'This is unacceptable': Mike Pompeo uses new book to criticize murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi

23 January 2023

Former Secretary of State and potential 2024 presidential candidate Mike Pompeo heavily criticized Jamal Khashoggi in his upcoming book, NBC reports.

Khashoggi, who was based in the U.S., was known to openly write about Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salam at The Washington Post before he disappeared in October of 2018 upon arrival to the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul. It was announced he was brutally murdered days later.

In his book titled “Never Give an Inch: Fighting for the America I Love,” Pompeo wrote, "And as even the New York Times reported, Khashoggi was cozy with the terrorist-supporting Muslim Brotherhood."

He goes on in the book to mock the media's coverage of Khashoggi’s murder, claiming the outlets portrayed the late journalist as “a Saudi Arabian Bob Woodward who was martyred for bravely criticizing the Saudi royal family through his opinion articles in the Washington Post.”

Pompeo claimed Khashoggi "didn’t deserve to die, but we need to be clear about who he was -- and too many in the media were not.”

Khashoggi’s widow, Hanan Elatr Khashoggi, spoke with NBC about her frustration with Pompeo’s words about her husband.

"Jamal Khashoggi is not part of the Muslim Brotherhood. I confirm it to you," she asserted. “Whatever he [Pompeo] mentions about my husband, he doesn’t know my husband. He should be silent and shut up the lies about my husband. It is such bad information and the wrong information...This is not acceptable.”

She mentioned to NBC that because her late husband "had a nuanced view of the Muslim Brotherhood," he believed that he should be "close to an ideology to speak about it." Therefore, he would "condemn their actions in some countries and appreciate it in others."

Khashoggi's widow continued to say that her husband “always condemned" the Sept. 11 attack and hailed Saudis as “the biggest loser of Sept. 11."

Pompeo mockingly called Khashoggi an “activist” in the book, claiming that he was a journalist only “to the extent that I, and many other public figures are journalists." He said, "We sometimes get our writing published, but we also do other things.”

He also asserted in the book that he'd "seen enough of the Middle East to know that this kind of ruthlessness was all too routine in that part of the world," and added that Khashoggi's murder "violates the norms of international law" but affirms the necessity of the continuing U.S.-Saudi relationship, according to NBC.

Hanan Elatr Khashoggi is insistent on setting the record straight on her husband's legacy and to quiet those who insist on tarnishing that legacy.

In advocating for her husband's remembrance, she is determined “to silence all of these people who publish books, disparage my husband and collect money from it.”

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