Apologies are not good enough. They knew the accusation was incendiary and would cause someone to get killed. Bring me the head of Mark Whitaker.

Fnally, Loseweek has a body count. Been a long, long time coming.

Say what you will about Jayson Blair and Howell Raines; at least they never got anyone killed.

The saddest part of the story is how "un-noticed" they're admitance of wrongdoing will go in the MSM..... Bastards.

Bush hatred gone too far.

Both Isikoff and the editor ought to apologize and then be fired. Who knows how many of our soldiers will be injured or killed because of this.

This is much worse than RatherGate.

Bring me the the heads of Isikoff, and that of Evan Thomas for trying to whitewash the mess.

I've said it before: leftists don't essentially give a shit about individual human beings. The afghans who were killed -- Hassan the bricklayer, Abdul the taxi driver, Mohammed the baker, Fatima the mother of four -- are simply unfortunate statistics in the never-ending cultural war the leftists wage. The leftist is only concered with the group, the class -- all being victims.

This is why we get the weak-kneed "retraction" that isn't really a retraction at all. The left feels the "deeper truth" trumps any niggling issues of accuracy in the details -- anything that makes the hated Bush administration look bad must be true, and if the facts contradict that...well, too bad for the facts.

These are the wages of relativism, multi-culturalism, and post-modernism, folks: the left has become a moral monster. Nothing means anything, really. They live in a perpetual twilight where there is no good or evil, or right or wrong, no real meaning beyond a bland and formless "peace". If nothing is worth fighting for, then nothing is worth killing for (or dying for); the only truth is equality in all things. Any evil is acceptable if it advances that basic belief.

I have nothing but contempt for these greasy, lying bastards.

Well said Monty.

I think it's giving them too much credit to say they knew the remark would be incendiary. They may have thought "incendiary" in the sense of "Oh boy, they'll be going crazy at the Campus Diversity Sessions THIS weekend!" not in the "Hey, people will riot and die!" way. Not that this is in the least an excuse; it just shows how goddamn blinkered these people are.

Something interesting I saw somebody else mention; remember a few weeks ago, when Catholics were pissed at eBay for letting someone sell a consecrated Host (you know, considered the BODY OF CHRIST) online and wrote eBay a lot of emails until they finally agreed that selling Hosts was no longer, um, kosher? That situation was, in a lot of senses, more of a potential desecration than this one, and yet I don't remember any Catholics rioting and shooting random people or issuing a fatwa on the idiot eBay auctioneer. Remember that next time somebody yaps about how we live in a burgeoning theocracy.

I've been following this crap over the weekend even though I really didn't want to. But this shit just makes me see fucking red.

From CNN - In an article assessing its own coverage, the magazine wrote, "How did Newsweek get its facts wrong? And how did the story feed into serious international unrest?"

I'll respond to the questions Newsweek's delusional schizophrenics are asking themselves.

1. You didn't care about the facts.

2. Direct causality.

Sticking with #1 for a sec - I don't care about the facts either. Because even if every word of the story was true, as loyal Americans, it was your duty to suppress it. If you think you have a "higher duty" to your profession than you do to your country, I cordially invite you to make that case to the American people. Then we can decide if we want to keep buying your shitty magazine or if we'd prefer to hang you for treason.

On to #2. You're lying, simpering, solipsistic MURDERING TRAITORS with the moral sense of a Palestinian or a Frenchman. Fuck you. 15 people dead and all you can do is wonder querulously about the merits of your fucking story. FUCK YOU.

Jesus God, I wish we really did live in the Nazi-fascist-hegemonic-oil-fuelled-dictatorship you fucking dipshits bitch about all the fucking time. I would LOVE to see each and every one of you motherfuckers hang by the neck until you're fucking dead, dead, dead.

Every fucking journalist on the face of the earth ought to be begging forgiveness from every decent human being he sees today. Because you assholes are fucking filth.

grrr.

One of my favorites:

"...We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of heaven. We have been preserved, the many years, in peace and prosperity. We have grown in numbers, wealth and power, as no other nation has ever grown. But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us; and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own..."

Abraham Lincoln, 1863

Damn theocrat!

I see now that other people have already made the points I did with a lot more maturity and a lot less profanity. That's good, that's always good. Still felt nice to get this off my chest. Tail's still lashing but the blinding fury is dying down a bit.

rowr.

Megan,

I liked your version the best!

megan,

Don't apologize for being enraged about this. Not ever. Righteous wrath is exactly what is needed here -- to see the thing for what it is, and to call it what it is.

In many ways the modern Leftist ideology is more poisonous than Islamic fascism because even the Islamists must conform to a moral code (bloody and evil though it be). The Left, though, can simply morph and change and shift, never grounding their ethos in anything at all. The Left is always against, never for -- they define themselves not for what they are, but for what they are in opposition to.

