahhabist Saudi Arabia of the last 40 years has been an aberration, and that he is “reverting to what we followed — a moderate Islam open to the world and all religions.” Moreover, until Biden came along, determined to empower the Brotherhood and the Saudis’ Iranian enemies, MBS, like Sisi, was working with the United States on counterterrorism and other areas of mutual interest, while quietly building stronger security ties with Israel — the latter would have been inconceivable in the not too distant past. Unlike the Saudi regime of the recent past, he is not pretending to be our friend while abetting the jihadists who plot to kill us, and he is taking risks — lots of Saudi fundamentalists resent being dragged kicking and screaming out of the seventh century.
Biden has driven the Saudis into the arms of the Russians, even as Putin executes a barbaric war of aggression against Ukraine. Our president has induced MBS to slash energy production in aid of the Kremlin as it prepares to cut our European allies off from the Russian oil and gas supplies on which they’ve recklessly made themselves dependent.
Yes, we should condemn the murder of Jamal Khashoggi. But we should also face the reality that he readily sympathized with enemies of the United States, and that he was a Saudi who chose to align himself, at least rhetorically, with opponents of a Saudi regime that believes it is fighting for its survival. The killing of a Saudi national in a Saudi consulate in Turkey (where Khashoggi was reportedly seeking paperwork he needed to enter a sharia-authorized polygamist marriage), was an abomination. Its significance, however, is vastly outweighed by the geopolitical stakes for the United States in maintaining (or, now, rebuilding) a constructive relationship with Riyadh — one in which Russia is undercut rather than abetted, and Iranian ambitions are more effectively checked.
Biden is courting the Iranians, who’ve spent 40-plus years killing Americans. And he is championing the Muslim Brotherhood, which, for all its flowering “democracy” blather, rejects real democracy, is dedicated to Israel’s destruction, and despises the West. Under the circumstances, the president has no business moralizing about Jamal Khashoggi at the expense of his duty to tend to American national security.