Democratic terrorism: Jamal Khashoggi's vision of political Islam - opinion

As envisioned by the late Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi, supporters of Islamist and Palestinian terrorist organizations have brought to life an ecosystem of human rights organizations, think-tanks, lawyers, academics, and activists advocating for the interests of revolutionary political Islam using the language of Western liberal values.

The Israeli establishment has yet to take notice.

On October 2, 2018, CCTV camera footage captured the Saudi-born journalist, activist, and dissident walking into the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. He never walked out, and his body was reportedly dismembered and discreetly disposed of.

When news emerged of his death, Saudi officials initially claimed he was killed in a brawl at the consulate. Amid mounting outrage in Western media over the killing of a journalist and political dissident, they later revised the official statement, admitting he was murdered by a Saudi “rogue operative.”

Then-president Donald Trump tweeted: “America First! The world is a dangerous place,” and downplayed the event, standing in defense of the Saudi monarchy.

But the reaction of Joe Biden on his 2019 campaign trail was completely different. He promised to “make them [the Saudis], in fact, the pariah that they are.”

Upon his election, Biden proceeded to make Khashoggi a human rights cause célèbre, releasing a CIA report that placed the blame for his murder firmly upon the Saudi monarchy. He repeatedly recalled the affair, including in a 2022 one-on-one meeting in Riyadh with Crown Prince Mohammad Bin Salman (MBS), as a glaring example of the dismal Saudi record on human rights and political freedom.

Throughout the prolonged saga, one issue went almost entirely unaddressed in the international media: What ideals did Khashoggi believe in? Was this dissident in a self-imposed exile in the United States for his profound commitment to democracy and civil liberties? Was he a Saudi Alexei Navalny assassinated by ruthless autocrats merely for his love of freedom?

In short: Yes, Khashoggi advocated for democracy in the Middle East, but of a very specific kind.

IN THE months leading up to his death, he was in the process of launching an organization later known as DAWN – Democracy for the Arab World Now, working in close collaboration with Palestinian-American Nihad Awad, executive director and co-founder of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), and currently a board member of DAWN.

CAIR is a powerful US Muslim advocacy group long known for its sympathies – and the denial of them – for Global Muslim Brotherhood (GMB) organizations in the West and in Muslim countries, including murky links to terrorists and terror funding that garnered public attention during the 2007 Holy Land Foundation trials and the conviction of CAIR affiliate Ghassan Elashi.

Awad was among the participants in the 1993 Philadelphia Meeting: A Roadmap for Future Muslim Brotherhood Actions in the US – a three-day summit in which ways to sabotage the Oslo Accords and enhance fundraising for Hamas in the US were discussed.

Post-Oct. 7, at a speaking event in Chicago, Awad applauded the Hamas massacre as a paragon of Islamic justice and faith, stating that “The people of Gaza only decided to break the siege – the walls of the concentration camp – on October 7... Yes, I was happy to see people breaking the siege... And yes, the people of Gaza have the right to self-defense, have the right to defend themselves, and yes, Israel, as an occupying power, does not have that right to self-defense... Gaza transformed many minds around the world, including people who are not Muslim. What kind of faith do these people have? They are thankful, they are not afraid.”

These remarks drew fierce condemnation from the Biden administration and led to Awad’s disinvitation from all his government-related functions, severing ties that had grown dramatically under the Obama administration.

HAMAS IS the Palestinian chapter of the GMB.

Other chapters include Ennahda in Tunisia, Al-Islah in Yemen, and the UAE, Jamaat-i Islami in Bangladesh, India and Pakistan, and a long list of unofficial affiliates in the West, such as the Popular Conference for Palestinians Abroad (PCPA), declared an unlawful association in Israel in 2022.

Former CAIR executive director and Ennahda affiliate Mongi Dhaouadi is a DAWN board member, as is Tawakkol Karman, the controversial Yemeni activist, former al-Islah member, and 2011 Nobel Peace Prize recipient.

DAWN’s ranks are filled with Islamists and fellow travelers. These also include Jewish anti-Israel activists, such as Adam Shapiro, the organization’s former director of Advocacy for Israel-Palestine (until May 2024), and co-founder of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), who gained notoriety in 2002 by dining on camera with PLO leader Yasser Arafat at his palace in Ramallah while it was besieged during an Israeli military operation.

Surprisingly, DAWN also employs Israeli citizens, including its director of Research for Israel-Palestine, Michael Omer Man, the former editor-in-chief of the radical +972 Magazine and a former staff member of The Jerusalem Post; and advocate Michael Sfard, a non-resident fellow at DAWN. Their names feature on its website alongside men such as Awad, who the Biden administration has shunned as a toxic Hamas-aligned antisemite.

It is no coincidence that Islamists fill the ranks of Khashoggi’s organization. As British author John R. Bradley pointed out in a 2018 article in The Spectator, Khashoggi had joined the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1970s. He did not believe in pluralistic democracy nor in Western values. He was a political Islamist to the bitter end and was assassinated by the Saudis as such.

