August 10, 1968: While it was relatively meaningless by itself, it was part of a bigger campaign. In Turkey today, two firebombs were thrown into the USIS office in Izmir. The anti-American climate in Islamic Turkey would continue to fester and grow.
August 10, 1968: Yasser Arafat’s al-Fatah detonated three grenades in Jerusalem’s Jewish section, injuring eight Israelis and two Americans.
August 19, 1968: Yasser Arafat’s al-Fatahdetonated a bomb near the Parliament building in Jerusalem. No one was hurt.
August 21, 1968: Al Fatah terrorists bombed the U.S. Consulate building in East Jerusalem demonstrating their hatred for Americans.
September 4, 1968: Palestinian Muslims detonated three bombs in the Central Bus Station in Tel Aviv killing one Israeli and wounding 71 more. Attacking soft civilian targets was becoming a hallmark of Fatah terrorists.
September 13, 1968: Syrian al-Sa’iqa terrorists attacked the Israeli police headquarters in Baniyas in the Golan Heights. The facility was destroyed and all five Jews who were inside were killed.
October 26, 1968: In the Federal Republic of Germany, three prominent anti-Communist Croatians were assassinated in a Munich apartment. Throughout much of 1968, Communists in Croatia were attacking targets all across Europe.
October 26, 1968: Armed with a revolver, a member of the Black Panthers, Raymond Johnson hijacked a National Airlines flight to Cuba. The Black Panther was arrested and held by Cuba. No one was injured and there were no prisoner exchanges or ransoms.
October 26, 1968: Two Italians hijacked an Olympic Airways jet from Paris en route to Athens to publicize their opposition to the military junta in Greece. The terrorists brandished a pistol and a grenade. They gave the 130 passengers handbills telling them that they had just been punished for going to Greece. No one was injured and no prisoners were exchanged.
November 22, 1968: Islamic terrorists in Israel used a large bomb to kill 12 Jews and wound 52 more in Jerusalem’s most crowed open-air market.
December 26, 1968: Still basking in their July 23rd success, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine attacked another El Al aircraft in Athens, shooting and killing one passenger. In response, Israel destroyed 14 Lebanese planes in Beirut. The two Palestinian hijackers who perpetrated the attack were freed in September of 1970 as the result of a quad hijacking by the PFLP and subsequent prisoner exchange.
December 29, 1968: Yasser Arafat’s al-Fatah claimed “credit” for shelling the Israeli town of Beisan in northeast Israel.
December 31, 1968: In Israel, al-Fatah Islamic terrorists attacked the Jewish settlement of Kiryat Shmona in the upper Galilee. The rockets they deployed had been fired from Lebanon. It was the beginning of a foreboding trend.
January 2, 1969: A lone Islamic terrorist hijacked an Olympic Airways flight that had departed from Crete en route to Athens. The plane was flown to Cairo, Egypt.
February 3, 1969: Yasser Arafat, in the afterglow of the Time Magazine cover story on his violent and victorious defeat at the village of Al-Karameh, and flush with OPEC funding and jihadist recruits, was appointed Director of the Palestinian Liberation Organization in their meeting in Cairo, Egypt. The ugly face of Islamic terror had a new “Commander-in-Chief of the Palestinian Revolutionary Forces.” The “Chairman of the PLO’s Political Department” was now Yasser Arafat.
February 18, 1969: Palestinian Muslims attacked an Israeli El Al airliner in Zurich, Switzerland as it was preparing to take off en route to Tel Aviv. The cockpit of the airliner was machine-gunned by the four Islamic terrorists who belonged to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
The terrorists fired 200 bullets and lobbed incendiary grenades from their car as the plane taxied down the runway.
February 25, 1969: The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestinian “claimed credit” for detonating a bomb inside the British Consulate in Jerusalem. .
March 1, 1969: In Germany, Islamic terrorists corrupted by the Muslim Brotherhood used a bomb to destroy an Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 707 jet at the Frankfurt Airport. Several cleaning women were injured in the blast.
The Government of Ethiopia blamed the attack on the Syrian-Egyptian Movement for the Liberation of Eritrea. The Islamic Eritrean Liberation Front claimed credit for the bombing.
March 6, 1969: Muslims belonging to the PFLP thought it would be a good idea to detonate a bomb in the Hebrew University cafeteria, so they did, mutilating and burning the bodies of 29 Jewish students.
May 22, 1969: The attempted assassination of the first Israeli Prime Minister, Ben-Gurion, failed but the would-be killers were freed by Denmark.
