During her show last week, MSNBC anchor Katie Phang discussed US President Joe Biden’s four-day trip to both Israel and Saudi Arabia.
Opening a segment that included interviews with Peter Beinart and Hagar Chemali, Phang characterized the countries as “stolid US allies in the Middle East” but then added that “both have been accused of serious human rights violations.”
She proceeded to use the deaths of journalists Jamal Khashoggi and Shireen Abu Akleh to drive home her simplistic analysis that the actions of Israel and Saudi Arabia are in some way comparable:
Consider the tale of two slain journalists: the former columnist for The Washington Post Jamal Khashoggi and the Palestinian-American TV journalist Shireen Abu Akleh. Both of them, in their own way, died at the hands of the governments they were working to expose. In Khashoggi’s case, Saudi agents murdered him at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul back in 2018. US intelligence agencies concluded that the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman approved the operation to kill Khashoggi. Eight suspects were ultimately sentenced in Saudi Arabia for Khashoggi’s death but the Crown Prince himself has not been held accountable for his role. President Biden vowed to make Saudi Arabia a ‘pariah’ over the murder, now Biden is set to meet with [Mohammed bin Salman] himself.
And then there’s Shireen Abu Akleh, who was shot and killed while reporting at a refugee camp in the West Bank. The US State Department conducted its own investigation and said that a bullet fired by Israelis forces was ‘likely responsible’ for Akleh’s death. But the US also said that it found ‘no reason to believe’ that Israel intentional targeted the Palestinian-American journalist.”
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Phang then went a step further, implying that a letter, signed by a number of Democrat senators and addressed to Secretary of State Antony Blinken, proved that the United States had somehow whitewashed the investigation into Abu Akleh’s death.
Dated July 12, the communique from Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), Patrick Leahy (D-VT), Chris Murphy (D-CT), and Dick Durbin (D-IL) claimed that the probe into Abu Akleh’s death by the United States Security Coordinator (USSC) did “not meet any plausible definition of the ‘independent’ investigation that [Blinken] and members of Congress have called for.”
Yet the facts of the two cases illustrate how utterly dissimilar they are.
A Question of Premeditation: Khashoggi vs. Abu Akleh
Jamal Khashoggi, who was based in the United States and worked for The Washington Post, had been close to the Saudi royal family for many years until a falling out led him to go into self-imposed exile in 2017.
On October 2, 2018, he entered the Saudi consulate in Turkey to obtain a document confirming his status as divorced so that he would be free to marry his fiancée Hatice Cengiz. Turkish investigators said that when he was inside the building, he was strangled by a Saudi hit squad and his body was dismembered and later disposed of.
A probe conducted by US intelligence services — declassified in February 2021 and summarized in four pages — concluded that Khashoggi’s brutal murder was premeditated and likely authorized by bin Salman.
Compare these horrifying circumstances to Abu Akleh’s tragic death in May, which occurred in the middle of a gunfight between the Israeli military and Palestinian terrorists during a raid in Jenin to arrest suspects following a spate of deadly terror attacks against innocent civilians.
Related Reading: The Washington Post Abandons Journalistic Integrity In Latest ‘Investigation’ Suggesting That IDF Deliberately Killed Shireen Abu Akleh
Despite fantastical claims by the Palestinian Authority (PA), there is not a shred of evidence to suggest Israel deliberately targeted Abu Akleh or that it has sought to prevent a full and transparent investigation into her death.
Indeed, Israel quickly offered to participate in a joint probe with the Palestinians, while also carrying out its own investigations that were hampered by the PA’s refusal to turn over the bullet that killed Abu Akleh for ballistic analysis.
When the PA did finally release the bullet to American authorities nearly two months later, US officials stated it was too badly damaged to conclusively determine who had fired the fatal shot, but that it was likely an accident by an IDF soldier.
When the facts so clearly show that the deaths of Khashoggi and Abu Akleh are not remotely alike, it is a mystery why a respected television anchor like Katie Phang would suggest they are.
Her monologue instead represents an egregious example of trying to find commonalities in the deaths of Abu Akleh and Khashoggi where there are none.
Such distortion of the truth makes a mockery of serious journalism.
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