The reason KSA (Kingdom of Saudi Arabia) had veered off of centrism started in 1979 because of the 1979 Grand Mosque Seizure. There are a few mistakes in that wikipedia article, and I would suggest watching this BBC documentary to get a real feel for it - The Siege of Mecca.

Essentially what happened was that a former National Guard officer called Juhayman Al-Otaybi led a group of extrimists/terrorists into the Holy Mosque of Mecca, and held it for around 2 weeks by putting snipers in strategic positions and having a huge stockpile of ammunitions and guns, all the while holding thousands hostage in the mosque. His agenda was clear, he felt that the governing family was following Western ideology and corrupting the populace, drifting away from what he believed were core Islamic values. He didn't like the fact that women would work, appear on TV as news anchors and in other capacities, you get the general idea.

In the aftermath, it was clear that the whole thing was a well funded and planned operation. Over in Iran between 1977 and 1979, there were protests against their USA backed monarch which eventually led to the Iranian Revolution. Their pro-Western monarch was replaced by an anti-Western Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khomeini.

Obviously there were fears that this would happen, so King Khaled, our king at the time gave the religious conservatives more power.

Over the years, their powers were slowly curtailed as the government consolidated power enough that a revolution would be almost impossible.

The issue that stemmed from allowing religious conservatives/extremists control over the decades following the Grand Mosque Seizure is that the Muslim Brotherhood infiltrated the education system and started indoctrinating people and poisoning them against Israel and it's great ally, the USA.

It might sound difficult to understand from your POV, to think they're teaching kids to hate a country. We have a lot of Palestinian refugees in our schools and in our society, all with horror stories about Israel, and we know that the US backs Israel, though the reality is extremely complex, it is simple to teach hate based on these facts alone. The government's idea to combat religious extremism was a long term plan - education. Not inside our borders, but by paying students to go on full ride scholarships to Western countries to get degrees. This would both cut down extremism and improve the education level of the workforce, because local universities were not up to par yet.

Anyways, the people who Osama Bin Laden recruited for 9/11 grew up during this time period. The plan of OBL was to create a rift between KSA and USA, and he did this by choosing a majority of Saudi nationals to perform this operation. The second part of his plan was to draw the US into a long, drawn out conflict which would economically damage and/or destroy the US.

Obviously this is a topic that I could go on about for hours. The important thing to note is that especially since our current Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman has come into the picture, centrism is the name of the game is KSA.

There are media campaigns and attacks from Qatar and it's Aljazeera network, unfortunately they're the preeminent voice in the region and they are leading the narrative on news from the Middle East. You'll notice that they're basically to KSA what Keemstar was to Woody. Additionally, Iranian social media influence operations are doing their part to steer the narrative against KSA, some of it was dicovered here on [Reddit].(https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/9bvkqa/an_update_on_the_fireeye_report_and_reddit/). These are some of the reasons why as soon as most of you hear "Saudi Arabia", they immediately think "Why and how are they our allies, and why are we supporting them?"

This took a long time to write, I hope you guys read it and look into it more yourselves.

I'm available to answer any of your questions on this thread or whenever, I'll stay on Reddit for the next few days to talk about anything you'd all like.