June 18, 1969: In Pakistan, three armed members of the Islamic Eritrean Liberation Front assaulted an Ethiopian airliner at the Karachi airport. The Boeing 707 was burned in the attack. The terrorists, all of whom were captured, told authorities that they carried out the attack to dramatize their opposition to Ethiopian rule in Eritrea. Since the Islamic Pakistani government was sympathetic to their cause the three men were jailed for less than one year.
July 17, 1969: In India, a bomb was detonated inside of a USIS reading room in the American Consulate in Calcutta, burning one employee.
July 18, 1969: In London, England, Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine terrorists fire-bombed a department store owned by Jewish citizens of the U.K.. The PFLP claimed responsibility for the bombing and warned that there would be more bomb attacks on Jewish-owned establishments in London and in the United States.
PFLP leader George Habbash said, “We shall expand our operations everywhere, in all parts of the world. The enemy camp includes not only Israel but also the Zionist movement, world imperialism led by the United States.” As a Muslim Marxist, Habbash had to please his Islamic and Communist financiers. Terrorism is, after all, expensive.
July 19, 1969: Islamic jihadists associated with the Sudan government firebombed a United States Information Services library in Khartoum. The fundamentalist Islamic regime in control of the Sudan would soon unleash the most deadly genocide in modern history, killing 2.7 million African Animists and Christians.
July 22, 1969: Muslims in the Philippines threw hand grenades into a USIS library in the American Consulate building in Manila, killing one Filipino. They did this because Muslims are hostile to the truth. Honest, open, and informed discussion is the one thing that is lethal to their religion – and thus to the terror Islam inspires.
August 17, 1969: In London, England, PFLP Islamic terrorists planted several bombs inside the Marks and Spencers Department Store.
August 18, 1969: Six Islamic terrorists hijacked an Egyptian Misrair Anatov-24 flying from Cairo to the tourist destination of Aswan on the Nile River. The plane was forced to land in Jidda, Saudi Arabia.
August 18, 1969: The Israel Touristy Office in Copenhagen, Denmark was bombed by Muslim militants.
August 19, 1969: TWA flight 840 from Rome to Athens was hijacked to Syria, where President Assad was sympathetic to Islamic terrorism. The Palestinian terrorists destroyed the aircraft.
August 29, 1969: In France, a TWA Boeing 707 flight from Paris was hijacked by two Palestinian Front for the Liberation of Palestine terrorists and forced to land in Damascus, Syria. The plane carried a crew of 12 and 101 passengers.
After the hijack the Islamic terrorists announced to the passengers that the PFLP had taken command of the flight, and they ordered the plane flown to Damascus. Immediately upon landing, the passengers managed to jump from the plane before a bomb went off, destroying the aircraft. Four passengers were injured.
The PFLP said the hijacking and destruction of the TWA jet, along with the hijacking of an El Al Israeli Airlines plane to Algeria in July l968, the attacks on El Al planes in Athens in December 1968 and in Zurich in February 1969, were all part of their plan to strike at “imperialist interests within and outside the Arab world.” Acknowledging their Muslim overlords, they also asserted that “the action was in reprisal for American assistance to Israel.”.
September 8, 1969: Arafat’s al-Fatah recruited two teenage boys and motivated the young Muslims to throw hand grenades into the El Al Airlines offices in Brussels, Belgium. Four people were wounded in the blast.
What’s interesting is that while the perpetrators admitted that they had conducted their mission on behalf of Fatah, yet the PFLP claimed credit for the attack.
September 8, 1969: Two Islamic terrorists calling themselves “Palestinians,” bombed the Israeli Embassy in Bonn, Germany. The PFLP claimed credit.
September 8, 1969: In the Hague, Netherlands, Muslim militants threw hand grenades into the Israeli Embassy.
September 9, 1969: In Asmara, Ethiopia, the American Consul General Murray Jackson, was kidnapped along with a British businessman by Muslims corrupted in Cairo. After signing a document stating that he had been instructed in the terrorist’s objectives, and that he had not been mistreated, Mr. Jackson was released.
September 12, 1969: In Jordan, a bomb went off on the porch of the Amman home of the U.S. assistant army attaché.
September 13, 1969: Three armed members of the Islamic Eritrean Liberation Front hijacked an Ethiopian Airlines DC-6 with 66 passengers aboard. The flight, bound for Djibouti from Addis Ababa was forced by the Muslim militants to land at Aden, Southern Yemen. One of the hijackers, Muhammad Sayed, 18, was shot by an Ethiopian secret police official who had been a passenger on the flight.
