RUSH: Okay. Let me zero in on the situation involving the death of the so-called Washington Post journalist, Jamal Khashoggi, who’s now being referred to as a lovable, little teddy bear-type guy in the New York Times. There is… and I know I went through this the other day. But I am continuing to see it, and this is what makes me suspicious of this story, folks. You know, I read my tech blogs. I read everything. There are still people attempting via their reporting to suggest that there is a recording of the murder of Jamal Khashoggi from his Apple Watch.
My friends, this is item No. 1 that arouses my suspicion about this. There’s even a tech blog out there called AppleInsider. This tech blog has been misappropriated as a source for this in certain Google searches. They have run a piece at AppleInsider denying any relation, any complicity in this story. So whoever is behind this idea that the murder and the conversations that took place prior to it and during it were recorded by Khashoggi’s Apple Watch and are now somewhere on iCloud…
When you find out that a tech blog that has a famous name has been misappropriated and has been falsely accused of recording this in order to give it legitimacy in certain Google searches, then I start having to question a lot of things about this story. Now, very briefly, here’s why the Apple Watch angle of this doesn’t work. I know that most of you don’t have Apple watches; so let me just briefly explain to you how they work.
There are three ways that an Apple Watch can receive and transmit data, and the biggest one, the one with the longest range, the one that is most capable is not even available in Turkey, and that is LTE or cellular signals. Two years ago, when Apple… Well actually, 14 months. When Apple introduced the Series 3 Watch they activated LTE cellular service, which for the first time made the watch independent of the phone. You could take it on a workout; you could do anything. You could take it away from the phone and have it operate.
It would still get emails and messages and record your workout data and so forth, if you could receive a cell signal. You didn’t need your phone nearby. So it was the first time that the watch failed to be or ceased to be a slave to the phone. The other two ways are Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. Those are the three ways that data can get to a watch and data can leave a watch. You take LTE out of the mix because it doesn’t exist in Turkey. There’s no watch, no Apple Watch in the world, and it’s an Apple Watch they claim he was wearing.
The story is that he’s fiancée had his phone out in the car in the parking lot at the consulate! There’s only one way that watch could communicate with that phone. Well, there’s two ways. There would be Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. Bluetooth, you have to… Bluetooth is weak by design. It doesn’t have much range. Sixty feet max. You get into an embassy, the shielding, the IR, the protections against other nations being able to monitor and overhear and steal signal.
There’s no way that the Bluetooth component of a watch would be able to permeate the protections that an embassy would have to protect itself from such thing. There’s… That couldn’t happen. So the only other way would be Wi-Fi. But that would only work if the Wi-Fi network password of the embassy or the consulate had been entered on the Wi-Fi connection on the watch. Just because the phone connects to Wi-Fi… When the phone does, the watch automatically connects, but not the Wi-Fi connects to the phone.
It’s a slave to the phone. Now, if the watch knows a Wi-Fi network because the phone it’s paired to uses it, then… Like if you’re at home, your phone is inside, you have to go outside to walk the dogs, you’ll connect to a Wi-Fi network on your property even if your phone’s out of range, if you’ve entered the password to the Wi-Fi network on your watch as well as on your phone. I just don’t think Khashoggi did that. Don’t think he would probably know to do it. I don’t know that they would give him the password!
How would he get the password of the Saudi consulate Wi-Fi network? The idea that that watch was recording whatever happened to Khashoggi and then somehow transmitted it up to iCloud is just so outside the realm of possibility as to be next to impossible. And yet somebody is still pushing this. They’re still pushing that that recording exists and it’s somewhere Wi-Fi, iCloud, and the Turkish officials are doing everything they can to listen to it and make decisions and sharing everybody in the United States.
If there’s a recording of this, I’m not denying that. Could have easily been a recording that the Saudis made themselves, but not from Khashoggi’s watch. That just… I don’t see how in the world, given the technological limitations that could be. But they continue to push that. Now, the balance of this story is being used to tarnish President Trump. And I’ll tell you how successful it is. I’ll tell you how successful… I got an email today first thing this morning, from a good friend of mine whose name you would know but I can’t tell you ’cause he wants anonymity and privacy. You would know who this person is.
