“Oops, we goofed,” says Newsweek. 16 are dead and the jihad knives are being sharpened — Newsweek’s belated retraction is unlikely to blunt the force of this as yet another new pretext for jihad. The pretexts are ever new; only the jihad is constant. Another update on the great Qur’an toilet flushing riots of 2005: “Newsweek says may have erred in Koran report,” from Reuters, with thanks to all the many dozens of Jihad Watch readers who have sent this in:
WASHINGTON – Newsweek magazine on Sunday said it may have erred in a May 9 report that said U.S. interrogators desecrated the Koran at Guantanamo Bay, and apologized to victims of deadly violence sparked by the article.
The weekly news magazine said in its May 23 edition that the original source of the allegation was not sure where he saw the assertion that at least one copy of the Koran was flushed down a toilet in an attempt to get detainees to talk.
“We regret that we got any part of our story wrong, and extend our sympathies to victims of the violence and to the U.S. soldiers caught in its midst,” Editor Mark Whitaker wrote in the magazine’s latest issue, due to appear on U.S. newsstands on Monday.
The report has sparked angry and violent protests across the Muslim world from Afghanistan, where 16 were killed and more than 100 injured, to Pakistan to Indonesia to Gaza.
On Sunday, Afghan Muslim clerics threatened to call for a holy war against the United States in three days unless it handed over the interrogators in question.
The May 9 report quoted unnamed sources as saying that military investigators probing abuse at the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, found that interrogators had placed copies of the Koran on toilets and “in at least one case, flushed a holy book down the toilet.”
Newsweek said a Pentagon spokesman told the magazine late last week that the story was wrong and that the military has found no credible evidence to support separate allegations of Koran desecration made by released detainees…