Word: sheiking
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...last week's anniversary of the 1967 Six-Day War, Israel's Defense Minister Moshe Dayan pointedly paid a call on the town council of Hebron on the occupied West Bank. Turning to the mayor, Sheik Mohammed Ali Ja'abari, Dayan suggested that the council ought to begin making development plans for the next ten or 15 years. As the assembled Arab notables gasped, Dayan added with a tight smile: "I suggest that you free yourselves from any illusions you may have regarding the future...
Early one evening last week, Sheik Abeid Karume, 67, the burly, leftist strongman of the spice islands of Zanzibar, sat down to play cards and sip bitter coffee with his cronies in the white-walled building in Zanzibar Town that served as headquarters of his Afro-Shirazi Party. Shortly after sunset, two cars pulled up outside, and four men armed with automatic weapons and revolvers jumped...
Then, according to eyewitnesses, they burst into the building and sprayed gunfire at the cardplayers, killing Sheik Karume instantly. Karume's bodyguard shot one of the attackers dead, and the driver of one car was captured; the others escaped. Throughout the night, troops combed the island's clove and coconut plantations, and gunboats patrolled the coral-reef waters lest the assassins should try to reach the mainland by dhow or dugout...
...Sheik Karume was a cruel, erratic but folksy despot. His rule was characterized by conspiracy trials, summary executions of his political opponents, and Byzantine factional fights within the ruling Revolutionary Council...
...great surprise that Karume was killed, since he had been the target of at least a dozen previous assassination attempts. At week's end, though, it was not yet clear which of the Sheik's many enemies had taken their revenge, or whether the assassination would lead to another period of prolonged violence and factional infighting on what tourist posters used to describe as the "Clove-Scented Isles...