Democratic Islamists

DAWN’s signature projects target Israel and the Arab regimes commonly known as moderate, meaning those that have declared war on the Muslim Brotherhood as a threat to their regimes and to regional and world peace. Therefore, the organization focuses on human rights violations in the UAE, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt, but not violations by Islamists and their enablers in Qatar, Iraq, or Algeria.

In essence, the democracy that DAWN advocates follows a simple yet devious train of thought: Democracy is the rule “of the people, by the people, for the people,” and since the most authentic representatives of the people in Muslim countries are the Islamists, they must rule Muslim lands according to their illiberal totalitarian doctrines, which are the will of the people.

Liberalism is therefore nothing but foreign domination and anti-democratic Western imperialism.

The traditional monarchs of Saudi Arabia and the Emirates are not moderates but despots; their crackdowns on Islamists like Khashoggi are not security measures but human-rights violations; and the Abraham Accords normalizing their relations with Israel are not a nascent inter-civilizational peace but a budding axis of evil. And, finally, any candid attempt to set the moral record straight on the violence inherent to political Islam is Islamophobia.

With these simple first principles in mind, the derivation of all of DAWN’s projects and policy recommendations featuring on their website is now fully decoded – including defense of the 94 Emiratis accused of supporting the Yemenite GMB chapter Al-Islah, the denunciation of the Abraham Accords and the Egyptian government’s crackdown on Islamists, and the calls for stopping the US government from shipping arms to Israel to battle Hamas. 

Western allies are the problem, and political Islamist factions, the solution. The language is that of human rights, but the policies translate into political Islam – all the way to Oct. 7.

‘Democratizing’ international institutions

A new report by The Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP) titled “The Palestinians, the Red-Green Alliance, and the legal battle against Israel – The ICJ case study” shines a spotlight on the web of organizations involved in the ongoing South African lawsuit against Israel in the International Court of Justice.

The report highlights a pattern noticeable across the Islamist advocacy ecosystem: a dense web of recurrent names and organizations connecting through back doors and revolving doors, in a seemingly deliberate attempt to obscure trails of collaboration, funding – and possibly, the points where the advocates connect to designated terrorists.

The report highlights the Palestinian working logic for operating under the NGO framework as a means for rival Palestinian factions to collaborate on common causes under a presumably noble banner rather than working directly under the banner of any Palestinian political organization and its baggage.

The anti-Israel lawfare front has been stressed by the Palestinian Authority (PA) and Hamas leadership.

In a 2005 speech in Qatar at the re-launch of the Global Anti-Aggression Campaign (GAAC), Khaled Masha’al, then-chairman of the Hamas politburo, spoke of “resistance” as a “holistic and comprehensive concept, whose aim is to subdue the enemy in all domains and prevent it from achieving a breakthrough which will eventually contribute to neutralizing the nation’s efforts and its willpower.” He stressed the importance of “peaceful resistance of all forms” in combination with military resistance.

In his 2023 address to the UN Assembly, PA President Mahmoud Abbas declared – in direct violation of the Oslo Accords – that “For our part, we will persist with our pursuit of accountability and justice at the relevant international bodies against Israel because of the continued Israeli occupation of our land, and the crimes that have been committed and are still being committed against us.”

THE 2020 launch of the Law for Palestine (L4P), registered in London by Ihssan Madbouh (aka Ihsan Adel) as a “youth-led, nonprofit human rights organization” aiming to “create, train, and connect jurists interested in Palestine from all over the world,” was a significant step in coordinating the activist web’s pro-Palestinian legal efforts. These culminated in the South African petition against Israel at the ICJ. The head of the South African legal team, Prof. John Dugard, sits on L4P’s board of trustees.

L4P focuses on conducting research around the Palestinian question and international law, organizing seminars and webinars, creating online databases of relevant UN resolutions, and facilitating cooperation with other legal or human rights bodies across the Middle East and Western countries. These include DAWN and groups which Israel says are affiliated with the Marxist-Leninist terror organization, The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).

Ihsan Adel is a Jordanian national who served between 2011 and 2019 in various roles in the Geneva-based Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor (Euro-Med Monitor), which was declared an unlawful association in Israel in 2015. Euro-Med Monitor’s founder, Ramy Abdu, was listed by the Israeli minister of defense in 2013 as a member of Hamas in Europe.

Iman Zueiter, the coordinator of L4P’s Jurists for Palestine Forum, had also worked at Euro-Med Monitor. She was among the writers of the 2019 Practical Guidebook for Active and Professional Participation in the UN Human Rights Council for NGOs.

The activist web goes on and on, but it is worth noting that many of L4P’s staff are past or current workers in UN agencies.

According to the ISGAP report, in preparing for the ICJ suit L4P reportedly created a database with over 500 statements of senior Israeli officials expressing the “genocidal intent with respect to Israel’s conduct of the war in Gaza.”

