On Order From Chaos, Tamara Cofman Wittes pushes back against the attempt to smear the reputation of Jamal Khashoggi, a man who was apparently passionate and followed those passions – but learned from those experience as well. I particularly liked this remark:
Yes, Jamal Khashoggi had many friends among the Muslim Brotherhood and, as his colleague David Ignatius reported days after his disappearance, had joined the movement himself as a young man before apparently shifting away from it later in his career. No one who knew Jamal at all is surprised by these facts, no matter with what lurid framing they are now “revealed.” Whatever sympathies and associations he may have had, they do not change the apparent fact that Jamal Khashoggi was kidnapped, murdered, and dismembered to silence his freedom of expression. Those on the right who have spent decades fighting for free speech on campus will leap to tell you, correctly, that freedom of speech demands respect regardless of the political valance of the views espoused—and that protecting the expression of unpopular views that challenge current political correctness is the acid test for the security of this right overall. So even if you believe that Jamal Khashoggi was a full-bore Brotherhood member with an agenda of Islamization for the Arab world, you should still condem his apparent assassination for the crime of speaking his mind.
It’s important, always important, to use the ideals and arguments of your opponents against them. Not necessarily those being employed against you or someone or something you wish to defend, but those which aspire to the highest moral level.
If you can’t find a way to do that, it’s quite possible their argument is correct; typically, fallacious arguments will involve either bad principles, or contradictions indicating the present argument is really lost to them, if you but persevere in pushing back the fog of fear and confusion such arguments usually employ. The fog is quite common and has been used by both right-wingers and left-wingers over the decades when they face the problem of actually engaging in a clash of ideas, rather than a clash of arms.
In his youth, Mr. Khashoggi may have had sympathies for certain extremist groups. Quite often, extremists group have legitimate grievances (something the “progressive left” needs to learn); the extremism comes in their response, both ideologically and tactically.
But Mr. Khashoggi was now a respected journalist who happened to be criticizing a theocracy whose links to the United States are merely those of utility, not of sentiment or shared political system. Worse yet, he was bringing to light what appears to be subterfuge by Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman (MBS), in which highly autocratic political maneuvers have been cloaked in apparent liberalizations of Saudi society. If reports are to be believed, MBS is attempting sleight of hand in the consolidation of power in preparation for the death of his father, the King.
Here’s the real threat for the Republicans attempting their smear: they may succeed. And then they’ll find themselves allied with a Muslim theocrat who is a hot-head and willing to wage war to enhance his reputation. This is not a desirable alliance for the right-wing. It’ll continue to damage their brand (to use their commercial jargon), disillusioning young voters even more. But … his bags of gold blind them to reality.
This smear campaign is extraordinarily short-sighted, even for the right.
