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Why Now?

Over at Outside the Beltway [1], (which increasingly should be changing its title to inside the Beltway) James Joyner asks an interesting question. Essentially, why now?

The disappearance and presumptive murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi while in the Saudi embassy in Turkey has spawned a level of outrage that has surprised me. After all, the Saudi government routinely murders dissidents and has killed tens of thousands of civilians in its ongoing spree of atrocity in Yemen with hardly a peep.

Well, that’s very true. It does Raise The Logical question of why all this hell is being raised over this particular individual.

The answer clearly is because raising a stink about it previously wasn’t politically useful for people here in the states until now. One political group in particular finds it useful, just now.

As to the timing, what’s coming up next month?

In the piece Stephen Green laid out over at instapundit [2]

“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. He 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 favour 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.”

Isn’t it interesting that this guy was totally wrapped up in the kind of Islamic politics encouraged by the Middle East policy of Barack Hussein Obama and Hillary Clinton…(Arab Spring?)

And of course it fits that the Crown Prince there is trying to drag the Middle East Kicking and Screaming into the modern world… Something that Jamal Khashoggi desperately against as it turns out… And if we judge by the Middle East policy the Democrat Party was against it here in the US, as well.

All of which would seem to answer rather nicely the question posed by James.

I suspect he’s not going to like the answer. I’m quite sure I don’t but for different reasons.

Now, keep in mind all of this makes the assumption that the man was killed, which is a point we have absolutely no evidence on whatsoever. A situation not unlike something we saw in the Brett Kavanaugh hearings recently…as the Donald himself pointed out yesterday.

Limbaugh seems to feel that this is an attempt on the American left to try and pin these connections on Donald Trump just before the midterms. And yes I’m convinced there is at least some of that.

Trump for his part is playing this one fairly smart. And for that I’m going to suggest reading Rodger Simon’s [3] column today.

As Rodger points out, which country has more journalists in jail? Turkey, or the Saudis? The answer is Turkey without even blinking. And yes, the outrage gets directed against the Crown Prince. And by extension Donald Trump. See how this thing works?