Newsweek's bias drove that story to print. No vetting, no editorial scrupulous review, only what we think is happening at the Guantanamo.

They listed their story sources as Guatanamo released prisoners(no agenda there!) and Al Jazeera, for God's sake.

The MSM is a cancer visited upon us. God, I wish they would die which is a sad and unhealthy thing in a democracy.

It wasn't Newseek that was ulimately responsible for these deaths. It was these people just being who they are that was responsible.
This is who they are. Killers, liars, thugs

Imagine if the media had been straight with us for one damned second during this war, or this election season. Imagine if they had told the truth about the war, the economy or the presidential election.

But no, they had to follow their ideology instead of doing their f'ing job.

Nick, of course the reporters didn't physically go out and shoot anyone. That's not the point. Of course these people who murder and brutalize, pillage and burn to "protest" the alleged desecration of a book are "ultimately responsible."

Newsweek still bears the moral burden of having deliberately and recklessly incited and encouraged violence against Americans. Don't tell me they were too damn naive to know this would happen. They knew. They wanted this to happen. They planned for this to happen. And they should pay a fucking heavy price for their treason. Because they ARE murderers and they ARE traitors in every sense of the word but the absolutely literal.

And I'm not too interested in parsing semantics when our soldiers and our fellow citizens are in danger. There are two sides. There are the United States and there are her enemies.

Choose.

The one cold comfort here is the same one we've always had. We will win. Whatever happens, we will eventually win. And after we win, to paraphrase Steyn, our kids still won't know who the hell those Moslem bastards were, where the hell they were from, or what the fucking hell was bugging them in the first place. We're going to beat the motherfucking crap out of them and then we'll go right back to not giving a flying fuck about them, and that's exactly the way it should be.

Sure would be nice if our own goddamn media would play for our side, though. Might make things go faster, y'know?

Ace, I hope that in your zeal to poke and prod at Newsweek in this case, you don't forget the *real* story here.

Thousands of people rioted and even killed. . . over a book.

Hell, they did it over the *allegation* that a book was desecrated. I'd say their fact-checking is even worse than Newsweeks-- I mean, c'mon, if you're going to kill over blasphemy, at least confirm the blasphemy.

But seriously-- the Newsweek story is the trees. The forest is the constant patronizing by our government & media of the Islamic world. Every day we hear that riots, honor killings, terror sermons, all those are okay, because honestly, can we expect anything better out of those unwashed people?

I, for one, would love it if we held all of humanity to the same standards we hold themselves.

Wait, who am I kidding? I'd settle it if the West held the Islamic world to the same standards we hold *Christians*.

Much better place, that world.

Cheers,
Dave at Garfield Ridge

The MSM -- at least in the print and television aspects -- are excellent examples of a monoculture. I don't think that reporters or news editors deliberately conspire to give a liberal slant to the news they cover; the liberal slant is simply assumed. To them, the liberal interpretation is of course the correct one.

With very few exceptions, journalists come from the more-liberal coastal areas rather than the conservative midlands; they are educated at liberal institutions (by professors who are far more liberal than the average); and they take jobs at organizations run by people who matriculated in the 1960's counterculture (like Ted Turner).

The result is that you get the phenomena best exemplified by Pauline Kael, who could not understand how Nixon could get re-elected. "No one I know voted for him," she sniffed, never knowing that she was saying more about herself than anything else.

With very few exceptions, media people would rarely label themselves as "liberals". To them, their viewpoints are completely centrist. They work and live around people who think exactly as they do -- they take in the Liberal Creed like oxygen. They don't need a conspiracy, because the whole leftist/liberal po-mo multi-culti creed is the very ocean they swim in. And it comes as a terrible shock when they are left gasping on the beach, aghast that there is a whole other world they never even dreamed existed.

Uh, that sentence should read:

"I, for one, would love it if we held all of humanity to the same standards we hold ourselves. "

Loose shit.

Dave-

Frankly, we would've nuked and/or carpet-bombed at least 95% of the Middle East if we held them to any civilized standards. The only reason so many of them are still alive is because we generally don't expect them to act any better than rabid animals.

Not that I'm arguing this is a good thing. Hell, if I had my way, every one of our Spirits would've been heading towards Mecca by half past noon on 9/11.

Monty, you're on a roll. You should have a blog, or something. You too, Megan.

Dave -

Your original line was more amusing. Just imagine the kinds of headlines we'd be seeing if the media held Moslems to the standards to which it does hold Christians. The editors of the New York Times would be personally leading the charge into Syria right now. The New Republic would be invading Saudi Arabia and the Los Angeles Times would've occupied Qatar, Jordan, Egypt, and the Emirates.

Yeah, they're pansy-ass liberals, but they're still pansy-ass liberal Americans - so they'd probably win, too.

