Word: meccas
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Americans, the world's judgment seems to be rigged up to a perverse double standard. Let only a rumor waft through, a propagandist's mischievous fantasy about the CIA's organizing the attack on the Sacred Mosque at Mecca, and rioters swarm like film extras against U.S. consulates from Turkey to India; in Islamabad, Pakistan, two Americans die and the embassy goes up in flames. Let the U.S. admit the deposed Shah for temporary medical treatment, and the Tehran embassy, with all occupants, becomes the property of overheated Shi'ite gunmen. But let four Soviet divisions...
...since they had grown used to living off gossip and rumor mills during the reign of the Shah, when the heavily censored press played down even nonpolitical bad news about Iran. When Khomeini declared that the Americans and Israelis were responsible for the November attack by Muslim fanatics on Mecca's Sacred Mosque, this deliberate lie was given instant credence by multitudes of Iranians...
...killed two U.S. servicemen; the Ayatullah's reaction was "great joy." In Saudi Arabia, possessor of the world's largest oil reserves, the vulnerability of the royal family was made starkly apparent when a band of 200 to 300 well-armed raiders in November seized the Sacred Mosque in Mecca, the holiest of all Islamic shrines, which is under the protection of King Khalid. The raiders appeared to have mixed religious and political motives: they seemingly were armed and trained in Marxist South Yemen, but were fundamentalists opposed to all modernism, led by a zealot who had proclaimed the revolution...