Khashoggi, Saudi Crown Prince, Thomas Friedman And
Lamb Kebabs
Saeed
Naqvi
I interviewed Jamal
Khashoggi in Jeddah in December, 2001, months after 9/11. What struck me were
his strong opinions on the Palestinian issue. Since US military action in
Afghanistan, following the destruction of the twin towers in New York, was the
big story, that naturally was the focus of my interview (it can be seen on
www.saeednaqvi.com) but Palestine is what riled Khashoggi.
The manner in
which Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman has upturned his country’s policy
on Palestine may have been one of the issues on which Jamal Khashoggi differed with
the Prince so sharply in his public talks that he had to pay for with his life.
He was unhappy with MBS’s opposition to the Arab Spring, his growing
authoritarianism, but Palestine was an angst he carried. If he changed his
views in his last years I would not know.
Khashoggi was
valued by visiting journalists for a simple reason: he was well informed. He
was plugged into the kingdom’s caverns of power. His role as a foreign
correspondent in Afghanistan, South Sudan, various news spots in West Asia and
elsewhere, enhanced his own level of interaction within the Kingdom. His field
reports made him interesting to practitioners of power. This had a multiplier
effect when he met journalists outside – Thomas Friedman of the New York Times,
for instance.
Friedman has,
more or less, admitted that Khashoggi was his “Deep Throat” on the Kingdom,
except that Friedman was unable to protect his “Deep Throat” the way Woodward
and Bernstein protected theirs. How naïve could Friedman have been. He writes:
“Jamal had
come to my office a few days ago for a long talk about Saudi Arabia and MBS.”
Are we to understand that a high profile Saudi informer, visits a higher
profile New York Times columnist in the iconic NYT building and intelligence
agents from the Kingdom, Israel, the US missed the story? MBS had personally
invested in Friedman; his revisionism rankled.
Pressure was
applied on Khashoggi to return to Saudi Arabia. He had left the country in
September 2017 just before MBS arrested Princes, business tycoons and other
influential Saudis and parked them in one of the world’s most luxurious hotels,
Ritz-Carlton, Riyadh. He obviously had an inkling of what was to happen.
Immediately, MBS’s
propaganda machine went into top gear. Early kudos for the reform minded Crown
Prince came from none other than Lyse Doucet of the BBC. She walked on
tip-toes, through the hotel’s chandeliered corridor, speaking in whispers lest
the incarcerated Princes were disturbed. Peering through the grill were CNN’s John
Defterios and Richard Quest. The most powerful in the Western media had turned
up to blow trumpets. It was command performance on an epic scale. There you had
the world’s “free press”, captive to petro dollars.
Khashoggi’s
macabre end is great tragedy and yet the convulsions in which the world media
and nodal points of global power are remains a puzzle. Hundreds of journalists are
killed each year even in functioning democracies. Saudis are not even known for
free speech.
In MBS
framework the pride of place was reserved for Friedman, who was invited to the
Royal Family’s (in his words) “ornate adobe-walled palace in Ouja” where “MBS
spoke in English, while his brother Khalid and several senior ministers shared
different lamb dishes and spiced the conversation” which lasted four hours. The
succulence of the Kebabs inspired Friedman to purple prose on MBS.
Just when the
33 year old Crown Prince was beginning to wallow in all the manufactured
publicity, Friedman began to worry about his credibility. The information base
for revised versions was presumably provided by the likes of Khashoggi.
It turns out that
MBS is not the only Saudi Crown Prince Friedman has savoured lamb dishes with.
Remember the late Saudi king Abdullah? Well, he was Crown Prince in February
2002 when Friedman turned up:
“I am
currently in Saudi Arabia on a visit – part of the Saudi opening to the world
in light of the fact that 15 Saudis were involved in the September 11 attacks.
So I took the opportunity of a dinner with the Crown Prince” – lamb kebabs
again.
Friedman drew
Abdullah’s attention to a column he had written on the Israeli-Palestinian
impasse: in return for a total withdrawal by Israel to the June 4, 1967 lines,
and the establishment of a Palestinian state, the 22 members of the Arab League
should offer Israel full diplomatic relations, normalized trade and security.
“Have you
broken into my desk?” asked Abdullah on hearing the proposal. He was ready with
his own speech spelling out exactly the ideas in Friedman’s column. This became
famous as Crown Prince Abdullah’s peace proposal. As we now know they went
nowhere.
The ideas in
the Abdullah package had been in the works when I met Khashoggi. The reason
they lay in Abdullah’s desk was because there were no takers for the ideas in
Israel. Indeed, Ariel Sharon’s actions against the Palestinians were generating
anger even among the Saudi ruling class. Prince Turki bin Faisal was the most
consistent critic. Khashoggi had been the closest to Turki bin Faisal, having
been his spokesman when the Prince was the Intelligence Chief.
There remains
a divide in Arab ruling circles, including in Saudi Arabia: one section of the
elite is unwilling to accept the primacy of the Shia-Sunni divide as the
principal faultline defining the Arab world. The contrived faultline, this
group believes, is an effort to devalue the Palestinian cause.
Khashoggi’s
mentor, Prince Turki, told a gathering in New York recently: there is a large
Shia minority in the oil bearing eastern part of Saudi Arabia. Likewise there
are Shia minorities in all the Gulf States. “How then can we endorse Shia-Sunni
as the basic conflict?” This was Khashoggi’s line too.
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