Angry mobs attacked US targets over events with no US involvement

Evidence

In November of 1979 an angry mob attacked and burned the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan. The stated cause of the crowd’s anger was the seizure of the Great Mosque in Mecca by a group of Muslim dissidents—an event in which there was no Amer­ ican involvement whatsoever. Almost ten years later, in February of 1989, again in Islamabad, the USIS center was attacked by angry crowds, this time to protest the publication of Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses. Rushdie is a British citizen of Indian birth, and his book had been published five months previously in England. But what provoked the mob’s anger, and also the Ayatollah Khomeini’s subsequent pronouncement of a death sentence on the author, was the publication of the book in the United States. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 1585

Categorization

• QUESTION: The Rushdie timeline is worth verifying — publication dates and who actually held rights; Lewis emphasizes US publication as trigger.
• SHARE: This Islamabad double-case is a neat paired anecdote illustrating how US becomes scapegoat for unrelated events.