A story broke last week that a Saudi journalist named Jamal Khashoggi, who was working for The Washington Post, had disappeared and was presumed dead. The official story is that Khashoggi was last seen entering the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, on the afternoon of Oct. 2.
So, for a week, while this anti-Saudi hysteria built, and as some in the U.S. news media played up how Trump’s “Fake News” media rhetoric had supposedly encouraged violence against journalists, reporters were deliberately hiding who one of their main sources was—the individual feeding them the inside information on the alleged Saudi involvement in Khashoggi’s disappearance and supposed murder.
Not until Oct. 12 did two of the journalists involved in the coordinated roll-out of the Khashoggi narrative suddenly reveal the identity of their confidential source, who supposedly was privy to the inner workings of the Saudi plot to grab and then eliminate the troublesome journalist.
Alamoudi was the founder of the American Muslim Council, where Saffuri worked as the organization’s Director of Government Affairs for two years, from 1995 to 1997, when Alamoudi helped Saffuri launch The Islamic Free Market Institute, giving Saffuri $35,000 in start-up funds.
Saffuri’s Islamic Free Market Institute has been investigated several times for financial ties to Hamas, as well as other terrorist groups. Given his background, he’s hardly some neutral source that people should be taking at face value when he’s making the claims to Michael Isikoff and Daniel Klaidman.
Let this sink in: Isikoff and Klaidman’s source for their stories on bin Salman’s state of mind and his various nefarious plots against journalists is... a guy who’s been investigated for terrorism ties, and, on top of that, has connections to an al-Qaeda-affiliated terrorism financier who is currently in federal prison for participating in a plot to kill a Saudi crown prince.
Isikoff and other reporters pushing this story likely knew if they told everybody Saffuri was a big source of this “inside info” detailing this supposed Saudi plot against Khashoggi, people would have instantly seen his rumored terrorist ties to both Hamas and al-Qaeda and the very real direct tie he has to an imprisoned terrorist plotter against the Saudi kingdom.
So, to sum up how we got here: Political partisans disguised as “reporters” found an al-Qaeda- and Hamas-connected person and used him as a source to float rumors that bin Salman had Khashoggi killed because Trump’s rhetoric made bin Salman think he'd get away with it.
This is looking increasingly like an attempt at smearing the Saudis, bin Salman, and Trump, likely in the hope of getting the arms deal between the United States and Saudi Arabia called off. If so, it is going to backfire massively on the people who rushed to judgment.
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