RUSH: The Khashoggi situation, and there’s some things about this guy that I don’t think are being widely reported exactly who he is. The Drive-Bys…
Let me just tell you what the Drive-Bys purpose here is, again. The Drive-Bys are trying as hard as they can to link Donald Trump to Khashoggi’s murder. By the way, just so you know, there are a couple of CNN infobabes who are pronouncing the name “Khashog-gee” because there’s two G’s in there. Every time I’ve heard the word, the name pronounced, it’s always been “Kah-show-gee,” Adnan Khashoggi pronounced his name that way.
Robin Leach made a star out of Adnan Khashoggi, who was a Saudi arms merchant, and he was practically featured every other week in Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. His name was pronounced “Khashoggi.” I don’t know if Jamal Khashoggi is related to Adnan, if they’re from the same family. Anyway, CNN’s out there with a couple people pronouncing his name “Khashoggi.” The Drive-Bys are trying to say that Trump is responsible for his murder.
And the reason for that, or the way that is possible is that Trump has sidled up to MBS, Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, who is said to be the culprit here. The story is that Jamal Khashoggi dared to criticize the regime and dared to poke holes at the reforms of Mohammed bin Salman and pointed out they’re really not reforms, that this guy’s a phony and he’s a fake. So Mohammed bin Salman does not tolerate criticism.
You criticize Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince, and you die. You get beheaded, get defingered, you get decapitated, whatever, you just die. And because Trump sidles up to Mohammed bin Salman, Trump is complicit! The Drive-Bys are doing their best to make Trump complicit. CNN today all morning long was running a story with a chyron graphic: “Unnamed White House adviser says that the way Trump handles this will be the single most determining factor in his presidency going forward!”
Right. Somebody in the Oval Office or the West Wing called CNN and said (paraphrased), “You know, we all know here. We’re watching Trump, and we in the Trump adminstration, we know that this is the most important call he has to make. His presidency hinges on doing the right thing here.” Mike Pompeo, the secretary of state, just arrived in Saudi Arabia. And Jeff Zeleny at CNN reported on Pompeo’s meeting with the Saudi king, Salman, and MBS was there, his son, the crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman.
ZELENY: There is one thing that is being criticized here: The secretary of state SMILING as he walked into that meeting. Most people in Washington certainly do not think this is a laughing or smiling matter. Uh… Um, not in the least.
RUSH: Oh, come on. You people at CNN, you’re the biggest sticklers for diplomacy world’s ever seen! What is Pompeo supposed to do, walk in there pointing a gun at ’em? Pompeo’s supposed to walk in there frowning with a look of determination on his face, accusing them of wanton murder? What’s he supposed to do? Oh! How about if he had walked in and bowed to the king like Obama did to King Abdullah?
The previous king was the brother of King Salman, and Obama met the guy and bowed to him! Remember when that happened? People were outraged. Pompeo, the secretary of state, goes in there with a smile on his face. They are allies. Anyway, this… I think to show you the bankruptcy the left has in their arsenal of weapons to get rid of Trump, this is the next one. It’s falling in their face.
They’re gonna get rid of Trump; they’re gonna humiliate Trump. They’re gonna show Americans that Trump is unfit because of the way has a handling this Khashoggi situation. And Pompeo walks in there smiling? (impression)”It just proves it Trump ask his administration don’t take this seriously, they don’t care about a dead journalist!” I think Jamal Khashoggi was much more than a journalist.
Yeah, he wrote opinion pieces for the Washington Post, and so they’re running around saying he was an American citizen, an American journalist. But I don’t think that’s who the Saudis saw when they saw Jamal Khashoggi. I think they saw an enemy of the regime. I think they saw a guy who’s tight with the Muslim Brotherhood. The Muslim Brotherhood, the agents of change in the Arab Spring, the Muslim Brotherhood and the Saudis do not get along in any way, shape, manner, or form.
No, no. Do not misunderstand me. I’m not advocating or trying to excuse whatever they did to Khashoggi. I’m just trying to tell you that he’s not an innocent, minding-his-own-business journalist going about his life gunned down. He was an enemy of the regime, and he once held a position in the Saudi government.