October 7, 1969: An undisclosed group of Argentinean terrorists bombed a number of American businesses for reasons they never disclosed. Although there were nine attacks, no one was injured.
October 21, 1969: Marxist Muslim Muhammad Siad Barre assumed dictatorial power in a military coup d’etat following the assassination of Somalia’s second President, Abdi Rashid Ali Shermarke. Barre nationalized the economy with the help of Soviet advisers and Cuban troops. His Supreme Ruling Council formulated political and legal institutions based on the Qur’an, Marx, Mao, Lenin, and Mussolini. Siad Barre explained: “The official ideology consists of three elements: my own conception of community, a form of socialism based on Marxist principles, and Islam.”.
December 5, 1969: Four Muslim Militants were caught before they could attack an airliner in London. The subsequent plot on the 17th failed as a result.
December 12, 1969: Islamic terrorists bombed the West Berlin office of Israeli El Al Airlines. No one was injured in the blast.
December 12, 1969: Muslim militants associated with the Islamic Eritrean Liberation Front armed with pistols and explosives were killed by plainclothes security guards as they attempted to hijack an Ethiopian Airlines jet shortly after takeoff from Madrid on a flight to Addis Ababa.
In Damascus, Syria, the Eritrean Liberation Front admitted that the two slain men were members of their organization but claimed that they had not intended to hijack the airliner, merely to hand out leaflets. But on December 10, Spanish police had arrested a third ELF member at the Madrid airport for carrying explosives.
December 20, 1969: In Islamic Turkey, a bomb was detonated outside the United States Information Services building in Ankara.
December 21, 1969: Three Lebanese Muslims were caught as they tried to hijack a TWA plane in Athens. The flight was bound for Rome and then on to New York. The three Muslim militants, who used handguns and explosives, said that they were members of the PFLP, and that they had received orders to divert the airplane to Tunis where they were to evacuate the passengers and blow up the aircraft.
One of the hijackers confessed that he and his colleagues had planned to destroy the plane “to warn the Americans to stop providing air communications with Israel.” The three Islamic terrorists were freed after the hijacking of an Olympic Airways plane to Cairo on July 22, l970.
December 29, 1969: Philippine terrorists attempted to assassinate U.S. Vice President Spiro Agnew by bombing his car. No one claimed credit for the assault but these same tactics were deployed countless times by local Islamic groups such as the Abu Sayyaf, Jemaah Islamiyah, and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front.
January 1, 1970: In Turkey, an explosion occurred at the entrance of the U.S. Consulate in Istanbul. Islamic Turkey was becoming a dangerous place to be an American.
January 9, 1970: In France, a TWA 707 airliner en route from Paris to Rome with just 20 passengers and crew aboard was hijacked to Beirut by a lone French terrorist. He said that he wanted to spite Americans and Israelis for their aggression in the Middle East. Considered a hero by Muslims, when the hijacker was taken into custody in Lebanon he was only sentenced to nine months in jail essentially the time he served awaiting trial. He was promptly released and returned to France, where he was tried for illegal possession of weapons and sentenced to eight months in prison, once again, the length of the trial process.
The Popular Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine thought their criminal act was a good thing, so they claimed responsibility for the murder and mutilations. However, since the word has a problem understanding the benefits of being judgmental, and fails to appreciate the concept of responsibility, the murdering Muslim terrorists were set free after the September 6, 1970 hijacking of one Swiss and two U.S. airliners.
January 11, 1970: In Ethiopia, Islamic jihadists shot and killed a U.S. soldier. The Eritrean Islamic Jihad Movement was responsible for the shooting the American.
The Eritrean Islamic Jihad Movement was composed of Islamic terrorists who are financed, trained, and armed by the fundamentalist Islamic government in neighboring Sudan. The terrorist club sought to depose the current secular government in Eritrea and replace it with an Islamic theocracy based upon Sharia Law.
January 21, 1970: In the Philippines, a car bomb exploded behind the Joint U.S. Military Assistance Group headquarters in Manila. Three support staff were injured.
February 10, 1970: In Germany today, three Islamic terrorists killed an Israeli citizen and wounded 11 other Jewish passengers in a grenade attack on a bus at the Munich airport. The militants deployed guns and grenades in their assault on the El Al airport shuttle. The carnage was minimized because the Israeli pilots wrestled the weapons away from the Islamic terrorists.
