The Middle East Eye, a news portal tied to the Global Muslim Brotherhood, acknowledged yesterday that the late Jamal Khashoggi had anonymously written several opinion pieces for the portal. According to the MEE report:
October 22, 2018 Over the past two years, Saudi journalist and intellectual Jamal Khashoggi wrote several opinion pieces for Middle East Eye that were critical of the leadership in Riyadh. Like many critics of Saudi Arabia he feared for his life and so, in keeping with MEE policy, we used the byline “MEE correspondent” on these articles. This is something we have had to do for many other writers and it is something we will sadly be forced to do in the future. … In a memoriam to his work, we have now changed the bylines on the articles he wrote on topics ranging from Saudi’s role in the war in Yemen to the Gulf rift with Qatar. They join several earlier pieces he wrote for us in 2016 that were written in his name, before Saudi authorities banned him from writing and tweeting, an action which eventually pushed Khashoggi to live in self-imposed exile in Washington, DC.
The Middle East Eye (MEE) is a London-based online news outlet covering events in the Middle East and edited by David Hearst the former chief foreign leader writer for the UK-based Guardian newspaper. According to its official website, MEE is:
…an independently funded online news organisation that was founded in February 2014. We aim to be the primary portal of Middle East news and our target audience are all those communities of readers living in and around the region that care deeply for its fate.
However, in June 2014 we reported on a series of articles in the UAE-based The National which traced the Hamas and Brotherhood ties of several key individuals involved with MEE including:
- Adlin Adnan, who registered its website and was previously head of policy development at INTERPAL, a US designated terrorist entity that helps to fund Hamas.
- Jamal Bassasso, at that time the sole director of the company that owns Middle East Eye, a former director of Al Jazeera and of the company that operates the website of the Hamas-controlled Al Quds TV.
- Former MEE journalist Rori Donaghy who, as we reported in 2014 who once worked with a Hamas think-tank in Gaza has his own ties to UK Muslim Brotherhood figure Anas Altikriti.
All these ties have been independently confirmed by the GMBDW.
Jamal Khashoggi’s work for the Middle East Eye is just the latest in a growing body of evidence that he was firmly in the orbit of the Global Muslim Brotherhood. Yesterday we reported that Khashoggi had been working together with US Muslim Brotherhood leader and former Hamas activist Nihad Awad on the Khashoggi’s “Islamic Democracy” promotion project. That post also documented:
- Khashoggi’s close friendship with Azzam Tamimi, at UK-based UK Muslim Brotherhood leader and Hamas activist and with Khaled Saffuri who has his own history of ties to the US Muslim Brotherhood. Those ties interesting include interestingly at one time working for Abdurahman Alamoudi, sentenced in 2004 to a 23-year prison term for illegal dealings with Libya that included his involvement in a complex plot to kill then leader of Saudi Arabia.
- Khashoggi’s keynote address before the Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy (CSID), a US-based group long arguing for the election of Islamists to power in the Middle East and originally established as a cooperative effort among the US Muslim Brotherhood, the US State Department, and Georgetown University academic Dr. John Esposito who served during the 1990’s as a State Department “foreign affairs analyst” and who has at least a dozen past or present affiliations with global Muslim Brotherhood/Hamas organizations.
- Khashoggi’s attendance at Indiana State University from 1977-1982, where we believe it is likely that he interacted in some way with the formative organizations of the US Muslim Brotherhood.
Other posts have presented a long list of other evidence for Jamal Khashoggi’s ties to the Global Muslim Brotherhood including other friendships with key Global Muslim Brotherhood figures, and his disingenuous denials of Muslim Brotherhood “membership” together with the admission that he once formally belonged to the Egyptian organization. A future post(s) will attempt to summarize all of this evidence in one place.
The Washington Post has recently leveled a charge of “smear” at anybody who raises the question of Jamal Khashoggi and extremism, regardless of the quality of the evidence offered:
His columns belie the despicable propaganda, spread by Saudi trolls and some U.S. conservatives, that Mr. Khashoggi was himself an Islamist extremist. Though he joined the Muslim Brotherhood in his youth, believing it was the best vehicle for reform in the Arab world, he later came to the conviction that “democracy and freedom were the Arabs’ best hope of purging the corruption and misrule he despised,” as The Post’s David Ignatius put it.
In an earlier post, we reviewed the Washington Post’s questionable record of late in covering the Muslim Brotherhood and pointed out that that support for “democracy and freedom” is not a refutation of extremism when it comes to the notion of “Islamic Democracy.”
As always, In this climate the GMBDW wishes to reiterate that none of the above should be in anyway be taken or used as support for the death of Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi Embassy in Istanbul. We offer this evidence in the context of our continuing coverage of all relevant developments in the Global Muslim Brotherhood and as a corrective to the generalized failure of the US media to cover the topic in a serious sense. We hope that serious analysts can make use of the above in order to further under the developments in this story and their relationship to the Global Muslim Brotherhood.
According to a BBC report, Saudi Arabia has blamed the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi on a “rogue operation”, giving a new account of an act that sparked a global outcry.The report says that Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir told Fox News “the murder” had been a “tremendous mistake” and denied the powerful crown prince had ordered it. Khashoggi was last seen entering the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.