After Egypt, Libya and Syria, will we stop falling for the same lies?
In 2014, Jason Rezaian, the Washington Post’s Tehran Bureau Chief, was arrested and spent two years in prison. Iran kept him in one of its worst prisons, he slept on a damp concrete floor, was denied medical treatment, experienced hallucinations due to sleep deprivation and was abused by his captors. His wife was told that her legs would be cut off and her husband would be thrown off a cliff if she didn’t confess.
While Jamal Khashoggi has often been misidentified as a Washington Post journalist, all he did for the radical leftist paper owned by Amazon’s CEO is write editorials promoting the Muslim Brotherhood agenda. The Muslim Brotherhood leader and former Bin Laden pal was never a journalist. The closest he came to it was acting as a terrorist propagandist in Afghanistan, glamorizing Osama bin Laden, on behalf of a man listed by the Treasury Department as one of “the world’s foremost terrorist financiers.”
And yet the arrest and abuse of Jason Rezaian didn’t touch off a fraction of the outrage from his own paper as the possible death of Jamal Khashoggi at the hands of the Saudis. The media went through the usual formal protests, but the outrage was muted and there was no talk of sanctions. Instead, Rezaian, along with some other hostages, was illegally ransomed after two years by Obama for $400 million.
The media did not vigorously campaign to break off relations with Iran, as it now is with Saudi Arabia.
It didn’t push too hard out of fear of spoiling Obama’s dirty nuclear deal with Iran’s terrorist regime. And even the arrest may have taken place, according to some sources, because of Rezaian’s closeness with some regime figures.
The New York Times showily announced that it was suspending its pricey Saudi tours over Khashoggi, but it never stopped its Iranian tours, not over Rezaian’s imprisonment, or the killing, torture and rapes of Iranian protesters.
The Washington Post rolled out a special Jamal Khashoggi edition, but there was no special Jason Rezaian edition. There were fewer news stories about Rezaian’s imprisonment after two years than there have been after a week of Khashoggimania. The Post and the rest of the media did far less for Rezaian, one of their own, than they were willing to do for Khashoggi, a shady Islamist activist.
Why?
The answer has everything to do with the media’s political agendas. It is not concerned with human rights. And it’s even less interested in freedom of the press. It has no principles, only allegiances.
The media will always favor Islamist movements over non-Islamists.
The media underreacted to Rezaian’s arrest because it supported Iran’s Islamist government. It overreacted to Khashoggi’s disappearance because he is an Islamist leader. And under Mohammad bin Salman, the Saudis, once the hub of regional Sunni Islamism, turned against the Muslim Brotherhood.
The media is raving against Mohammad bin Salman because he opposes Iran and the Brotherhood. It repeats every piece of propaganda from Turkey and Qatar because they back the Muslim Brotherhood.
If the Saudis turn around and support the Muslim Brotherhood, the media will happily let them kill as many reporters, journalists, hacks and pundits as they like. The media does not care about human rights. It cares only about the triumph of Islamist political movements and it will tell any lie on their behalf.
The scandal of the Khashoggi case is not whatever the Saudis or anyone else did to Osama’s old friend. It’s that the Washington Post provided space for a Muslim Brotherhood leader to push the agenda of America’s enemies, and is colluding in a political campaign to overthrow the Saudi government.
The Washington Post is not “investigating” Khashoggi’s death, it’s spreading smears from the Turkish regime’s pet media while pressuring American lobbyists to drop the Saudis. Khashoggi’s death is just another tool for implementing regime change in Saudi Arabia and replacing its king with another ruler who will return the oil power to its usual stance of supporting Islamic terrorists and fighting Israel.
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
@ adamdalgliesh:
It is not only the press, but the entire «Classe Politique» is faking hypocritical concern for Kashoggi. Let me give another example.
Last week-end, 20.10.2018, Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte proclaimed not one stone must be left unturned in the investigations of the death of Jamal Khashoggi.
Yet curiously, last July 6th, The Netherlands quietly ousted two Iranian diplomats, without explanation. A week later reports surfaced, the two Iranians had ‘liquidated, Mohammad Reza Kolahi Samadi aka Ali Motamed, an opponent of the Ayatollah regime, and Ahmed Mola Nissi, a leader for the Liberation of the Khuzestan Province in Iran. Both leaders residing in Holland.
The Dutch government meanwhile issued no clarifications on expelling the diplomats. Instead the Dutch together with Federica Mogherini, the EU High Representative, are feverishly seeking to construct a coalition to circumvent the US boycott of Iran and preserve the nuclear accord for Iran.
Both Daniel and Hugo are obviously right. But one question: Why is the press pro-Islamist? What is the reason why it supports the enemies of their own countryzz? Can anyone help me understand this?
@ Hugo Schmidt-Fischer:
Hi, Hugo
You are right on, about Meng Hongwei. To his mysterious disappearance, at the hands of the Red Chinese, you might add Kim Jong Un’s assasination of his own brother in Singapore, the Russians bumping off their agents in the UK with nerve gas and Turkey’s imprisonment, torture and execution of thousands of President Erdogan’s suspected opponents. The smell of mendacity is in the air everywhere.
Erdogan let his fawning press leak a story about supposed audio “proof” that this and that happened in the embassy; but he has been unwilling and/ or able to publicly show that proof. Meanwhile, he’s demanding that the Saudis provide him with a body or body parts, so he can make a case against them.. Considering that everyone involved in this caper, on every side, is a psychopathic killer, adds to the circus atmosphere — “circus”, not so much in the sense of Barnum & Bailey and the Ringling Brothers, as in the sense of the Circus Maximus, where Christians lit up the place by being human torches.
Every turn of a phrase in this story is nothing more than a trap for the US and Israel, expressed in the sickening-sweet language of “morality” and “international law”.
The swamp is upset because Kashoggi was trying to frustrate a fruitful Trump Saudi cooperation. And mainstream media dutifully comply.
The hacks are only making a fuss about Kashoggi because a Muslim Brother from a Trump critic news rag was killed.
How about China making the head of Interpol ‘disappear’. That doesn’t even elicit a yawn. He had left his Lyon residence in France on September 29 never to be heard from again.
Interpol President Meng Hongwei is still missing after several weeks, but a ‘letter of resignation’ mysteriously appeared in Paris. Interpol accepted the resignations with no questions asked. Kim Jong Yang of South Korea will be the acting president of the international criminal police organization until a new president is elected at a meeting in Dubai on 18-21 November, Interpol said.
Not that I’m blaming the Chinese. But the surrounding silence is bizarre.