As a Saudi HNer who has spent his life between Saudi and the US, I hope I can point out a few things here. I understand the point the author is trying to make. It does, however, come off to me as unnecessarily hostile and overreaching.
- Saudi Arabia has 18 million nationals. The vast majority of which are sunni salafis (the nomenclature preferred to "Wahhabism"). If Wahhabism was driving motivation for ISIS, then ISIS would have been at least 1000 times the size it is now. Which is clearly not the case.
- While ISIS has similar sounding rhetoric to some hardcore Saudi hardliners, it is almost uniformly reviled and regarded by almost everbody in Saudi as an extreme perversion. And not only since they blew up a number of mosques in the country (or since releasing that video of a Saudi ISIS member executing his own cousin who lay begging for mercy in the begining of that fateful video). But their gruesomeness is as repulsive to Saudis as it is to everbody else in the world. And they are seen as one of the biggest obstacles to the ouster of Bashar Al Assad in Syria (who is responsible for a civil war that has killed more than 200,000 people, mostly Sunni).
- The article makes little effort to distinguish between the Saudi people and the Saudi government. It demonizes the saudi populace even though it is at times the first victim of some of the unsavory consequences of the alliance between the monarchy and the "clergy" (a rather inaccurate term since there is no real hierarchy. The closest thing there is a counsel of elder scholars and those are usually selected for being unwaveringly loyal to the government). There is a subtlty to the dynamic of the populace, monarchy, and clergy that few in the west try to understand. I can expand on this later.
- None of this is to deny the existence of an activist, xenophobic, hateful, Quran-thumping segment that is a loud ultra-minority from which Alqaeda and ISIS try to recruit (with Saudi being one of the first places they often like to target). The government have clamped down HARD on the vast majority of this segment ever since the string of terrorist bombings in Riyadh in the early 2000s.
- Like I try to explain Saudi here, I often try to explain the US to people in Saudi. If there's anything you'd like me to clarify about Saudi, AMA.