Lynch Newsweek

Continuing on the Newsweek retraction story, things are just as I predicted: the Afghan and Pakistani people are skeptical of the retraction.

KABUL, Afghanistan (CNN) -- 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."

Perhaps, Mullah Aman, that's because you tell all of those illiterate peasants what to think? The charges were ridiculous to begin with, and the fact that the Afghans and Pakistanis didn't see through it just proves how far the Islamofascist control of the populace goes, even in moderate Pakistan.