Thanks for the kind out. I’d indeed ‘skimmed’ too quickly before my posting. Back then the stone’s theft could be kept as secret as Obama’s college records. Nowadays finding a crater as your Haj destination would be trending on the internet. I think long term they would react like the Aztecs did after Cortez’s praiseworthy desecration. But short term there probably would be a lot of enraged crazy responses, and their crazies are much more dispersed than the Aztecs were. The followup would still be messy.
Messy, but with an end in sight. After 1,400 years of terror, that would be a worthwhile outcome.