ISIS/Daesh is Salafi Islam, played out to its logical extreme and with vastly greater support throughout broad swaths of the Sunni world (98.5% of whom live outside the West) — in varying degrees — than liberal Americans seem capable of understanding or willing to admit.
Salafism is Saudi Arabia. (The roughly 15% of Saudi Arabia who are Shia are brutally repressed by this reality, by the House of Saud. No other religion can be publicly practiced in Saudi Arabia, and even attempts to organize other religions in the privacy of one’s home are forbidden. Private practice, inside one’s own house, is 'tolerated'.) For 50 years Saudi Arabia has been funding this poisonous Salafi cult throughout the world, reaching far into the minds of a billion Muslims worldwide. It is this cult that we need to push back against, to publicly call out, to publicly identity its roots and its tentacles, and to condemn. This is not mainly a military war, but it is a war of ideas.
The House of Saud is playing a similar game as Assad in Syria: they recognize the real threat to their regime is not the Salafi extremists, with whom they have been in bed since the founding of the 1st House of Saud long ago and in its more recent version since the 1920s (when they teamed up with Wahhabis to form an alliance against colonial powers). In fact, as with Assad, the extremists are what the Saudi government uses to legitimize its power: “It’s either us or the Salafi extremists, which do you want?” So to the House of Saud, the real threat is not ISIS, but liberals — like Raif Al Badawi. Which is why Saudi Arabia declared, at the peak of the Arab Spring, that “liberal thought is terrorism.” (Really, that’s a verbatim quote from the new law.) And that’s why young women who attempt to drive in Saudi Arabia are arrested and processed through the terrorist courts. (Really.)
Aux idées, citoyens!