Beautiful Words By Khashoggi's Daughters

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This article is absolutely beautiful. Jamal Khashoggi’s daughters show a side to their father that hasn’t yet been spoken of.

Illustration by Razan Jamal Khashoggi
 (taken from The Washington Post)

Sometimes it’s so easy to forget that the murder of a journalist – or indeed, of any individual – has an impact on their loved ones that nobody can even begin to imagine. Their loved ones loved and knew the person as a human being with all of their idiosyncrasies, and knew their character as nobody else could have.

Jamal Khashoggi was a ‘loving man with a big heart’. He loved history and teaching his daughters about it during their travels. He adored books, ‘fully absorbing every opinion’. Khashoggi’s daughters show that their father was not simply a journalist, but a human being who happened to be a journalist, as all true journalists are.

An article like this keeps the memory of a murdered journalist alive because it fights the dehumanisation tactics used by their killers and all who wished them dead. Trying to portray a journalist as subhuman is a textbook method of turning the public against him or her and creating a climate of hatred, the very environment that allows murder to happen. This is what happened to Daphne Caruana Galizia, who was called a ‘witch’ for most of her writing life, and who was then assassinated in broad daylight in a European democracy. We cannot let a journalist be dehumanised because it gives a sense of power to evil people, and just look at where that leads.

What we must do is remember the journalist as a person and keep his or her legacy alive. Noha Khashoggi and Razan Jamal Khashoggi end their piece with especially poignant words:
This is no eulogy, for that would confer a state of closure. Rather, this is a promise that his light will never fade, that his legacy will be preserved within us. Baba said it best: “Some depart to remain,” which rings true today. We feel blessed to have been raised with his moral compass, his respect for knowledge and truth, and his love.

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