February 17, 1970: The Germans foiled a PFLP hijacking of an El Al aircraft. However, their temporary success only served to encourage terrorism because the German government foolishly freed the kidnappers two months later.
February 21, 1970: A Swiss Air flight 330 from Zurich bound for Tel Aviv was bombed in mid-air nine minutes after takeoff by the PFLP General Command, a PFLP splinter group. Forty-seven innocent souls lost their lives to Islam, 15 of whom were Israelis. The bomb, placed in the cargo hold, was triggered by a change in atmospheric pressure. While the crew attempted to turn the plane back to the airport, smoke in the cockpit and the loss of electrical power thwarted their efforts,.
February 21, 1970: On the same day that the PFLP-General Command destroyed a Swiss aircraft, killing everyone aboard, the main branch of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine exploded a bomb aboard an Austrian Airlines Caravelle flight from Frankfurt, Germany to Vienna, Austria. Fortunately, the damage was not catastrophic and the plane returned to Frankfurt safely with its 33 passengers.
The bomb was detonated twenty minutes after takeoff by an altimeter reading of fourteen thousand feet.
March 1, 1970: In Italy, a bomb was found in the luggage of an Islamic terrorist aboard an Ethiopian airliner in Rome. The device had been placed by members of the Eritrean Islamic Jihad Movement.
March 4, 1970: Two hours after a violent anti-American demonstration in the Philippines, a bomb rocked the embassy area and damaged a passing tanker truck carrying gasoline.
March 14, 1970: A United Arab Airlines Antonov 24 flight flying from Athens to Cairo via Alexandria was four minutes out of its stopover when a bomb exploded in the landing gear well of the rear of the left engine, causing extensive damage to the undercarriage and injuring two of the ten passengers.
March 20, 1970: In Ethiopia, five members of a National Geographic film crew, including an American producer, were taken hostage by members of the Eritrean Islamic Jihad Movement. They held the five hostages for 17 days.
March 28, 1970: The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) fired seven rockets into the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, Lebanon and into the JFK Library, also in Beirut. The PFLP later said that the attack was in retaliation for “plans of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut to foment religious strife and create civil massacres in Lebanon aimed at paralyzing the Palestine resistance movement.”
September 11, 1970: In India, a fifth jetliner, a BOAC VC-10, from Bombay to Beirut carrying 150 passengers, was hijacked by the PFLP sympathizer. The plane was also flown to Zarqa, Jordan. The passengers were held hostage pending the release of Miss Khaled from Briton and six other sub-human species. Once they were freed, the plane was blown up. No Islamic country has ever built an airplane, but their citizens became quite apt at destroying them.
September 16, 1970: In what was justified as retaliation for the plane hijackings the week before, but was actually a response to the three assassination attempts on the Jordanian King Hussein’s life, the Islamic nation’s Army attacked Palestinian communities within the kingdom. Since most Jordanian Arabs (70% of the total population) were related to those who call themselves “Palestinians,” and since the ruling monarchy wasn’t among them, this was a preemptive strike designed to keep the majority population subservient to the Hashemite minority. The armed assault on Palestinian refugee camps and communities would continue through July of 1971.
Late September, 1970: In Jordan, the terrorist organization known as Black_September was formed. An outgrowth of Arafat’s Fatah, the Arab League’s PLO, and Egypt’s Fedayeen, they claimed to be descendants of Hasan’s Hashshashin/Assassins of Persian and Crusade infamy.
February 2, 1971: In India, two armed Kashmiri Muslims hijacked an Indian Airlines plane to Pakistan. They demanded that the Indian government release 36 convicted Islamic terrorists held in Kashmir jails. When the government rejected their demands, they blew up the plane.
February 10, 1971: In Sweden, two Croatian Muslims seized control of the Yugoslav consulate in Gothenburg in an unsuccessful attempt to ransom its occupants in exchange for convicted terrorists held in Yugoslav jails. The Yugoslav government refused to meet their demands, and the terrorists surrendered the next day to the Swedish authorities. They were tried and sentenced to 3 years imprisonment. But on September 16, 1972, they were released and flown to Madrid after three Croatians hijacked a Scandinavian airliner and demanded their freedom, along with the release of five Croatians involved in the assassination of the Yugoslav ambassador on April 7, 1971.
