>9/11 wasn't some coherent beef with US foreign policy; it was bog-standard religious extremism of the Salafist Islamic flavor.

Why would he bomb US and not SA then? At least in his own words it was about foreign policy and Palestine among other things.

I'm just being honest but I think you are missing an gigantic point here. Why would a Muslim terrorist not bomb the holiest place in Islam? That is basically your question. They already viewed the U.S. as infidels, the "Great Satan", or kuffaar (unbelievers), I don't see why its not obvious that someone like that would choose to attack the U.S. instead of Saudi Arabia.

But that's not how terrorism works. Terrorism works by inflicting pain on your adversary, not on random infidels half the world away.

What I wrote is exactly how terrorism works, for evidence, I submit the real world. Again, they aren't going to bomb Muslims in their holy land, I don't see how this would be surprising.

There have been a huge number of terror attacks in SA. It's worthwhile to look this stuff up first because these theories are not always concordant with reality.

In fact, these theories comport quite well with reality. I'm aware of attacks in Saudi Arabia but there have been no attacks on Saudi Arabia of the scale of 9/11. Sure, there are attacks all over of the Middle East but not any of these large scale shocking attacks.