Word: meccas
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Today Mohammed Reza Pahlavi is a man of 60, battling cancer, unwelcome in most countries of the world, and bearing a price on his head (an all-expenses-paid pilgrimage to Mecca, offered by the revolutionaries who overthrew him to anyone who succeeds in killing him). Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini and his aides are filling the air with tirades against the Shah as a "U.S. puppet," a Hitlerian "criminal" who tortured and killed hundreds of thousands of his subjects, a thief who looted Iran of untold billions. At the other extreme, the Shah's defenders cite the praises heaped...
Understandably, the Carter Administration remained deeply worried about the fragile state of U.S. relations with the Muslim world. The series of protests had been precipitated by Muslim outrage over the false charge that the U.S. was involved in the seizure of Mecca's Sacred Mosque (see following story...
Eight days in Mecca that shook the Muslim world
...purists known as Wahhabis. At week's end, with the Riyadh regime saying nothing publicly, the best guess of Western intelligence experts was that the attackers were members of the 'Utaibah tribe, a migratory Sunni group that still wanders with its herds of goats and sheep between Mecca and Riyadh. The group apparently is small in number and represents no serious political threat to the House of Saud...
Events in Mecca were being followed closely and with great concern in Tunisia, where 20 Arab heads of state, plus Palestine Liberation Organization Chief Yasser Arafat, had gathered for their annual meeting. An honor guard wearing plumed gold helmets presented arms with drawn swords as the leaders trooped into Tunis' Palais de Congrès for a summit that one Kuwaiti delegate predicted would be a "love feast." He meant that there would be no public arguments about divisive subjects and that the leaders would merely reaffirm their opposition to Egyptian President Anwar Sadat for signing the Camp David...