Dave:

I honestly don't think Islam per se is the problem. The problem is a toxic mix of tribalism, oil-money, and Arab's humiliation at their continuing failure to succeed in the modern world. The religious faith itself is simply...a scaffold. Rigidly Christian Arabs would present the same problems to the modern world as extremest Muslim Arabs do.

Much of the near East is a basket-case because -- in the Arab countries, Africa, Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan -- you have tribal bands that have never really accepted nor understood the concept of civil society. Power is vested either in God, or in the head of a family or tribe. The whole idea of vesting power in an elected body seems not only weird (and maybe heretical), but downright madness: who will take care of the family in such a scenario? How will a man make sure his daughters marry well? Who will make sure the slightly-stupid nephew still gets a good job? In order for a civil society to succeed, the tribe and family must sometimes come in second -- and that is a concept that many Arabs and Africans simply cannot internalize.

It's been said before that we are fighting an enemy who brings an eighth-century mindset and twenty-first century weapons to the fight. But even here Arabs especially are humiliated: they cannot invent or manufacture the weapons they bring to bear. They can only exist as parasites on the very Western world they claim to hate.

I'll feel a lot better about the prospects for democracy in the Middle East when I start seeing some non-religious civil institutions like (for example) the Kiwanis, the Rotary Club, or something like the Small Business Owner's Society.

Looks like Newsweak made fucking maniacs out of Monty and megan.

Which is, of course, a good thing, because the white-hot, crystal-clear rhetoric they gave birth to is the stuff most of us (ok, just me) can only dream of creating.

Excellent work.

Monty, re: "Christian Arabs would present the same problems to the modern world as extremest Muslim Arabs do."

There are still some Christian Palestinians left, despite Arafat's best efforts. Isn't it odd then that we never hear of them going out to murder Jews?

The problem is Islam. It's not just a religion; it is revelatory and thus unquestionable law. Islam is entirely unique in that its prophet had not only absolute religious and moral authority but also equally absolute worldly power. There is nothing even vaguely approximating Luke 20:25 in the Koran.

Since I was yet again importuned to start a blog, I'll cite another entry from my dead one: I wrote a lot more about this subject here. Read the linked article as well if you didn't back then.

PS. Monty, just to be clear, I'm not arguing against the excellent cultural points you make, but the religion itself has a plethora of terrorist/tyrant-enabling qualities as well. And we have a responsibility to our 5000+ dead to recognize and delineate them.

Megan--

I'm sorry for being such an awful writer-- yours was the point I was trying to make. We (the royal "we", including the MSM) seem to hold everyone but Muslims to a higher standard. And, of course, as of late Christians are held to the highest standard of them all.

BTW, I recognize that, and I'm an atheist.

Monty-- please pardon me if you read into my statement any sweeping generalizations about Islam. I think that the whole witches brew present from the Mahgreb to Central Asia has a lot of broken ingredients, with only the primary influence being Islam. If tomorrow the entire region converted to Christianity, Judaism, or Scientology, our problems would be far from solved.

That said, you only have to be hit over the head a certain number of times before the obvious question poses itself: is there something particular to Islam itself that renders it conducive to moonbattiness? And if there is something in particular, what can be done-- within Islam, and from outside of it-- to mitigate or eliminate those influences?

I am under no illusions that an Islamic reformation is possible any time soon. But if the political reformation proves impossible in our lifetimes, what else is there?

Can people-- whether one or a milion-- be made to worship their own God without condemning those who don't to violence, servitude, and misery?

Some people can. Some people can't-- or at least, haven't been asked to yet.

And I for one don't want to effin' die because someone decided to play nice and not ask others to stop being murderous assholes or else. I'd much rather if we break some china, and ask for forgiveness ex post facto.

Cheers,
Dave at Garfield Ridge

Megan, I just mean that you were on a roll....A KAISER roll...but hey, if you want to blog, don't let me stop you. The part about how Monty should have a blog was a joke, because, well, he does have one.

Ah. :) And no, I don't want to blog; I tried it once and it takes far too much work. I'll leave that to people with more ideas and more follow-through ability, like Ace and Monty.

Megan:

Sir James George Frazer, in his book The Golden Bough, talks about the power that eidolons have over people -- especially pre-modern people, who had no scientific explanations for the things they saw around them. An eidolon is a ghost or shade, but in this context it is a religious being or force.

There is nothing a priori about the practice of Islam that requires one to be a bloodthirsty savage; in fact that Sufi branch explicitly rejects all violence and seeks internal peace, much as the Zen Buddhist does. Even the Sunni faith, prior to the advent of Wahhabism in the 17th century, was actually a force for moderation: it could not be otherwise, for the Sunni faith is predicated on the Sunna, which is a set of strict guidelines similar to the Jewish Leviticus (only traditional rather than scriptual).