DAWN, in cooperation with other groups including L4P, held a roundtable discussion which concluded that Israel’s assault on Gaza “likely amounts to genocide under the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.” A statement was issued urging state parties to the Genocide Convention to submit their own Declarations of Intervention to support South Africa’s submission to the ICJ.

The future of Western democratic institutions

Given the weak international standing of the ICJ, the suit against Israel may eventually amount to much ado about nothing. But the underlying trends detailed above are a grave threat not only to Israel or the Diaspora Jewish communities but also to Western civilization and civilization at large.

The Orwellian “Newspeak” debuting in the political arena is no longer a baffling intellectual exercise in radical humanities faculties. We must ask: What will happen as the Islamist Big Brotherhood gains greater and greater political power as is currently happening in the UK – and as radical pro-Palestinian graduates of Columbia University and SOAS fill not only the ranks of human rights organizations and think tanks but also the seats on the courts and in elected office?

There is no need to imagine the beginning: Lebanese academic and diplomat Nawaf Salam is president of the ICJ, and Pakistani Karim Khan is chief prosecutor at the International Criminal Court (ICC), which prosecutes individuals, not countries, for war crimes.

On November 23, 2023, US President Joe Biden nominated Karachi-born Adeel Mangi to serve as a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. If confirmed despite Republican opposition, Mangi would be the first Muslim American to serve on a federal appeals court and the third Muslim-American federal judge.

The fact that Mangi admits to admiring Islamist-aligned, populist, former Pakistani prime minister Imran Khan was deemed by Democrats an obscure factoid not to stand in the way of diversity and inclusion. What will happen when the new human rights discourse that prefers the human rights of Islamic terrorists to those of their victims becomes normalized in Western courts?

How many upcoming progressive icons subscribe to this ideology? Was it not the logic of Khashoggi and DAWN that guided then-president Barack Obama to support the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi to be president of Egypt over secular dictator Hosni Mubarak and to espouse collaborations with CAIR?

PAKISTANIS ARE the largest Muslim ethnicity in the US and the UK, and many are educated professionals. Although seldom acknowledged, fierce antisemitism is nearly ubiquitous among both religious and non-religious Pakistanis, in addition to a widespread hatred of Hindus. Since the outbreak of Operation Swords of Iron, several unofficial advisory groups to the UK police were revealed, in which Islamist activists advise the police in real time about slogans and chants intomed during demonstrations. Will the London Metropolitan Police become pro-active against the anti-Israel mobs rallying in the streets of London if those rallies deteriorate into riots as violent as or more violent than the 2022 anti-Hindu riots in Leicester?

Political Islamists in the West are now entering a new phase in their activism: of direct and aggressive involvement in politics, pushing the “pro-Gaza” ticket.

What will happen to free societies if the emerging Red-Green alliances will play all the roles of legislators, policemen, reporters, experts, judges, witnesses, wardens, and executioners? Will dissidents decrying the new moral order be convicted on newly minted charges of “Islamophobia” (Newspeak for Blasphemy Laws)? UK Prime Minister Keith Starmer’s new government has already begun a crackdown on online free speech, to be monitored by police, dubbed by X owner Elon Musk as being “The Woke Stasi.”

Even in Israel, the establishment not yet determined to call out the moral hoax.

Former Israeli Supreme Court president Aharon Barak is a longtime supporter of deepening the role of international laws and treaties in Israeli decision-making. It is therefore not surprising that he not only lent legitimacy to the ICJ by choosing to sit as a judge on the court on the petition against Israel but also voted in favor of two of the court’s measures against the Jewish state. 

So unwavering is the trust of the godfather of the Constitutional Revolution in the language of international law and human rights that he could not doubt the court’s moral legitimacy and concede that in Newspeak, the words remain the same, but their meaning has been reversed.

Ehud Rosen is a veteran researcher of the Global Muslim Brotherhood at the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS), who compiled some of the data quoted in this article. He laments that “Israel has failed to grasp the nature of the war waged against its legitimacy to exist as a Jewish state. If at all, Israel and its allies address this only anecdotally. This war is mobilized by the ‘Red-Green Alliance’ between Western far-left activists, political Islamists, and radical Arab nationalists, most of whom are antisemitic to their core, [and] support and promote terrorism.

“The demonstrations we see on campuses and in the streets of Western countries, dragging Israel to institutions like the ICJ and ICC, and other phenomena we see during the Swords of Iron war are the bitter fruit of this alliance, which operates through global ‘grassroots’, ‘civilian’ networks of NGOs, with intermittent support by state players,” he said. 

“Utilizing the pro-Palestinian ticket, political Islamists are now aggressively deepening their involvement in European and American politics, which presents a long-term strategic challenge to the future stability of liberal democracy,” Rosen warned.

“Groups such as Hamas and the PFLP should be banned in the West,” he urged. “The discourse on their agents of influence in the West, the effect of their activism on the sharp rise in antisemitism, [and] the growing physical threat to Jewish communities and social cohesion should also be brought into the spotlight.” 