{"id":293668,"date":"2025-11-19T00:02:08","date_gmt":"2025-11-19T00:02:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/293668\/"},"modified":"2025-11-19T00:02:08","modified_gmt":"2025-11-19T00:02:08","slug":"the-saudification-of-america-is-under-way-karen-attiah","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/293668\/","title":{"rendered":"The Saudification of America is under way | Karen Attiah"},"content":{"rendered":"

The first time I ever used the words \u201calhumdulilah\u201d, which translates to praise be to God in Arabic, was the night of 16 November 2018. A Friday night news alert came through on my phone: \u201cCIA concludes Saudi crown prince ordered Jamal Khashoggi\u2019s assassination.\u201d I collapsed into my couch, repeating the words.<\/p>\n

I am not Muslim. But Jamal, in life and death, has taught me a lot about faith and looking for hope in all the wrong places. As a writer with a history of criticizing America\u2019s meddling in weaker countries, in normal circumstances, I should have been loath to celebrate the CIA.<\/p>\n

But given that, a month before, a group of Saudi hitmen not only kidnapped my friend and writer from a consulate in Istanbul but allegedly cut his body into pieces, I might have been forgiven for looking for any hope that the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman<\/a>, would face consequences \u2013 cutting off leaders who think nothing of cutting up human beings should be a basic tenet of any healthy country\u2019s foreign policy. (Prince Mohammed has denied any involvement or responsibility for Khashoggi\u2019s killing.)<\/p>\n

This week, seven years almost to the day since the CIA announced the crown prince\u2019s responsibility in the murder, Mohammed bin Salman returns to Washington, invited for an offical visit by America\u2019s Temu pharaoh, Donald Trump. The reconciliation between Trump and MBS was perhaps inevitable, given that even before the first Trump presidency, Trump spoke often of his love for the Saudis and their wealth. (\u201cI get along great with all of them; they buy apartments from me. They spend $40m, $50m,\u201d he quipped in 2015. \u201cAm I supposed to dislike them? I like them very much!\u201d)<\/p>\n

In 2016 Saudi Arabia<\/a> banned Jamal Khashoggi, a longtime editor, journalist and royal adviser from writing. His crime? He published an op-ed warning about the rise of Trump in 2016. He remained silent for a year, until Prince Mohammed unleashed a crackdown on businessmen, writers, and mild critics \u2013 imprisoning many of them. Jamal fled to the US in self-exile.<\/p>\n

In September 2017, while I was the editor of the Washington Post\u2019s global opinion section, I asked Jamal to write for us. He published \u201cSaudi Arabia was not always this repressive, but now it\u2019s unbearable\u201d, breaking his year-long silence. I hired him to continue to write for the Washington Post.<\/p>\n

A year later, Saudi Arabia had Jamal killed. In the aftermath of Jamal\u2019s murder, Trump administration<\/a> officials worked overtime to launder Saudi Arabia\u2019s blood-stained image. Jared Kushner was advising Prince Mohammed on how to \u201cweather the storm\u201d. Last year, Kushner\u2019s equity firm received $2bn from Saudi Arabia\u2019s private equity firm.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s much to say about the Saudification of western cultural spaces through the sheer sums of money the kingdom is so obviously throwing into what it sees as soft power. Writers and observers have commented for years about Saudi Arabia\u2019s \u201csportswashing\u201d, like the kingdom\u2019s sponsorship of LIV golf tournament and the purchase of the Newcastle United soccer team.<\/p>\n

The kingdom invested heavily in tourism campaigns for Saudi Arabia, paying online influencers hefty sums to post pictures of their heavily curated trips to the country.<\/p>\n

Jamal warned about these hollow visions of Saudi Arabia. He warned that behind the glitz and glamour of the Saudi royal family, and promises of futuristic cities, there was poverty and discontent. He often told me how proud he was to have his words in the Washington Post, and he hoped the Post could be a model for voices like his to be heard. I still admire Jamal\u2019s relentless optimism about media and America.<\/p>\n

In death, Jamal\u2019s faith would prove to be misplaced. The Washington Post\u2019s erasure of Jamal\u2019s memory and the freedom he stood for has been brewing in the background.<\/p>\n

The global opinion section that Jamal wrote for was dismantled. The Jamal Khashoggi fellowship \u2013 which was offered to writers speaking out against authoritarian regimes \u2013 was left to fade away. Jamal used to tell me about his days as an editor chairing newspaper editorial meetings in Saudi Arabia, where editors were given marching orders from the top about the \u201cred lines\u201d, or what the royal regime wanted and did not want published.<\/p>\n

Today, the Washington Post opinion section is going through an increasing Saudification \u2013 imposing harsh red lines on who and what can publish. Under owner Jeff Bezos\u2019s edict to write only about \u201cfree markets\u201d and \u201cpersonal liberties\u201d, the Washington Post opinion section, the first major US paper to publicly impose such heavy censorship, purged nearly all its full-time voices that wrote against censorship, political violence and repression at home and abroad, myself included.<\/p>\n

To date, the Washington Post editorial board has not mentioned Jamal\u2019s name ahead of Prince Mohammed\u2019s visit. The Saudification of the mainstream news media means that other US media outlets and institutions are bending the knee to Trump, agreeing to multimillion-dollar shakedowns in exchange for eliminating diversity. He has sued outlets he claims were not fair to him. He has begun attempting to prosecute his political rivals. Pro-Saudi voices would argue that moralizing about chopped-up journalists does us no good, shouldn\u2019t get in the way of the US-Saudi partnership, that there is too much money at stake, and that in order for the west\u2019s colonial management of the Middle East, we need our friends in Saudi Arabia to normalize relations with Israel. They are effectively asking Americans to believe that America and Saudi Arabia will make the world a better place, together.<\/p>\n

This narrative only helps the billionaires and the deal brokers. The average American gains next to nothing from these elite arrangements. Rather, Jamal\u2019s plight and murder was a warning sign for America, of the impending loss of freedom and censorship that would sweep the country.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The first time I ever used the words \u201calhumdulilah\u201d, which translates to praise be to God in Arabic,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":293669,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[43,44,41,39,42,40],"class_list":{"0":"post-293668","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/293668","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=293668"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/293668\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/293669"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=293668"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=293668"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=293668"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}