Andrew C. McCarthy
National Review, Oct. 8, 2022
“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.”
‘We 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. … Source
