According to the Saudi government, a goon squad of 15 Saudi agents accidentally strangled Khashoggi. Then they accidentally beheaded & dismembered him & accidentally lost his body parts. Those are the “facts” the Saudi regime & Pompeo “don’t want to talk about.”

With decades of personal membership in & political association with the Saudi ruling class, Khashoggi is too politically compromised to be immortalized as a champion of democracy or the oppressed. Most who live outside the Middle East don’t really know what he actually stood for in word & in deed. But his gruesome murder isn’t just about him as an individual. It involves the essential Saudi role in the US invasion of Iraq; the US & UK-backed Saudi-coalition carpet bombing of Yemen (now in its fourth year); US & Canadian military arms deals with Saudi Arabia; the Saudi role in thwarting the Arab Spring uprisings, including in Syria; the Saudi alliance with Israel & betrayal of the Palestinian struggle; the financial ties of the Saudi regime with Trump & Kushner; & last but not least, the increasing endangerment & repression of journalists around the world so that news reporting is violently controlled & embedded journalists spouting propaganda come to prominence. That’s how the Syrian Arab Spring uprising, Palestinians, Kashmiris, Rohingyas, & other freedom struggles could become portrayed as ‘Saudi-backed Wahhabi jihadist terrorism’.

May Jamal Khashoggi Rest in Peace. May we use his murder to protest all journalists arrested, tortured, disappeared, incarcerated, murdered–like those at the Great Return March in Gaza, those jailed & assaulted by the occupying army in Kashmir, the Rohingya citizen journalists in Arakan/Rakhine state disappeared by the military during the genocidal onslaught of 2017-2018, Burmese journalists Wa Lone & Kyaw Soe Oo arrested for reporting on the Rohingya genocide, those disappeared & murdered by the Assad regime. May they Rest in Peace & Power.

(Photo is screen shot of Mohammed Bin Salman, the Saudi ruler behind the assassination of Khashoggi, & Trump discussing its Saudi multi-million arms deal with the US.)