When President Trump welcomed Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to the Oval Office this week, a reporter asked about Jamal Khashoggi. The Saudi journalist was murdered in 2018, according to U.S. intelligence agencies, in an operation approved by the Crown Prince.
“You’re mentioning somebody that was extremely controversial,” the president replied. “A lot of people didn’t like that gentleman that you’re talking about. Whether you like him or didn’t like him, things happen.”
Khashoggi, from a prominent Saudi family, fled the kingdom in June 2017 after growing increasingly critical of the government. He said he’d been banned from using Twitter and began writing columns for The Washington Post with a candid admission:
“It was painful for me several years ago when several friends were arrested,” he wrote. “I said nothing. I didn’t want to lose my job or my freedom. I worried about my family. I have made a different choice now. I have left my home, my family and my job, and I am raising my voice. To do otherwise would betray those who languish in prison. I can speak when so many cannot.”
The following summer, the Crown Prince lifted the long-standing ban on women driving. But before that change, Saudi authorities arrested many women’s rights activists, accusing them of having “nefarious contacts with foreign parties.”
“The message is clear to all,” Khashoggi wrote. “Activism of any sort has to be within the government, and no independent voice or counter-opinion will be allowed. Everyone must stick to the party line.”
A few months after writing those words, Khashoggi entered the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on Oct. 2 to pick up documents for his marriage. His fiancée waited outside for hours; he never emerged.
Yet his voice persisted. His last column, published after his death, urged free expression across the Arab world and warned that regional governments “have been given free rein to continue silencing the media.”
Khashoggi understood that his writings could be deemed not merely “extremely controversial,” as the president put it, but dangerous to those in power. He wrote them anyway.