A famous world-known athlete. And he is constantly emailing people proof of various acts committed by the left that he thinks people should know about. He’s one of us. He said, “Rush, I don’t feel good about this. I think Trump’s on the verge of blowing this whole Khashoggi thing. If he doesn’t come down on the right side of this, it could mean everything.” And you know what his evidence was? A Thomas Friedman column in the New York Times. He said, “Rush, I know that you and Friedman have a hate-hate relationship, but this guy knows more than anybody else about the Middle East, and this is not good for Trump. They’ve gotta do something about it to make…”
Well, this is how… This is how seductive this stuff could be. This guy that I’m talking about is as knowledgeable as anybody else on who the left is and how they operate, and here he was sucked in by a Friedman column today. And there was one element of the Friedman column that I think got him. And in this… Friedman, by the way, has a point in this, but it’s not… It’s distantly connected to the Khashoggi incident. Well, maybe not, depending on how you look at it.
The point is… And I mentioned this a couple of, three days ago when explaining to you who Khashoggi is and why was at odds with the Saudi government. Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince, the 32-year-old Millennial son of the king, who effectively is running the country, has decided that Saudi Arabia is stuck in the Dark Ages and needs to modernize, get… You know, branch out beyond just oil dollars as income.
So he’s been traveling the world, including the U.S., making potential deals with Silicon Valley and Hollywood to invest in Saudi Arabia. And the reason they should, he says, is because he’s modernizing and reforming the country. “Look. I’m letting women drive now; so we’re not stuck in the Dark Ages, and we’re branching out beyond oil. And I put a bunch of corrupt Saudi leaders in jail for a while and got what they had stolen. I’m cleaning things up here.”
And Hollywood loved it. They ate it up. Silicon Valley loved it. They ate it up. Mohammed bin Salman is building a brand-new city somewhere in Saudi Arabia from scratch that is going to be a technological marvel. It’s going to be state-of-the-art. And that’s where he wants this investment. Well, part of the reforms that Mohammed bin Salman has instituted he says is to also reform the nature of Islam that Saudi Arabia represents and is responsible for.
In the hierarchy of Islam, the Saudi royal family defines what Islam is. They are the guarantors and protectors of the holy sites Mecca and Medina. Bin Salman has been telling Hollywood people and Silicon Valley people and Trump, you know, leaders around the world, he has been telling them that we’re gonna start deemphasizing Wahhabism. Wahhabism is terrorist Islam. Wahhabism is bin Laden. Wahhabism is what the Saudi royal family has been permitting the last 30 years.
They’ve been promoting it. And the story is Mohammed bin Salman thinks we can’t modernize unless we do something about this. So he supposedly has been making moves to deemphasize Wahhabi Islam and replace it with something that’s more reform, more modern, less terrorist inclined. And it’s at this juncture that Khashoggi enters the picture. And this business about Wahhabi Islam is what freedom in his column said the most important thing Saudi Arabia represents today is not royal and not any of this other stuff.
It’s that it’s this: If Saudi Arabia could succeed in deemphasizing and essentially undermining Wahhabi Islam and getting control over it, getting a handle on it, then it will be better for everybody in the world because most of militant Islam would then fade away, theoretically. Don’t think that would happen, but that’s what Mohammed bin Salman wants people to think. Along comes Khashoggi, who is tied to the Muslim Brotherhood.
