These are a people, a culture, who commit *an entire hand* to "unclean" things like wiping after a bowel movement. To claim Americans have taken their most holy book, believed by them to be directly written by God himself, and flushed it down the toilet is the social equivalent of an atomic bomb in D.C.
You can bet there will be no sharing of this retraction or that it will be spun as the Americans trying to hide the truth of their depravity and a thousand new Al Queda sympathizers have been born out of this false story.
I'm not sure anything can exact the kind of punishment such irresponsible "reporting" truly deserves. I won't shed a tear if Newsweek is lost.
Right on.
The toothpaste is out of the tube. The Jihadist provocateurs will simply spin Newsweek's "retraction" as the magazine's capitulation to pressure from the Bush Administration. And no matter how easily we might dismiss such allegations as whacko conspiracy tin-foilism, the other side of the world doesn't give a rat's behind what we think.
The damage done by this bogus story cannot be overstated, and the blood is on Newsweek's hands.