Thursday's postcard, and how professional golf found its moral hazard

July 13, 2023

The red sandstone & shales of the Chugwater formation, near the Hole-in-the-Wall campground in central Wyoming

Casual Slaughter

If you’d told me in January that I’d be writing about golf in July I would have surmised it to be an effect of the heat. But a trio of events will at least give context to this topic and why it’s timely and necessary.

The first was the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi Arabian journalist and columnist for the Washington Post. This was in early October, 2018.

At the time of his death Khashoggi was in exile from Saudi Arabia because he’d criticized the Saudi government and, in particular, the effective leader of the Saudi regime—Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman. Unable to go to Riyadh without being arrested, Khashoggi arranged to go to the Saudi embassy in Istanbul to submit papers necessary to marry his fiancé Hatice Cengiz. He was murdered inside the embassy by a Saudi death squad; his body dismembered with a bone saw.

photo courtesy Wikimedia images

The Saudis would later claim the ghoulish work of the death squad was a “rogue” operation. But a UN investigation concluded the slaughter was “likely” ordered at the “highest levels” of the Saudi government, and a U.S. intelligence report in 2021 concurred: “Since 2017, the Crown Prince has had absolute control of the Kingdom’s security and intelligence organizations, making it highly unlikely that Saudi officials would have carried out an operation of this nature without the Crown Prince’s authorization.”

The assassination was so brazen it sent shockwaves around the civilized world. But it fit with the pattern of human rights abuses that were intensifying under Bin Salman’s influence. This from Amnesty International, earlier this year: “Saudi Arabia has a long and infamous record of cracking down on human rights defenders, journalists and members of civil society, and their targets now include ‘ordinary’ members of the public who are peacefully exercising their right to freedom of expression online. These shocking [prison] sentences send a chilling reminder to all Saudi citizens and residents that any dissent will not be tolerated.”

In February of 2022, a second thing happened, or late least came to light in rather bizarre fashion.

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