I Ask Myself
Der Journalist Jamal Khashoggi wurde im saudischen Konsulat in Istanbul ermordet. Viele fragen nun, ob Saudi Arabien noch als Verbündeter bezeichnet werden kann.
Amy Argetsinger on Saudi Arabia
There’s a colleague I often bump into in the minikitchen shared by some of us at The Washington Post, a man with a round face and wire-rim glasses. When he first showed up in my office a year ago, it was like seeing a celebrity: Wait, who is that?
He was Jason Rezaian. Formerly our Tehran correspondent, he spent a year and a half in an Iranian prison on false charges of espionage — an episode that galvanized our newsroom. We didn’t know how it would end; it was horrifying to imagine this young man locked away for decades. But after aggressive diplomatic intervention, Jason was released, and now he is here, enjoying a normal, everyday office job like the rest of us.
That’s why I was not immediately alarmed by the news that Jamal Khashoggi — a Saudi dissident who wrote for the Post’s opinion page — had gone missing after visiting his home country’s consulate in Istanbul. Clearly, I assumed, he was being held prisoner, an outrageous act. But I was certain that after the usual uproar and diplomatic maneuvering, he would come home with a powerful story to tell.
This is typical journalistic thinking. We go to unsafe places — war-torn countries, dangerous neighborhoods — and assume we will be safe, that our status as Americans will protect us. But the murderous dictators of the world are increasingly showing us otherwise. Otto Warmbier was an American college student, and he ended up dead after a year in a North Korean prison. Khashoggi wasn’t a US citizen, but he was a journalist and a legal resident of this country with extensive connections in Washington. He was killed minutes after entering the consulate.
This brazen action is all the more galling for the weak response from President Trump, whose first reaction was to dismiss the evidence of Khashoggi’s death and accept the denials of the Saudi government. Even after the Saudis said that Khashoggi had died in the consulate — in an “accidental” killing, they absurdly claimed — Trump was reluctant to punish them, arguing that the Saudis are our allies. Well, if they are our allies, why did they do this? Some of the president’s conservative defenders have tried to smear Khashoggi, falsely calling him an Islamic radical. One commentator dismissed the uproar as media hysteria because Khashoggi was not famous before his death — as if fame were the measure of a man’s worth.
I did not know Khashoggi, who wrote for the Post on a freelance basis, but I know his editor, a young woman who has made many TV news appearances calling for justice. Sometimes I run into her in the women’s restroom, touching up her makeup between appearances. It is clear she has been crying a lot. His loss has cast a shadow on this place.