Opinion

Saudi Hush Money to Khashoggi Family

Kevin Barrett

Sha'ban 25, 14402019-05-01

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According to the famous hadith of Jibril (a), one of the signs of the approaching end of the world will be the spectacle of barefoot naked destitute Bedouin shepherds vying with each other in the erection of tall buildings. Like the slave girl giving birth to her mistress and the Sun rising in the west, the notion of backward Bedouins competing in the building of skyscrapers suggests something profoundly unnatural — a world out of kilter.

Today, in a situation that would have been unimaginable 1,400 years ago, the most backward Bedouins of the Arabian Peninsula are in fact vying with each other in building tall buildings. The tallest so far is the Burj Khalifa in Dubai at 828 m, with the Makkah Royal Clock Tower Hotel a distant second at 601 m (since the tallest building in a city or country always represents that country’s real religion, it seems that the Saudi and UAE rulers are shamelessly advertising the fact that they have forsaken God in favor of Mammon).

Ironically, the most retrograde, uncouth, uncivilized, uncultured barbarians in the region are the mega-billionaires in charge of these projects; while the genuinely cultivated and spiritual people are likely to be impoverished, marginalized, or persecuted. One might be forgiven for thinking that the end of the world is nigh.

Back when uncouth Bedouins were poorer, they were more civilized. They followed the Islamic practice of allowing the survivors of murder victims to choose between qisas (equal retaliation) or diyah (financial compensation). Under this system, the survivors have the absolute right to demand and carry out the execution of the murderer (qisas). They also have the right to freely choose to forgo that option and accept diyah instead. Normally they would make the free choice to abjure retaliation and accept diyah only if they felt that the murderer had genuinely made tawbah (repentance). The survivors’ acceptance of diyah rather than qisas would be an act of mercy, in accordance with Allah’s orders to be merciful, and in worshipful submission to Allah (swt) to whom we pray every day as al-Rahmanal-Rahim (the Mercy-Giving, the All-Compassionate).

Today, as savage Bedouins build monstrous skyscrapers and the world approaches its end, a hideously perverted parody of Islamic justice is transpiring in Riyadh, the capital of what the British Foreign Office misnamed “Saudi” Arabia. Under the spotlight of global media, a vicious mass murderer, the Evil Clown Prince Bin Salman (BS), is writhing and squirming like the parasitic worm that he is as he tries to escape justice for the killing of Jamal Khashoggi. Bin Salman — Khashoggi’s real killer (and the genocidal butcher of Yemen) — is presiding over a kangaroo court tasked with convicting and then pardoning a few of the lower-level flunkies and hired thugs who carried out Bin Salman’s orders to strangle Khashoggi and dismember him with a bone saw.

The Khashoggi kangaroo court proceedings offer a farcical façade of Islamic justice. The idea that a murder can be properly prosecuted when the real murderer is in charge of the court proceedings, indeed in charge of the entire country, makes a mockery of justice. And the notion that the Khashoggi family has a real choice between qisas and diyah is a sick joke.

The tawdry spectacle of hush money negotiations between BS and the Khashoggis is being presented to the world as somehow Islamic. It is not. It represents corruption in its most disgusting and decadent form.

Is this obscene insult to the whole concept of Islamic justice some kind of April fool’s joke? That was my first thought when I read the April 1st story in the Washington Post that begins,

The children of slain Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi have received million-dollar houses in the Kingdom and monthly five-figure payments as compensation for the killing of their father, according to current and former Saudi officials as well as people close to the family. Khashoggi’s two sons and two daughters may also receive much larger payouts — possibly tens of millions of dollars apiece — as part of “blood money” negotiations that are expected to ensue when the trials of Khashoggi’s accused killers are completed in the coming months, according to the officials and others who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive talks.

The “negotiations,” the Post article ex-plains, are not about justice; they are about “ensuring that [Khashoggi’s family members] continue to show restraint in their public statements about the killing of their father.” In other words, they are hush money. Their purpose is not justice, but the avoidance of justice, by bribing the survivors to remain silent.

Some members of the Khashoggi family seem less interested in justice than in extracting the maximum possible bribe from the Evil Clown Prince. The Post story quotes the murder victim’s son ‘Abdullah Khashoggi, “‘I want the da Vinci,’ he said, referring to a painting by the Renaissance master that the crown princepaid $450 million for in 2017.” While he’s at it, ‘Abdullah Khashoggi might as well sell another sibling or two to the Clown Prince’s bone saw butchers in return for a Van Gogh and a couple of Rembrandts. Or he could commission a decadent postmodern sculptor to carve a series of stone statues, each a faithful representation of a piece of Jamal Khashoggi’s dismembered body, and insist that Bin Salman pay the commission. Maybe they could throw in a stone statue of a bone saw for good measure, and put the whole thing on display in the Museum of Modern Art. It is all about wheeling and dealing, right?

In all seriousness, selling one’s silence about a brother’s murder for the price of a Da Vinci is another sign of the times. Tellingly, the Da Vinci objet d’art is a sacred icon of the false religion of secular-progressivist materialist humanism that replaces the conformity to God with the narcissistic worship of man himself. And the more man worships man, the worse man gets. How ironic that two nominal Muslims are quarreling about “qisas” in the form of a Da Vinci painting, an idol worshipped by Western humanists. And what makes the irony even more exquisite, and more nauseating, is that the people doing the buying and selling are leaders of the same takfiri-Wahhabi tribe that not only advocates obliterating non-Islamic cultural heritage by blowing up such monuments as the Afghan Buddha statues and the archeological treasures of Petra, but also systematically bulldozes priceless jewels of Islamic history — and even collaborates with Zionists planning to blow up al-Masjid al-Aqsa and rebuild Dajjal’s blood sacrifice temple in its place.

There is a hadith in al-Tirmidhi suggesting that in the end times, the leader of a people will be the worst among them. That certainly seems to describe the situation today — especially in the birthplace of Islam, where custodianship of the Haramayn has fallen into extravagantly evil hands. No amount of phony diyah will ever be able to wash away the oceans of blood dripping from the homicidal hands of bone saw butcher Bin Salman.

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