Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, right, shakes hands with Salah Khashoggi, a son of Jamal Khashoggi, in Riyadh. (AP/AP)
In the weeks after Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi was killed in Istanbul, Saudi Arabia’s government offered ever-changing explanations for what had happened. It took weeks for Riyadh to admit that Khashoggi was dead and that his countrymen had killed him.
Critics and world leaders say Saudi Arabia still isn’t telling the whole truth, but Khashoggi’s sons have taken a much more measured approach. In a Sunday interview with CNN, Salah and Abdullah Khashoggi said they trusted the Saudi government to bring the perpetrators to justice. It was the first time the brothers had spoken to U.S. media since Jamal Khashoggi, a contributing columnist for The Washington Post, was killed Oct. 2.
“The king has stressed that everybody involved will be brought to justice. And I have faith in that. This will happen. Otherwise [the Saudi government] wouldn’t have started an internal investigation,” Salah Khashoggi, 35, said on CNN.
What explains his measured comment?
Experts say he may be trying to protect himself and his family from government retaliation. His father’s prominence as a critic of the Saudi leadership had caused him problems in the past: A friend of Jamal Khashoggi’s told the Associated Press that Salah, who has both U.S. and Saudi citizenship, had been banned from leaving Saudi Arabia before his father’s killing.
Salah Khashoggi’s approach might also reflect a genuine faith in the Saudi government — and skepticism of the way the Turkish government is handling the investigation into the killing. In the days after Jamal Khashoggi disappeared after entering the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul, his first wife, Alaa Nassif, told Saudi media outlets that she didn’t know anything about his new fiancee, a Turkish national, and wondered why she was handling his social media.
Nassif also expressed faith in the Saudi government.
“All the Saudi dissidents have not been harmed; no one reached to them to hurt them, even when they are outside the country. This is a truth since the establishment of the country. They might have said more than what Jamal have said, and they were not harmed. There are many examples,” Nassif said in an interview with Al Arabiya English, an outlet run by the Saudi government.
There may even be divides within the family about who Khashoggi was and how he should be remembered. One indication might be the way the Khashoggi brothers described their father on CNN.
In the interview, Abdullah Khashoggi called his father a “rock-and-roll star as a journalist” and someone who was “pushing the system a bit.” His father, he said, was “brave.”
Salah Khashoggi offered a different picture, that of a “moderate man who has common values with everyone.” He was “a man who loved his country and believed very much in it and its potential,” he said. “Jamal was never a dissident. … He believed in the transformation that [Saudi Arabia] was going through. That’s how he should be remembered.”
Read more:
Saudi campaign to abduct and silence rivals abroad goes back decades
Crown prince Mohammed bin Salman is ‘chief of the tribe’ in a cowed House of Saud
Credit:Washington Post
via USAHint.com
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