Jamal Khashoggi.
Mohammed Al-Shaikh/AFP via Getty Images
hide caption
toggle caption
Mohammed Al-Shaikh/AFP via Getty Images
Jamal Khashoggi.
Mohammed Al-Shaikh/AFP via Getty Images
When President Trump welcomed Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to the Oval Office this week, a reporter asked about Jamal Khashoggi. The Saudi journalist was murdered in 2018, according to U.S. intelligence agencies, in an operation approved by the Crown Prince.
“You’re mentioning somebody that was extremely controversial,” the president replied. “A lot of people didn’t like that gentleman that you’re talking about. Whether you like him or didn’t like him, things happen.”
Jamal Khashoggi came from a prominent Saudi family but fled his country in June, 2017, after he’d become increasingly critical of his government. He said he’d been banned from using Twitter.
He began to write columns for The Washington Post with a candid admission:
“It was painful for me several years ago when several friends were arrested,” he wrote. “I said nothing. I didn’t want to lose my job or my freedom. I worried about my family. I have made a different choice now. I have left my home, my family and my job, and I am raising my voice. To do otherwise would betray those who languish in prison. I can speak when so many cannot.”
The following summer, the Crown Prince lifted the traditional ban on women driving. But first his government arrested numerous women’s rights advocates, accusing them of “nefarious contacts with foreign parties.”
“The message is clear to all,” wrote Khashoggi. “Activism of any sort has to be within the government, and no independent voice or counter-opinion will be allowed. Everyone must stick to the party line.”
Just a few months after he wrote those words, Khashoggi entered the Saudi consulate in Istanbul to pick up documents for his marriage. His fiancée waited outside for him, for hours. Khashoggi never got out of that building.
But his voice went on. His last column, published after his death, called for free expression in the Arab world, and warned that the region’s governments “have been given free rein to continue silencing the media.”
Khashoggi knew as he wrote that some powerful people could find his words not just “extremely controversial,” as President Trump put it, but threatening to their power. He wrote them anyway, whether they liked him or not.