April 8, 1971: In Sweden, Croatian terrorists assassinated the Yugoslav ambassador and wounded two Yugoslav diplomats in Stockholm. These murdering jihadists were released from jail when three Croatians militants hijacked a Scandinavian airliner on September 16, 1972, and demanded their freedom.
May 29, 1971: In their second attack since this timeline began, Basque nationalists attempted to kidnap Henri Wolimer, the French Consul in San Sebastian. He resisted and escaped. There were no injuries in either mission.
June 4, 1971: PFLP terrorists carried out an assault on the Liberian-registered oil tanker Coral Sea. Using a speedboat, the jihadists fired 10 bazooka shells at the tanker, causing some damage but no casualties. The attack occurred in the Strait of Bab el Mandeb at the entrance to the Red Sea. It was intended to deter tankers from using the Israeli port of Eilat.
August 24, 1971: In Madrid, Spain, a bomb placed by Al Fatah’s Black_September Organization exploded in a Boeing 707 owned by the Royal Jordanian Airline. The aircraft was parked at the Barajas Airport.
September 26, 1971: In Yemen, three bombs exploded at a U.S. Consular officer’s home. The bombing was believed to be part of an Islamic terrorist campaign against the government.
December 15, 1971: In London, the Black_September Organization attempted to assassinate Zaid Rifai, the Jordanian Ambassador.
December 16, 1971: Three people were injured by parcel bombs sent by the Black_September Organization to the Jordanian mission to the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland.
Muslims first genocide in SudanDecember, 1971: The first Islamic war in the Sudan was nearing resolution. However, Arab Muslims trying to Sharia Law in all of the Sudan had already killed 500,000 Africans, 80% of them being unarmed civilians, leaving a million more homeless.
British bungling had set the stage for the slaughter in Sudan. As part of the UK’s strategy in the Middle East, the Arab Muslim north and the African animist and Christian south were merged into a single administrative protectorate. In 1953 Egypt and the UK granted “independence” to the Sudan because it was becoming impossible to control under these circumstances. Muslims don’t share power with anyone. When this happened, the Arab Muslims in the north immediately recanted the agreements they had made with the African south, and began attacking them. A succession of Islamic dominated administrations did nothing to stop the terror. It was only when a fundamentalist Muslim vs. Muslim Marxist rift in the north emerged, that the genocide temporarily lost momentum. In 1971, Joseph Lagu became the first to organize Africans in the south, providing a voice for the oppressed.
May 11, 1972: A series of bombs placed by the Baader-Meinhof Gang exploded at the Fifth U.S. Army Corps headquarters in West Germany, killing Colonel Paul Bloomquist and wounding 13 others.
The Baader-Meinhof Group was a violent communist association that acted in partnership with the PFLP. They emerged from the Federal Republic of Germany in the late 1960s. On April 2, 1968, Andreas Baader, the group’s founder, and his girlfriend Gudrun Ensslin, bombed a Frankfurt department store. The well-known German journalist Ulrike Meinhof, helped Baader flee custody. Following the prison break, Meinhof and Baader enrolled in a terrorist training camp run by the Popular Front for Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and became infamous.
Returning from the Islamic terrorist training camp, Baader, Meinhof, and Ensslin engaged in a violent spree of bombings, abductions, and firearm attacks. They professed a hazy mix of Marxism, Maoism, and Muslim beliefs as the terrorized West Germany.
May 24, 1972: In Zimbabwe, a South African Airways Boeing 727 flying from Salisbury to Johannesburg with 66 passengers and crew on board was hijacked by two Lebanese Muslim terrorists who threatened to blow up the aircraft.
May 31, 1972: After receiving the $5 million ransom from the German government, the PLO/PFLP/BSO financed and dispatched members of the Japanese Red Army to attack Lod Airport in Tel Aviv. They bombed the terminal and used automatic weapons to gun down and kill 27 people milling in the crowd, wounding 75 to 80 more. Yes, Islam has always found soulmates in Communist, Socialist, and Fascist circles.
June 10, 1972: The West German embassy in Dublin, Ireland was damaged by a bomb that had been placed by supporters of the Baader-Meinhof Gang of Muslim-trained Marxists.
July 18, 1972: An attaché case containing fifteen pounds of explosives was discovered in the USIS Cultural Center in Manila. The device was set to explode at 1 AM Saturday. The guard did not check the case until Monday morning, and the building was spared only because of the failure of the timing device.
