The Saudi government may deny links to the group, but its promotion of hardline Islam is not something the west can ignore any longer Friday 29 August 2014 11.38 BST Islamic State (Isis), now being described in some quarters as “the most capable military power in the Middle East outside Israel”, is at the top of the global agenda. Naturally, there is discussion of its origins and backers. Saudi Arabia is increasingly feeling the heat of the Sunni hardline blowback. While the Saudi government technically doesn’t sponsor Isis, it has promoted a fundamentalist Salafi interpretation of Islam that has encroached into the mainstream Sunni space. This has created the conditions, inside and outside the country, for extremism to breed. The clergy is a powerful force in Saudi Arabia. Its influence derives from the fact that the royal family has entered into a formal pact with the sheikhs, under which the understanding is that the House of Saud can hold on to political power, while the religious establishment gets to dictate the national character of Saudi Arabia, one that has remained doggedly extreme. Osama bin Laden was a perfect combination of the two, a personally motivated non-state actor, radicalised in the schools and mosques of Jeddah, who managed to also rope in the Saudi establishment by selling a religious mission to them – pushing back the Soviet invasion – in the guise of a political project. While the immediate focus vis-a-vis Isis needs to be on practical counter-extremism measures, the west can no longer afford to turn a blind eye to Saudi’s internal contradictions. These have spawned a decadent and west-friendly royal family that preside over a society where clerics run amok, where imams rant against infidels, religious minorities are oppressed, education is heavily slanted towards religion and where people are beheaded for sorcery. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/aug/29/islamic-state-saudi-arabia-rethink-extremism Without tackling Saudi Arabia, we cannot hope to end islamic terrorism. Western governments must work towards the total annihilation of Saudi Arabia as a polity and the destruction of Mecca as a primary goal.