Jamal Khashoggi, fake journalist, shares TIME’s 2018 Person of the Year

The big Khashoggi lie continues.

TIME magazine has decided to include the late Jamal Khashoggi as one of the “Guardians” — a group of journalists that on Tuesday were named TIME’s 2018 Person of the Year.

As Conservative Review readers probably know by now, Jamal Khashoggi was anything but journalist. He was an Islamist activist, a Saudi regime change conspirator, an ally to terrorists and their organizations, and a former correspondent for several state-controlled media operations, but never a journalist. Real journalists aspire to seek the truth above all else. Khashoggi was an information operative, not a journalist.

The TIME profile of “The Guardians” begins by lavishing praise on “journalist” Khashoggi.

The stout man with the gray goatee and the gentle demeanor dared to disagree with his country’s government. He told the world the truth about its brutality toward those who would speak out. And he was murdered for it.

Khashoggi may have had a “gentle demeanor” on the surface, but he did not hide his radical beliefs and his bloodlust for the destruction of Israel and the toppling of Middle East allies. In 2014, writing in a Muslim Brotherhood-run outlet, Khashoggi hoped that Israel would violently “die by force” at the hands of Hamas, the U.S.-designated terrorist group that runs the Gaza Strip.

Khashoggi certainly did “disagree with his country’s government,” but he disagreed with the Saudi monarchy because it decided to declare an end to long-standing peaceful relations with political Islamists both inside and outside the country. Last year, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman vowed to return to a “moderate Islam” and announced that radical preachers and activists had no role in Riyadh’s future. This was devastating news to Jamal Khashoggi, who until his last days sought to empower these actors not only in Saudi Arabia, but also in Libya, Syria, Afghanistan, Gaza, Egypt, and elsewhere.

Describing his death using unproven, poorly sourced information, the TIME piece continues:

Every detail of Jamal Khashoggi’s killing made it a sensation: the time stamp on the surveillance video that captured the Saudi journalist entering his country’s Istanbul consulate on Oct. 2; the taxiway images of the private jets bearing his assassins; the bone saw; the reports of his final words, “I can’t breathe,” recorded on audio as the life was choked from him.

CNN reported over the weekend that “I can’t breathe” were Khashoggi’s last words. However, there’s no firm evidence that this is actually the case. CNN’s Nic Robertson, who reported the quote, did not appear to actually hear the supposed audio tape of his killing firsthand. CNN relied on “a source with knowledge” to read a transcript of the supposed tape to the CNN correspondent. It still remains unclear how exactly the Turkish intelligence services got an audio tape of what was happening inside the Saudi diplomatic building during the Khashoggi incident. We do know, however, that Turkey, a rival of Riyadh’s, has pushed out countless pieces of false information to keep the Khashoggi killing in the news as much as possible.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has admitted to running the Khashoggi information operation through Ankara’s intelligence services. Yes, the same Turkey that is the world’s foremost jailer of journalists is doing its best to feed a constant stream of information to click-hungry journalists and convince them that the unsourced data obtained about Khashoggi’s death is accurate.

It’s no coincidence that President Donald Trump is mentioned sixteen times in TIME’s “Guardians” piece. Turkey has geopolitical goals for the Khashoggi information operation that its intelligence services is running. Mostly, Turkey seeks to chip away at the legitimacy of the Saudi monarchy, so that Ankara can fill that vacuum with its own power and influence. 

To the U.S. media, however, Khashoggi has to be a journalist, because the real Khashoggi — the caliphate-seeking regressive Islamist and anti-Semite with genocidal aspirations — could not be used as an instrument to attack the president. In this post-truth era, the legacy media has decided that “journalists” like Khashoggi no longer need to seek the truth. They just have to be useful tools to attack and sabotage the legitimacy of one’s political opponents.

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