On 2 October, Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a contributing columnist for the Washington Post, entered Saudi Arabia's consulate in Istanbul, never to be seen again.
After multiple denials, Saudi Arabia confirmed on 19 October that Khashoggi had been killed inside the building. In a statement on Saudi state television, the country's chief prosecutor said a fight broke out between Khashoggi and "people who met him" in the consulate. The brawl resulted in Khashoggi's death, the prosecutor said.
According to Turkish officials, he was in fact executed and dismembered.
Although formerly a close associate of the Saudi ruling family, Khashoggi had exiled himself last year.
Friedman's trite ideas
Writing before the Saudi admission, New York Times foreign affairs columnist Thomas Friedman quickly took to the pages of his own publication to announce that he was "praying for" Khashoggi, whose abduction or murder by agents of the Saudi government would "be a disaster for MBS [Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman] and a tragedy for Saudi Arabia and all the Arab Gulf countries".
By "disaster," Friedman means a potential decline in Western support for Saudi Arabia and Western investments in the kingdom, although the word might more accurately describe his own career, which has included a far-too-long November 2017 ode to MBS titled "Saudi Arabia's Arab Spring, at Last".
Not that Friedman wasn't a Saudi fan even before the allegedly reform-driven MBS ushered in springtime; previous Friedmanian soundbites come to mind, like: "The problem with Saudi Arabia is not that it has too little democracy. It's that it has too much," and "Of course, we must protect the Saudis".
Now, Friedman tells us, the elimination of Khashoggi would be "an unfathomable violation of norms of human decency, worse not in numbers but in principle than even the Yemen war" - a rather abominable statement given the ongoing bombardment and starvation of that country by a Saudi- and Emirati-led coalition backed by the US and UK.
In August, for example, the coalition dropped a 500-pound bomb on a Yemeni school bus, massacring 40 children. Granted, none of them were employed by the Washington Post.
CNN reported that the bomb in question was manufactured by that pillar of the US military-industrial complex known as Lockheed Martin, an unsurprising revelation in light of the $110 bn US-Saudi defence deal conjured up by Donald Trump last year in Riyadh.
And it's arrangements like these that help ensure that most victims of Saudi Arabia won't be given the time of day, much less various weeks of sustained media coverage. READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.