No surprise here: as I said yesterday, “Newsweek’s belated retraction is unlikely to blunt the force of this as yet another new pretext for jihad.” “Muslims doubt Quran climbdown,” from CNN:
KABUL, Afghanistan — Muslims in Afghanistan and Pakistan were skeptical after a U.S. magazine backed away from a report that U.S. interrogators desecrated copies of the Quran while questioning prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.
The account in Newsweek magazine’s May 9 issue has been blamed for sparking deadly riots in Afghanistan and other parts of the Muslim world.
On Sunday, Newsweek backed away from the report and offered its sympathies “to victims of the violence and to the U.S. soldiers caught in its midst.”
But Muslims said they suspected that pressure from Washington was behind the magazine’s climbdown, Reuters reported Monday.
“We will not be deceived by this,” Islamic cleric Mullah Sadullah Abu Aman told Reuters in the northern Afghan province of Badakhshan.
“This is a decision by America to save itself. It comes because of American pressure. Even an ordinary illiterate peasant understands this and won’t accept it.”
On Sunday, a group of clerics led by Aman vowed to call for a jihad, or holy war, against the United States in three days unless it handed over the interrogators reported to have desecrated the Quran…
CNN terrorism analyst Peter Bergen said “desecrating the Quran is a death-penalty offense” in Afghanistan and neighboring Pakistan.
The Pentagon said last week it was unable to corroborate any case in which interrogators at the U.S. Naval Station in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, defiled the Muslim holy book, as Newsweek reported…
“It’s not acceptable now that the magazine says it’s made a mistake,” Reuters quoted 42-year-old writer and journalist Hafizullah Torab as saying. “No one will accept it.”…
“Newsweek is backtracking, but it’s not just their report,” said Ghaffar Aziz, a top official of the Jamaat-e-Islami party. “All innocent people released from U.S. custody have said on the record that there was desecration of the Koran.”…