Noah Feldman, Columnist

If You Knew Khashoggi, You’d Be Outraged Too

Americans who work in foreign policy have moral reasons for wanting to make Saudi Arabia pay.

October 18, 2018 at 5:35 PM UTC

Noah Feldman is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A professor of law at Harvard University, he is author, most recently, of “To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People."

Putting a face on a policy.
Photographer: Ozan Kose/AFP/Getty Images

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I’m not proud of it. But I am one of those people who are more viscerally upset by the allegations that journalist Jamal Khashoggi died a brutal death at the hands of Saudi secret police than by the deaths of thousands of people under Saudi bombardment in Yemen. The reason isn’t that Khashoggi was a journalist or that he was a legal U.S. resident or that he may have been dismembered, possibly while still alive. It’s much simpler and much less principled than that: It’s because I knew him.

Many thousands of people knew Khashoggi — and many of them, at least in U.S. circles, were foreign policy types or journalists. For roughly 20 years, he was one of a handful of English-speaking Saudis who took the time to meet with researchers, scholars, writers, government and nongovernmental officials to explain the opaque system of government that is the kingdom of Saudi Arabia.