Why Trump is right to stand by Saudi Arabia
The media's hypocrisy over Jamal Khashoggi stinks. The president is wise to ignore it. In its sanctimonious coverage of Khashoggi's killing, the Western media that invited him with such frequency to shamelessly peddle those and many other lies is now taking all leave of its own critical senses. American newspaper columnists and TV pundits especially have casually abandoned all pretense at objectivity and balance. They are determined to portray Khashoggi's murder as the silencing of a saintly truth-teller.
Most egregious is how media outlets have consistently relied on single, anonymous sources, a practice abandoned for a while after the appalling mistakes made in the build up to the Iraq war. This is despite the fact that most of the uncorroborated (and thus, as the White House correctly implies in its report, unproven) information comes exclusively from a Muslim-Brotherhood dominated Turkish government, which adopted fellow traveler Khashoggi after he gave his Saudi paymasters the finger.
That Turkey is Saudi Arabia's main rival for influence in the Sunni Muslim world, and has an obvious vested interest in undermining bin Salman, should be cause for continuous skepticism. Alas, the Washington Post instead published an op-ed in defense of supposedly martyred journalist Khashoggi by none other than Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. This is a tyrant who has jailed more journalists than any other world leader. He is also in the awkward position of having rendered political dissidents from abroad, some of whom haven't been heard from since.