And they are not, they’re not all-in on these reforms. They don’t like the westernization of anything, particularly Islam or Saudi Arabia. They don’t want all this secularism. They want Islam to remain pure and so forth. So if the Saudis would deemphasize Wahhabi Islam, it would be a big deal, if it were real and if the rest of Islam would go along with it, as they’re supposed to do what the Saudi royal family wants in terms of Islam…
I’m simplifying this, folks, but generally that’s what happens. So, by the same token, you could say that this militant terrorist Islam that we’ve known since 9/11 and maybe 10, 15 years prior, that has been sponsored by Saudi Arabia, by the Saudi royal family. It’s why so many people have been upset with so many American presidents being buddy-buddy with the king, whoever he happens to be. The Saudis always fund former presidents’ libraries. I mean, the Saudis had a good thing going. They had relationships with every president, former president and so forth.
And while they were selling us oil, sometimes. Cooperative or uncooperative, depending on the time, with price. But during all of that, they were the primary thrust for Wahhabi Islam. Now, here comes MBS, and he wants to just reform the hell out of the country, get rid of Wahhabism, bring in petrodollars competitors such as Hollywood and Silicon Valley and basically bring Saudi Arabia into the twenty-first century instead of the seventh. And there’s some people that don’t want that to happen.
They don’t want women driving, they don’t want women voting, they don’t want Western influence anywhere. Anyway, now the Khashoggi death, murder, is said to have totally arrested anything Mohammed bin Salman wanted to do, that this death has discredited him, destroyed him, Hollywood’s pulled out, Silicon Valley pulls out, nobody wants anything to do with Mohammed bin Salman, everybody’s pulling, except the Trump administration. They are not knee-jerk reacting to this yet!
And that has the left and Thomas L. Friedman and the Drive-By Media outraged that Trump will not join the chorus and pull out of anything with Saudi Arabia. Stop the arms deal. Stop depending on oil, stop… These people are… There was none of this concern over what happened to our ambassador and three other people in Benghazi. All of this is about embarrassing Trump! It’s not even really about Saudi reform. They’re just saying that it is. This is just the latest vehicle that they think they can get in and drive toward the destination of ruination of Donald Trump.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: There’s another thing here about the Saudi reforms. They are joining us in opposition to Iran. They also… Mohammed bin Salman started a war in Yemen. That’s not been popular. And that all of this is happening in Turkey, where Recep Tayyip Erdogan is also Muslim Brotherhood, also… Turkey is a NATO ally. But this guy, Erdogan, is not one of our big buds. He’s militant Islamist, wants the caliphate, wants it all.
And then Khashoggi himself is Muslim Brotherhood. He’s probably more of a jihadist than he is a journalist. There’s a lot to this, folks, that is just not readily apparent on the surface. But it’s trying to be simplified by the Drive-By Media to make it look like the Trump administration somehow is complicit in this because they will not join the rest of the world in condemning Saudi Arabia for this. Here’s Mike Pompeo this morning outside the White House, sound bite No. 1. He was speaking to reporters about the meeting that they’d had with Trump to brief him.
POMPEO: I told President Trump this morning that we ought to give them a few more days to complete that so that we, too, have a complete understanding of the facts sounding that. At which point, we can make decisions about how or if the United States should respond to the incident surrounding Mr. Khashoggi. When I traveled and met with President Erdogan, he talked to me about the incident. He told me that they were conducting their own investigation. So we do believe that between these two efforts, a complete picture will emerge for what actually transpired here.
RUSH: Yeah. Well, everybody else has drawn the conclusion. Everyone else says, “The Saudis dismembered him. Fifteen hitmen showed up! They cut him apart while he was alive, then they got some mercy, gave him some drugs to knock him out, then put on the headphones and listened to music while they finished the job.” That’s what supposedly has happened. Our side, yet, will not fall in line with that version of the story — and that’s the rub, as far as the media’s is concerned. “Why won’t Trump just admit it? He’s so loyal to dollars and the Saudis for reasons we…?” It’s just more of the same. Just gotta wait and let it play out.
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RUSH: Sam in Wilmington, North Carolina. Welcome, sir. I’m glad you waited. It’s great to have you here with us.
CALLER: Oh, huge honor to talk to you, Rush.
RUSH: Thank you, sir.
