Monday, May 16, 2005

Well, Newsweek's trying, but this CNN story suggests that nobody's buying:

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....

"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.

He said the call for a holy war still stood....

"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."

Sayed Elyas Sedaqat, who heads a cultural group in the eastern Afghan city of Jalalabad, where the protests began last Tuesday, said: "Possibly, the American government put pressure on the magazine to issue the retraction to avoid the anger of Muslims."

In neighboring Pakistan, a religious party said it was going ahead with a call for protests on May 27.

"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."...


By the way, at the end of this post, Juan Cole quotes an e-mail he says he received from a former U.S. military officer who once attended Special Forces training school and saw a Bible being kicked around there at a mock POW camp. Make of that what you will.

*****

ALSO: Raw Story has a roundup of previous reports that refer to Koran desecration (in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, and other sources) here. I'm not sure why this one inspired violence when previous reports didn't.

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