Al-Etihad, UAE, October 14
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Truth and understanding
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The story of the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi still lacks many details that are crucial in understanding exactly what happened at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. Khashoggi’s story has been distorted and manipulated by the media, especially the Qatari one, in order to launch a malicious campaign against the Saudi Royal Family. The fabrications are multiple and successive. The first is the claim that Khashoggi’s disappearance was inevitably a kidnapping. Not a single source so far, Turkish or other, confirmed this claim. This fact did not prevent political pundits from spreading the message that the Saudi government abducted Khashoggi. Some reporters provided details of the alleged killing. Others added imaginary references of torture. Several papers even went as far as claiming that the incident was recorded on Khashoggi’s smart-phone watch, a fact that was later refuted by security experts. Ironically, when it was revealed that all of this information had no grounding in reality, Al-Jazeera and its sister stations quickly removed all of their tweets pertaining to Khashoggi from the web, due to the fear of being accused of deliberate fabrication. The second false story pertains to a group of 15 Saudi citizens who supposedly arrived in Turkey by private plane just before the incident in order to attack Khashoggi. However, it has now been revealed that these 15 individuals were Saudi tourists who came to Istanbul to travel, just like millions of other tourists do each and every year. This did not stop reporters from accusing Saudi Arabia of sending a team of assassins to Turkey. These blatant lies show that many news channels have very little regard for credibility or professionalism. This is true even of newspapers like the New York Times and large news agencies such as Reuters. All of them jumped to conclusions without waiting for results from the joint Saudi-Turkish investigations committee. Instead of examining the data, monitoring the investigation, and searching for the truth, these outlets invented their own version of what happened to Khashoggi. Will they stop spreading their lies? Probably not. There are those who stand with truth and those who stand with deceit. The UAE will continue to stand shoulder to shoulder with Saudi Arabia in its battle against defamation. –Abdallah bin Bujad al-Oteibi