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RUSH: Hi. Welcome back. Yeah, I just confirmed Jamal Khashoggi is the cousin of Adnan Khashoggi, and so they are related. Here is an example. This is the Washington Post. “Trump Joins Saudi Arabia’s Khashoggi Cover-up.” I’m telling you, the Drive-Bys have been dying to tie Trump to this murder. I think that they would love to undermine Trump’s relationship with crown prince Mohammed bin Salman and the Saudis in general, and so would the Democrats. It’s just the latest in a never-ending parade of events that the left thinks they can use to destroy and get rid of Trump.
Khashoggi was a friend of Osama Bin Laden. They went to high school together. But that’s not what you need to know about Khashoggi. Khashoggi’s ties to the Muslim Brotherhood are what’s really relevant here. I think… They’re trying to tell us that Khashoggi was murdered by Mohammed bin Salman because Khashoggi was being critical of the regime and you just don’t do that. And while that’s true, I think there’s a lot more to this than just he got killed because of stuff he was writing in the Washington Post.
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RUSH: Suzanne in Martins Ferry, Ohio. Great to have you with us. Hi.
CALLER: Thank you, Rush. Hi. Please catch me up. This is not a moral question It’s a political one. On Jamal Khashoggi, I understand he’s a Saudi citizen and a U.S. resident, and my other understanding is the U.S. usually reserves these very strict stances for U.S. citizens’ protection. So if you would answer that for us, I’d be very pleased.
RUSH: You know, I’m gonna take the occasion of your call to do a general biography of Jamal Khashoggi. I found a piece on him by John R. Bradley at Spectator.us, and Bradley has been following Saudi politics, Middle East politics, Muslim Brotherhood expertise for many, many moons. And his story ran three days ago, and you haven’t seen a thing about this anywhere in the Drive-By Media, like Missourians are not seeing a word about Project Veritas exposing Claire McCaskill.
The piece is entitled, “What the Media Are Not Telling You About Jamal Khashoggi — The dissident’s fate says a lot about Saudi Arabia and the rise of the mobster state.” Now, here are just some biographical things. The fate of Khashoggi has at least provoked global outrage, but it’s for all the wrong reasons. We are told he was a liberal, Saudi progressive voice fighting for freedom and democracy, and a martyr who paid the ultimate price for telling the truth to power.
“This is not just wrong, but distracts us from understanding what the incident tells us about the internal power dynamics of a kingdom going through an unprecedented period of upheaval. It is also the story of how one man got entangled in a Saudi ruling family that operates like the Mafia. Once you join, it’s for life, and if you try to leave, you become disposable.” So the point this piece is gonna make is that Khashoggi’s not a distant and removed commentator/journalist writing about the Saudi kingdom from afar.
He used to be part of it. He’s not… Well, the Khashoggis… Adnan Khashoggi was very, very tight with the royal family. I don’t know about bloodlines, but he was… You’re not allowed to become Adnan Khashoggi and acquire that much wealth — particularly running guns and arms — without being tight with the royal family. Jamal Khashoggi is a cousin of Adnan Khashoggi. This piece makes it clear (as you’ll hear in a moment) that Jamal Khashoggi — at one time in his life, at one point — was very, very tight with the ruling family, the royal family, was in the regime.
“This is not just wrong, but distracts us from understanding what the incident tells us about the internal power dynamics of a kingdom going through an unprecedented period of upheaval. It is also the story of how one man got entangled in a Saudi ruling family that operates like the Mafia. Once you join, it’s for life, and if you try to leave, you become disposable. 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.” Now, that right there will provide all of us the first source of serious conflict between Khashoggi and the current Saudi ruling royal family. “[T]he Muslim Brotherhood … exists to rid the Islamic world of western influence.” What’s Mohammed bin Salman doing? He’s trying to westernize the country! He’s a Millennial.
He’s trying to reform it in certain ways, letting women vote and letting women drive, but not much else. He wants the world to think that there’s massive reform happening in the kingdom. So he does something very visible, like letting women drive. But not much more. They’re still very subjugated. He’s meeting with all of the tech people in Silicon Valley and the Hollywood people. He wants to build a brand-new city from scratch — a huge, dynamic, brand-new city — that incorporates money from Silicon Valley and Hollywood and involves all of those people as developers and investors.
