I think most of the world has concluded now that Saudi dissident and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi was killed in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul last week. That is unfortunate, but what they are not telling you is who Jamal Khashoggi actually was.

A website called spectatorus provides some insight into what was behind the murder. The information they provide is not surprising.

The article outlines the events surrounding the murder of Khasshoggi:

A one-time regime insider turned critic of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman — the de facto head of the Saudi kingdom which tolerates no criticism whatsoever — Khashoggi had been living in Washington for the previous year in self-imposed exile amid a crackdown on independent voices in his homeland.

He had become the darling of western commentators on the Middle East. With almost two million Twitter followers, he was the most famous political pundit in the Arab world and a regular guest on the major TV news networks in Britain and the United States. Would the Saudis dare to cause him harm? It turns out that the answer to that question was ‘You betcha.’

Following uneventful visits to the consulate and, earlier, the Saudi embassy in Washington, Khashoggi was lured into a murderous plan so brazen, so barbaric, that it would seem far-fetched as a subplot in a John le Carré novel. He went inside the Istanbul consulate, but failed to emerge. Turkish police and intelligence officials claimed that a team of 15 hitmen carrying Saudi diplomatic passports arrived the same morning on two private jets. Their convoy of limousines arrived at the consulate building shortly before Khashoggi did.

Their not-so-secret mission? To torture, then execute, Khashoggi, and videotape the ghastly act for whoever had given the order for his merciless dispatch. Khashoggi’s body, Turkish officials say, was dismembered and packed into boxes before being whisked away in a black van with darkened windows. The assassins fled the country.

The Saudi government does not handle criticism well. But there is more to the story:

In truth, Khashoggi never had much time for western-style pluralistic democracy. In the 1970s he joined the Muslim Brotherhood, which exists to rid the Islamic world of western influence. He was a political Islamist until the end, recently praising the Muslim Brotherhood in the Washington Post. He championed the ‘moderate’ Islamist opposition in Syria, whose crimes against humanity are a matter of record. Khashoggi frequently sugarcoated his Islamist beliefs with constant references to freedom and democracy. But he never hid that he was in favour of a Muslim Brotherhood arc throughout the Middle East. His recurring plea to bin Salman in his columns was to embrace not western-style democracy, but the rise of political Islam which the Arab Spring had inadvertently given rise to. For Khashoggi, secularism was the enemy.

He had been a journalist in the 1980s and 1990s, but then became more of a player than a spectator. Before working with a succession of Saudi princes, he edited Saudi newspapers. The exclusive remit a Saudi government–appointed newspaper editor has is to ensure nothing remotely resembling honest journalism makes it into the pages. Khashoggi put the money in the bank — making a handsome living was always his top priority. Actions, anyway, speak louder than words.

Khashoggi was at one point a columnist for The Washington Post. Were his ties to the Muslim Brotherhood made public at the time? Did The Washington Post purposely hire a member of the Muslim Brotherhood to write columns for them?

The goal of the Muslim Brotherhood is to establish a worldwide caliphate under Muslim rule. For a number of years they have operated undercover in America working toward the goal of creating a Muslim government here. For further information see the Holy Land Foundation Trial information and exhibits (here).

Mr. Khashoggi probably died a horrendous death which is not right, but keep in mind that he would have celebrated had what happened to him happened to an infidel. Much of the Middle East does not play by the same rules as western culture does.