(Disclaimer: this is a work of fiction. Learn to take a joke; you’ll live longer.)
Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan came down hard on the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi Arabian journalist in Turkey.
Speaking in his country’s meclis or parliament, he said that it was “a very savage murder” and that it was premeditated.
He said that it saddened him that though the murder took place at the Saudi Embassy – technically Saudi soil – it still took place in Turkey, a country that treats its journalists far differently.
“We here also brutally kill journalism, but only figuratively,” he said. “We don’t literally, brutally kill journalists.”
Globally in 2016, one third of all imprisoned journalists, media workers and executives were in Turkey’s prisons, with the vast majority waiting to be brought to trial.
“Those are the values that we go by,” he said. “We jail them, kill off news outfits financially, by ensuring they don’t spread far and wide, create an opaque and shadowy government out of which nothing much emerges and also accuse any free press of being traitors but what took place in October 2nd is something absolutely unacceptable.”
“Incarceration and a humiliating torture, that is the way to go,” he continued. “That is the reason Turkey is looked up to by the ummah the world over as a potential leader for the Muslim world, not any other country,” he said.
STOP PRESS: The Turkish Government has official expunged the words of Erdogan from parliamentary records after the mutilated bodies of Ahmet Naziri and Miraç Mustafa, cameraman and correspondent-producer of a local anti-government channel were found in the Euphrates.
A new “sometimes murder” policy is being devised.
This is a developing story.