July 31, 1972: A group of hijackers, including George Edward Wright, George Brown, Melvin McNair, his wife Jean Allen McNair, and Joyce T. Burgess, who said they were Black Panther Party sympathizers, took over a Delta Air Lines jet over Florida and directed the plane to Algeria after collecting $1 million in ransom.
August 5, 1972: The PFLP/PLO/BSO attacked an oil refinery in Trieste, Italy. The damage they wrought in the ensuing fire in large oil storage tanks was considerable, estimated at over $7 million. The attack was justified because Germany and Austria allegedly supplied oil to Israel.
Attack on the Munich Airport, February 10, 1970: Three terrorists attacked El Al passengers in a bus at the Munich Airport with guns and grenades. One passenger was killed and 11 were injured. All three terrorists were captured by airport police. The Action Organization for the Liberation of Palestine and the Popular Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine claimed responsibility for the attack.
<img style="margin: 5px; border: 0px none;" title="Timeline of islamic Terrorism since 1966" src="http://immagini.diavolineri.net/palmunich.jpg" alt="palmunich Timeline of islamic Terrorism since 1966" width="220" height="218" align="left" border="0" hspace="5" vspace="5"/>Munich Olympic Massacre, September 5, 1972: Eight Palestinian “Black September” terrorists seized eleven Israeli athletes in the Olympic Village in Munich, West Germany. In a bungled rescue attempt by West German authorities, nine of the hostages and five terrorists were killed.Ambassador to Sudan Assassinated March 2, 1973: U.S. Ambassador to Sudan Cleo A. Noel and other diplomats were assassinated at the Saudi Arabian Embassy in Khartoum by members of the Black September organization.
Attack and Hijacking at the Rome Airport December 17, 1973: Five terrorists pulled weapons from their luggage in the terminal lounge at the Rome airport, killing two persons. They then attacked a Pan American 707 bound for Beirut and Tehran, destroying it with incendiary grenades and killing 29 persons, including 4 senior Moroccan officials and 14 American employees of ARAMCO. They then herded 5 Italian hostages into a Lufthansa airliner and killed an Italian customs agent as he tried to escape, after which they forced the pilot to fly to Beirut. After Lebanese authorities refused to let the plane land, it landed in Athens, where the terrorists demanded the release of 2 Arab terrorists. In order to make Greek authorities comply with their demands, the terrorists killed a hostage and threw his body onto the tarmac. The plane then flew to Damascus, where it stopped for two hours to obtain fuel and food. It then flew to Kuwait, where the terrorists released their hostages in return for passage to an unknown destination. The Palestine Liberation Organization disavowed the attack, and no group claimed responsibility for it.
Ambassador to Afghanistan Assassinated, February 14, 1979: Four Afghans kidnapped U.S. Ambassador Adolph Dubs in Kabul and demanded the release of various “religious figures.” Dubs was killed, along with four alleged terrorists, when Afghan police stormed the hotel room where he was being held.
<img class="alignleft" style="margin: 5px; border: 0px none;" title="Timeline of islamic Terrorism since 1966" src="http://immagini.diavolineri.net/iran-hostages.jpg" alt="iran hostages Timeline of islamic Terrorism since 1966" width="220" height="165" align="right" border="0" hspace="5" vspace="5"/>Iran Hostage Crisis, November 4, 1979: After President Carter agreed to admit the Shah of Iran into the US, Iranian radicals seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and took 66 American diplomats hostage. Thirteen hostages were soon released, but the remaining 53 were held until their release on January 20, 1981.Grand Mosque Seizure, November 20, 1979: 200 Islamic terrorists seized the Grand Mosque in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, taking hundreds of pilgrims hostage. Saudi and French security forces retook the shrine after an intense battle in which some 250 people were killed and 600 wounded.
Threats from Libya
When intelligence reports surfaced that Libyan leader Muammar el-Qaddafi had plans to assassinate American diplomats in Rome and Paris, President Reagan expelled all Libyan diplomats from the U.S. (May 6, 1981) and closed Libya’s diplomatic mission in Washington, D.C. Three months later, Reagan ordered U.S. Navy jets to shoot down Libyan fighters if they ventured inside what was known as the “line of death.” (This was the line created by Qaddafi to demarcate Libya’s territorial waters, which he said extended more than 100 miles off the country’s shoreline; the U.S. and other maritime nations recognized Libyan territorial waters as extending only 12 miles from shore.) As expected, the Libyan Air Force counter-attacked and Navy jets shot down two SU-22 warplanes about 60 miles off the Libyan coast.
