The PointBy Daniel Greenfield

Media martyr Jamal Khashoggi is being described as a political dissident.

Sure. So were Hitler, Khomeini and Osama bin Laden.

By no coincidence, Jamal Khashoggi was an old friend of Osama bin Laden.

In early 1990 Bin Laden returned to Saudi Arabia and gave a lecture in which he predicted that Saddam Hussein would invade Kuwait. Jamal Khashoggi, who had travelled extensively with Bin Laden in Afghanistan, attended the talk and afterwards asked his old friend how he could be so certain of the future. “He recited a verse from the Koran,” recalls Jamal. “The verse means the one who practises jihad for God, for Allah, God will show them the right path. I wasn’t comfortable about it. He had given himself the position of ‘I am seeing things because God is directing me towards it’. That was the first time I felt that Osama began to have an inflated ego.” Jamal lost touch with Bin Laden in the mid-1990s and Khaled in the early 1990s as both completely rejected his ideology. Although it has been many years since either of them saw Bin Laden, both admitted feeling sad at the death of their old friend in a raid by US forces in Pakistan earlier this month.

The media spins this as Jamal being a moderate. Only insofar as tactics go.

He was a Muslim Brotherhood member and continued backing the Jihadist network.

Under Muhammad bin Salman, the hitherto ambiguous Saudis now side with the Emiratis. He speaks of a “triangle of evil” encompassing Iran, IS and the Muslim Brotherhood. As such he seems to be drawing a dividing line between Arab states (and tame salafists) on one side, and all forms of Islamism on the other—be they non-violent Brothers or jihadists. “It is a crazy analysis about the threat of a pan-Islamic empire,” says Jamal Khashoggi, a former editor of al-Watan, a Saudi-owned newspaper, who now works as a columnist in exile in America. “He treats IS and the Brotherhood as the same thing—the only difference being that IS tried to create the caliphate immediately by violence while the Brotherhood wants to create the caliphate slowly, through democracy.” Although the Brotherhood never seemed very strong in the Gulf, its election victory in Egypt in 2012 unnerved Gulf rulers. Saudi Arabia and the UAE enthusiastically supported the coup that overthrew President Muhammad Morsi of the Brotherhood, not least because he was moving closer to Iran. For Mr Khashoggi, the campaign against the Brothers is an attempt to extinguish the last embers of the Arab spring: “Democracy and political Islam go together.”

That’s that “democratic” Caliphate.

And here’s Khashoggi vouching for an alleged terror funder for Al Qaeda.

Yet Mr. Khalifa is unsure how long he will enjoy these freedoms. He is a wanted man, believed by analysts and intelligence agencies, including the FBI and CIA, to have links to the heart of Al Qaeda. Using charities in the Philippines as a cover, Khalifa is alleged to have funded the radical Islamic group Abu Sayyaf. He is also said to have spearheaded plots including a foiled 1995 plan to hijack planes and crash them into the Pentagon and CIA headquarters - widely seen as a blueprint for the Sept. 11 attacks. The victims of Sept. 11 have named Khalifa in their multibillion dollar lawsuit for damages. Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi columnist whose views are aired in the Western media, is a Khalifa supporter. “I know Jamal very well and there is no way I believe he is involved [with Al Qaeda],” says Mr. Khashoggi.

This is the media’s new martyr. If the Saudis disposed of him, they seem to have gotten rid of a terrorist mouthpiece.