He wants Saudi Arabia to be a place where there is westernized capitalism taking place. His stated reason for this is he thinks that the kingdom is too exposed by having only petrodollars as its lifeblood. He wants to branch out so that investments from and in other areas besides oil and petroleum exist. He wants to grow the kingdom. Petroleum, no matter how much we have, is finite. At some point — 300 years, 400, whatever — it is we’re gonna run out of it unless we find a way to synthesize it, which we will.
But nevertheless he’s the first of the ruling royal family to ever talk this way, to ever travel the world and set something up like this, and this is anathema to the Muslim Brotherhood! They can’t stand this! There’s something else that the royal family’s doing, and I mentioned this when I was talking about who Khashoggi was and Mohammed bin Salman last week. That is this: Up to 9/11 and even many years after 9/11, the ruling religious dominance in Saudi Arabia was Wahhabism.
All of the clerics, all of the imams were Wahhabi Islamists, and these are the terrorist-inspiring Islamists. These are the imams, the educators at all the universities which teach and recruit and inspire the Osama Bin Laden-type terrorism. Mohammed bin Salman wants to rid Saudi Arabia of the influence of Wahhabism. Well, that’s not gonna sit well with the Muslim Brotherhood. The Muslim Brotherhood is not particularly tied to Wahhabism.
They have their own version of terrorist Islam. But the fact that the Saudi rile family, which, by definition, and by corporate structure, is in charge of Islam. Mecca and Medina are… Mecca is in Saudi Arabia. The Saudi royal family is Islam. It’s their charge with maintaining it, protecting it, defining it, the mosques, particularly in Mecca. And for Mohammed bin Salman to come along and try to eliminate the influences of Wahhabism, while at the same time importing such corporate scum as Hollywood and American technology?
This is considered to be an absolute affront to people like the Muslim Brotherhood, which wants to get rid of any Western influence in Islam or in Saudi Arabia or anywhere else in the Islamic world! So Mohammed bin Salman has made himself a huge, huge target. Khashoggi, as a Muslim Brotherhood member, would be diametrically opposed to everything Mohammed bin Salman is doing. And that has been well established and has been documented.
Again here, according to Mr. Bradley, “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.” Well, here comes Mohammed bin Salman incorporating Western influence in Saudi Arabia. Khashoggi “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 favor 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.”
He was not an Americanized Islamist. He was not pro-democracy. This was a Muslim Brotherhood advocate and member, and he is righteously indignant over the reforms of Mohammed bin Salman and wrote about them. But he threw in the words “democracy” and “freedom” and “liberty,” and this was all designed to cow Western readers and Western journalists into thinking that he was something that he’s not.
Much like liberals have to mask who they are, that’s what Khashoggi was doing. “He had been a journalist in the 1980s and 1990s, but then became more of a player than a spectator. Before working with a succession of Saudi princes, he edited Saudi newspapers. The exclusive remit a Saudi government-appointed newspaper editor has is to ensure nothing remotely resembling honest journalism” makes it into the papers. So when the Saudi ruling family hired him to run journalism, it was to be PR. It was to be propaganda.
Khashoggi did it. He took the money, he “put the money in the bank,” and he did what the royal family wanted him to do. He made “a handsome living,” which, according to Mr. Bradley here, has “always [been] his top priority. … Khashoggi had this undeserved status in the West” that our caller is talking about “because of the publicity surrounding his sacking as editor of the Saudi daily Al Watan back in 2003. … He was dismissed because he allowed a columnist to criticize an Islamist thinker considered to be the founding father of Wahhabism.
“Thus, overnight, Khashoggi became known as a liberal progressive” in the Saudi Kingdom and outside. And that’s another reason why the left in this country champions him, because that’s who he was. “The Muslim Brotherhood, though, has always been at odds with the Wahhabi movement. Khashoggi and his fellow travelers believe in imposing Islamic rule by engaging in the democratic process.”
Now, you might ask, “How do you impose something in the democratic process?” Well, you go out, and you campaign for hearts and minds, and you win elections! And this is what Khashoggi supposedly was advocating. “The Wahhabis loathe democracy”! They loathe the fact that people have a say in their own lives. The Wahhabis have no time for that. That’s “a Western invention” that they hate. They choose to live life as it supposedly existed during the time of the Muslim prophet, Mohammed.
