Kamel Daoud in the New York Times on November 20:

Black Daesh, white Daesh. The former slits throats, kills, stones, cuts off hands, destroys humanity’s common heritage and despises archaeology, women and non-Muslims. The latter is better dressed and neater but does the same things. The Islamic State; Saudi Arabia. In its struggle against terrorism, the West wages war on one, but shakes hands with the other. This is a mechanism of denial, and denial has a price: preserving the famous strategic alliance with Saudi Arabia at the risk of forgetting that the kingdom also relies on an alliance with a religious clergy that produces, legitimizes, spreads, preaches and defends Wahhabism, the ultra-puritanical form of Islam that Daesh feeds on.

It’s rich, isn’t it? We pitch a huge fit over a fourteen-year-old kid who brings a clock to school, but we clutch the throbbing heart of Wahhabism to our oil-loving bosom, and then give it all our money. We jump at phantoms, we yank people off airplanes, we start wars, and all the time, we’re treating the official, state-based, “legitimate” version of IS as our great great great friend and trusted colleague. Saudi Arabia is an ally! We saw fit to shun South Africa, and rightly so, but Saudi Arabia is our god damn ally.

Wahhabism, a messianic radicalism that arose in the 18th century, hopes to restore a fantasized caliphate centered on a desert, a sacred book, and two holy sites, Mecca and Medina. Born in massacre and blood, it manifests itself in a surreal relationship with women, a prohibition against non-Muslims treading on sacred territory, and ferocious religious laws. That translates into an obsessive hatred of imagery and representation and therefore art, but also of the body, nakedness and freedom. Saudi Arabia is a Daesh that has made it.

And Daesh is a Saudi Arabia that lacks only a centralized state to make itself an official member of the family of nations. Oh wait, it also needs a shit-ton of oil.

The West’s denial regarding Saudi Arabia is striking: It salutes the theocracy as its ally but pretends not to notice that it is the world’s chief ideological sponsor of Islamist culture. The younger generations of radicals in the so-called Arab world were not born jihadists. They were suckled in the bosom of Fatwa Valley, a kind of Islamist Vatican with a vast industry that produces theologians, religious laws, books, and aggressive editorial policies and media campaigns.

And all of the laws and books and policies? They suck. They’re antediluvian, they’re fascist, they’re woman-hating and life-hating; they suck. There’s nothing good to say about them.

Daesh has a mother: the invasion of Iraq. But it also has a father: Saudi Arabia and its religious-industrial complex. Until that point is understood, battles may be won, but the war will be lost. Jihadists will be killed, only to be reborn again in future generations and raised on the same books.

Kamel Daoud, a columnist for Quotidien d’Oran, is the author of “The Meursault Investigation.” This essay was translated by John Cullen from the French.

Sue me, Saudi.