CALLER: Yeah. The call screener told me to get right to my point. Let me get back to Khashoggi. And one thing I haven’t heard that upsets me is you remember James Foley, or Jim Foley? He was the reporter, American reporter that had his head cut off by ISIS, and it was strained all around the internet. And I didn’t hear everyone screaming for Obama to do something, but, you know, here a foreign reporter gets killed in a foreign country, and now, you know, it’s all Trump’s responsibility to do something. This doesn’t make sense.
RUSH: Yes. That’s exactly right. I do not remember the name Foley. I’m do remember the name Danny Pearl, who was beheaded by militant Islamists I believe near Afghanistan or Iraq. And that was also on video all over the internet. The complete thing. Every bloody detail of that beheading was available on video. And, you’re right, that didn’t cause nearly the kerfuffle that the death of Jamal Khashoggi has caused, nor did the four Americans dead in Benghazi cause anywhere near this kind of reaction.
And I’m telling you, there is something to learn here. There is something about this that the left thinks is extremely valuable in poisoning, getting rid of, otherwise negatively affecting Donald Trump. There’s no love lost for Khashoggi. They want you to think that there is, ’cause he was a Washington Post op-ed contributor. I don’t even think he was an American citizen. He had a home in America he lived and worked in America. I don’t think he was a full-fledged citizen. (interruption) No, no, no, no. I’m not saying…
This was not about Khashoggi himself. This is about things far bigger and greater. And it’s whatever the objective here has been, it’s been extremely successful. And Trump and Pompeo are not yet signing on to the conventional wisdom that the Saudis did it, and they did it in a brutal way, and they did it in such a brutal way that it warrants us abandoning the Saudis. They want to try to characterize Trump as a blood brother of the Saudis. Trump is so corrupt; so tied to the Saudis, like he was the Russians, that wanton murder will not stand in Trump’s way. That’s the attempt here that is being played out.
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RUSH: There’s a headline, New York Post: “Saudi citizen…” Well, it doesn’t say that. It just says “Saudi.” Whatever. “Saudi Who Arrived in Turkey the Day of Khashoggi’s Disappearance Dies in Traffic Accident — One of the 15 Saudis who arrived in Turkey the same day Jamal Khashoggi disappeared has died in a ‘suspicious traffic accident’ and the Saudi consul in Istanbul…” Is there ever been a better name for a city? Istanbul. I mean, that city was made for James Bond movies.
“Mashal Saad al-Bostani, 31, a lieutenant in the Saudi Royal Air Forces, was among the 15-member ‘hit team’ that landed in Istanbul in two private jets from Riyadh on Oct. 2 and headed to the Saudi consulate. He died in a car crash in Riyadh, but few details have emerged, the newspaper Yeni Safak reported, adding that his role in the ‘murder’ was not clear.” (interruption) They learned how to do what? (interruption) Arkancide? (interruption) Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh.
You’re talking about people who mysteriously died in Arkansas. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Arkancide. I’d not heard that term.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Jim in Honesdale, Pennsylvania. Welcome. I’m glad you called, sir. Hi.
CALLER: Greetings.
RUSH: Hi.
CALLER: I heard the administration is saying perhaps this stuff in Istanbul were some rogue killers. I listened briefly to that other network this morning and they were pooh-poohing that, saying no, an effective leader knows everything that goes on in his government, and all I thought about were how many times we heard, “Oh, I didn’t know about it ’til I read it in the paper when you did.”
RUSH: Oh, you mean Obama.
CALLER: Yeah.
RUSH: He didn’t know about Benghazi. He didn’t know about Hillary’s private email server.
CALLER: No. Or Lois Lerner.
RUSH: Our Lois Lerner ’til he read about it in the news.
CALLER: Yeah.
RUSH: And yet, yeah, and yet we’re being told that Mohammed bin Salman, there’s not a thing that happens in Saudi Arabia that the crown prince is unaware of. Yeah, that’s a good point. It is a good point. I’m glad you called. I really am.
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