“Instead, they choose to live life as it supposedly existed during the time of the Muslim prophet. In the final analysis, though, they are different means to achieving the same goal: Islamist theocracy.” Khashoggi was for it. The Wahhabis are for it. The Saudi royal family must ensure it, but they all have different ways of getting there. Anyway, I’m a little long here. But this will give you a taste of how Khashoggi was seen, and it’s nothing like the way the American media’s portraying for you and everybody else the way he was supposedly seen.
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RUSH: Okay, that was kind of detailed, but that’s a little bit on Jamal Khashoggi. There’s much more about who he is, his relationship with the Muslim Brotherhood, his former ties to the Saudi royal family, his departure and his opposition to them, a host of reasons and so forth. In other words, there’s much more to this than what the simpleton Drive-By Media is telling you, and they’re going the simpleton route because they’re desperate to link Trump to this killing.
They’re desperate to link Trump to sharing responsibility for it by claiming that Trump is just too loyal to this murderous Saudi regime at the expense of an American citizen who is working at the wash. Trying to construct, as they always do, sets of circumstances designed to make Trump look like an absolute heathen and reprobate. It’s kind of wearing me out, frankly. It still ticks me off. But it’s so predictable, and it’s gonna fail; it’s gonna bomb out. They still have no clue who Trump is. They don’t know how to deal with him. Their basic problem is they think they are 20 times smarter than he is, and they have no clue.
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RUSH: I’m glad I just checked the email, because some of you misunderstood my point about Jamal Khashoggi. I’m not… I shouldn’t even have to say this, but if I have to say this to be clear about it, okay. I am not in any way suggesting the guy deserved to have harm come his way. That’s not at all. I’m just trying to explain why. And, I tell you what. I’ll tell you what it exposes. And it is kind of a modified trapdoor for Trump. Because on the surface, this new, young crown prince is running around making it look like that he wants to reform Saudi Arabia.
He wants to bring in all this Western money and Western influence to branch out so that they’re not totally tied just petrodollars. So he’s talked to Hollywood. By the way, one of the Big Hollywood agents, Ari Emanuel — who is the brother of Rahm Emanuel and the brother of Zeke Emanuel (who was instrumental in writing Obamacare) is a Big Hollywood agent. And he has pulled out. “I don’t want any part of this. We’re pulling out of any investment ideas we had with Mohammed bin Salman.” They don’t want any part of it.
They bought that he was a reformer. What this episode is showing is the royal family of Saudi Arabia is still the royal family of Saudi Arabia. You cross them? If you’ve been part of them, if you’ve been part of their regime and you cross them, you become an opponent. They are still, despite all this talk of reforms, entirely of being who they are. And it is a trapdoor for Trump. I mean, everybody would love for Saudi Arabia to actually be leading this reform.
And in a lot of ways, folks, Saudi Arabia has been doing some good things. Saudi Arabia has aligned with the United States against Iran! Unheard of, prior to Mohammed bin Salman. He’s done this with a newly forged relationship with the son-in-law Donald Trump, Jared Kushner. That is a singularly important development. The Saudis have never been friendly toward Iran. Iran is considered the biggest threat in the region.
And to have the Saudis aligned with Israel and the United States against Iran is a huge deal, and you would like for nothing to happen to that. Then they come along and they do this and they murder this guy! And they’re gonna have to own up to it. They’ve got some flimsy excuse planned. “Hey, hey! He wasn’t supposed to be killed.
“Yeah, we sent 15 hitmen in there to our consulate in Istanbul, but they were not supposed to kill him. They are just supposed to roughly interrogate the guy. But some rogue assassin went in there and killed him and that’s not what we intended.” That’s what they’re gonna have to try and sell, and that’d be like John Gotti saying, “No, I didn’t intend for the guy to die in front of Sparks.
“I just wanted him to get a message.” Paul Castellano. “No, no, no, no! I wasn’t aiming for a kill shot. I just wanted him to know his days were done. The fact that he bought it, a cement swimsuit? Not my fault!” Gotti didn’t even try to make that case. But the Saudis are trying to make the case that what happened to Jamal Khashoggi was some rogue event, and it’s obvious. Not when you send 15 people in there.