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Post by Tim on Oct 24, 2018 9:50:34 GMT
At the risk of this sounding somewhat heartless I'm a little confused as to why the killing of Jamal Khashoggi has sparked the huge response it has. Clearly its a terrible thing but its an event that has obviously been repeated many, many times over the years, so why this guy in particular.
In addition some of the sheer hypocrisy coming out of, in particular, Turkey and the US is astounding. Turkey have had a massive clampdown on journalists (among many other groups) in the last few years and I think its widely accepted that the US - along with probably most other countries in the world - have done their fair share of making people disappear.
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Post by scouse on Oct 24, 2018 10:13:08 GMT
I must admit I find journalists reaction to this quite amusing. You'd think this guy was Mother Theresa rather than a Muslim Brotherhood shitposter, just because he'd written for the Washington Post.
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Post by Bob Sacamano v2.0 on Oct 24, 2018 10:23:16 GMT
Unfortunately, we are tied to the House of Saud as the bolster to Iran in the region. We need to sell them weapons so they don't buy them from the Russians and they need to keep buying our weapons as their whole defence setup is tied around NATO weapons systems. We need their investment petrodollars and they need our investment to ensure that their grandchildren aren't riding the desert on camels like their grandads were. It's a Faustian Pact that will survive this event, no matter how horrible.
Mind you, how inept must the Saudis be? 15 of them to off a single journalist. Lazy twats.
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Post by scouse on Oct 24, 2018 10:34:14 GMT
Rumours on the old interweb say he wasn't just a journalist. Allegedly he used to work for Saudi intelligence and thought that, now working as a journalist, he was immune from their actions.
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Post by racingteatray on Oct 24, 2018 12:19:14 GMT
I must admit I find journalists reaction to this quite amusing. You'd think this guy was Mother Theresa rather than a Muslim Brotherhood shitposter, just because he'd written for the Washington Post. What about the Skripals or the polonium chap whose name momentarily escapes me?
A vast fuss is being made on this occasion because it would seem the Turks had the Saudi consulate bugged and therefore we know what happened to Khashoggi, and moreover the Turks are drip-feeding the gory details (and they are pretty horrid) to the media precisely in order to get political leverage over MBS et al.
No honour among thieves after all.
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Post by johnc on Oct 24, 2018 12:20:26 GMT
Surely the wider picture is that he voiced dissent against the Saudi regime and they just got rid of him. If that becomes the accepted norm, where does it stop? If you complain to the Council that your bin wasn't emptied, do you become the rubbish to be disposed of the next week. It doesn't take much of a shift in thought process to go from a democratic country with independent courts to one like Nazi Germany, Stalin's USSR or cultural revolution China.
The cornerstone of a democratic state is that it can be criticised without fear of retribution. Journalist or not, his life should have been respected.
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Post by racingteatray on Oct 24, 2018 12:22:23 GMT
The cornerstone of a democratic state is that it can be criticised without fear of retribution. That too.
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Post by Tim on Oct 24, 2018 12:31:52 GMT
The cornerstone of a democratic state is that it can be criticised without fear of retribution. That too.
It's increasingly no longer the case in that great bastion of Western freedom, the US, either and as we know what happens there often sets a trend for us here.
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Post by scouse on Oct 24, 2018 12:53:20 GMT
It's increasingly no longer the case in that great bastion of Western freedom, the US, either and as we know what happens there often sets a trend for us here.
Oh fuck off! In case you haven't noticed, the vast majority of the US press does nothing but criticise the President - going as far to blatantly lie or deliberately misrepresent what he or his administration has said or done. The Litvenyenko (sp??) and Skripals where slightly different in that a nation state committed murder in another country using means that were, quite frankly, massively dangerous to innocent people. At least the Saudis had the decency to do it in their embassy..... What I meant was the tone of the journalists and the almost shock that it could happen to one of them. Despite lots of them being so biased, they like to pretend that they are the defenders of truth in the world. Lots of noise about a journalist being offed by a nation state, but no so much about the head of fucking Interpol being held by the Chinese.
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Post by johnc on Oct 24, 2018 12:54:44 GMT
It's increasingly no longer the case in that great bastion of Western freedom, the US, either and as we know what happens there often sets a trend for us here.
.............and history tells us that once power becomes corrupted and the masses are supressed that there will be an uprising at some point. Hopefully I'll be pushing up the daisies by that point!
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Post by Tim on Oct 24, 2018 13:06:11 GMT
Everybody in the US is lying. Not just the people who are opposed to Trump.
Seems to me as if a lot of the criticism of him is well deserved. He's clearly not averse to twisting the facts to suit himself and then when he gets found out he makes a grudging half-hearted backtrack. Then claims 'well it might happen'.
We won't have to worry about it when him & Putin have a cockfight and trigger a nuclear war anyway.
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Post by Deleted on Oct 24, 2018 14:06:59 GMT
I think people judge Saudi Arabia and its rulers by the same measure as western governments, they are moving forward but has a much harsher view of loyalty and the reinforcement of it as an absolute. They take people out and behead them for much less than Kashoggi did and nothing any other nation state does or say's will change that. The idiot from the green partly today was waffling on about us having to stop arms sales but did not have a good answer when asked if that would mean more arms sales for the French or others.
More heads are likely roll, pun intended, for allowing the Turks to bug their embassy and the Saudi's have a very long memory when it comes to slights and insults. In the end the Turks may well regret this public humiliation of another nation when the Turks themselves are hardly whiter than white, or is that racist?
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Post by Big Blue on Oct 25, 2018 10:59:09 GMT
Surely the wider picture is that he voiced dissent against the Saudi regime and they just got rid of him. If that becomes the accepted norm, where does it stop? If you complain to the Council that your bin wasn't emptied, do you become the rubbish to be disposed of the next week. It doesn't take much of a shift in thought process to go from a democratic country with independent courts to one like Nazi Germany, Stalin's USSR or cultural revolution China.
The cornerstone of a democratic state is that it can be criticised without fear of retribution. Journalist or not, his life should have been respected. I was unaware that Saudi Arabia is considered to be a democratic state, so the outcome of death was fairly unsurprising to be frankly honest.
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Post by johnc on Oct 25, 2018 11:02:44 GMT
I was unaware that Saudi Arabia is considered to be a democratic state I agree but they are supposed to be trying hard to modernise and to some extent liberalise their society. Obviously that's just a veneer to disguise what's really below the surface.
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Post by michael on Oct 25, 2018 11:08:05 GMT
I was talking to my sister-in-law a few weeks ago about Saudi, she's just moved back while my brother finishes his contract out there. She made the interesting point that although women may technically be allowed to drive out there she wouldn't fancy her chances as a driver involved in a crash because, regardless of the circumstances, if a woman was involved it would be her fault. Saudi will have to cram a hundred years of modernisation into a a few years and it isn't going to happen.
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Post by Deleted on Oct 25, 2018 11:13:23 GMT
Much like being a foreigner then. The argument used when I was out there was "If you were not here, the accident would not have happened so it is your fault".
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Post by Bob Sacamano v2.0 on Oct 25, 2018 11:26:45 GMT
Say what you like about Saudi women drivers - none of them has ever had a crash.
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Post by PG on Oct 27, 2018 12:46:59 GMT
...Saudi will have to cram a hundred years of modernisation into a a few years and it isn't going to happen... That is the issue across the Middle East and whole other areas of the world too. We forget that it took us in the UK 1900 years from the Roman invasion and 900 years from the Norman conquest to establish one man, one woman one vote democracy. And in between we had a pretty continual series of series of wars - both familial, civil and external - to get where we are. Yet somehow we expect other countries that are at year zero to get to our level in a few years.
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