The Christian faith in its youth was a very bloodthirsty one as well, let us not forget: the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, the witch-burning, the pogroms against the Jews, the pillage of South America: all were done in the name of the Christian god.

The Arab eidolon is Allah, but Allah to an Arab is not quite the same Allah that an Indonesian or Croat Muslim would recognize. The Arabs are a nomadic, austere, and intensely private and tribal people -- so it should be no shock that Wahhabism arose there and spread outward. Wahhabism is not so much a fundamentalist interpretation of Islam so much as it is an exceptionalist one. Whereas a Christian might say, "Faith in God leads to salvation", a Wahhabist would simply say, "Follow the rules and you will go to heaven."

The Wahhabist version of Islam is nearly devoid of a spiritual eidolon. God is not a spiritual entity, but simply the abstraction of a set of rules and orders and rituals. This sect appeals to the young and confused; or the more elder and angry.

To demonize Islam as a faith is to go down a road with no turning. Do we condemn Shi'ites and Sunnis equally? What of the Sufi and the Salafist? Or shall we branch still further and vilify the followers of Zoroaster?

Megan, we are fighting a group of people who have mixed their religious faith up with their anger and disappointment at their own failures as a people. The modern world has passed them by. The Saudis have reaped hundreds of billions through no effort of their own, simply by virtue of being on a lake of oil; and yet with all this unearned wealth they have given the world practically nothing of themselves: no painters, no writers, no scientists, nothing. The modern Arab (I think) feels that he could vanish tomorrow and leave no mark of his passing.

And that is a terribly sad thing.

Monty -

"Do we condemn Shi'ites and Sunnis equally? What of the Sufi and the Salafist? Or shall we branch still further and vilify the followers of Zoroaster?"

Zoroastrianism has only as much connexion to the Koran as the beginning of the Epic of Gilgamesh to the Book of Genesis. I think the point you're missing, or at least not acknowledging, is an important one: UBL is a perfectly faithful Moslem. So were the child-killers of Beslan. Nothing in the Koran condemns any actions they took; on the contrary, countless verses specifically endorse them.

Yes, I'm well aware of the history of Christianity. But we don't do Inquisitions anymore; we had an Enlightenment and a Reformation, and the cultural traditions of democracy and liberty associated with the same cultures that had embraced Christianity were seamlessly incorporated, or at least reconciled with, the religion itself.

Again, this was possible because the central figure in the Christian faith had explicitly and repeatedly renounced all worldly power: retreating from the ideology that led to the Crusades and the slaughter of the Albigensians and the Waldenses was thus less of a heresy than maintaining it. There was nothing intrinsic to the religion that demanded domination and control.

Compare that to Islam. Read this site; read the Koran itself if you can stomach it.

World domination is a central tenet of the Islamic faith. It was commanded by their prophet and is still expected by their god. The only way Moslems can live in peace with the rest of the world is if they're prepared to ignore vast tracts of their holy book - as indeed the overwhelming majority of Christians do also.

Of course, several of the cultural and historical pressures you cited make that rather improbable at present.

Does the road we're on have no turns? Possibly. Is that our fault? No. We didn't write their damned book.

I'm glad too see this much anger. This is just an outrageous display of reckless reporting.

A timely reminder. Monty, let's keep in mind our central goal: crucifying every Newsweek employee on the planet.

Megan:

I won't eat up more of Ace's bandwidth with my bloviating, and we're rapidly approaching the event-horizon of my knowledge on this topic anyway. (Besides, I long for another "dork" or "zombie" thread to lighten things a bit: c'mon Ace, hook a brother up!)

We often speak of the Arabs as though they are incapable of change, that they weigh alternatives and always default to dogmatic obedience to Islam. I guess my belief (my hope) is that the Islamic world will have its Martin Luther, its Gandhi, its Calvin. But these men (or women!) will not arise if we convince the Muslims that we crave not their reformation but their destruction. It will harden them against us, and it will harden us against them. As I said: this is a road with no turning, and at its end is only vastly more bloodshed and sorrow than we can imagine now.

I am a cynic, but of the hopeful rather than hopeless breed.

Fair enough, Monty. I, of course, will continue to hope that you're right and I'm wrong.

"leftists don't essentially give a shit about individual human beings"

Ya mean we're down to 15 now being 'just a statistic'?

And Newsweek *is* negligently responsible for the political and diplomatic trainwreck that will ensue.

[Monty -- that was amazing]

So, does SpewsWEEK get prosecuted?
I wonder if we have extradition treaties with Afghanistan. Hmmm

Oh please, Iblis. Indicting (or condemning, or criticizing, or hell, even disagreeing with) anyone who deliberately incites our enemies to kill us would be a "chill wind" blowing over every American's civil liberties, don'tchaknow. Treason is protected by the ACLU charter if not our irrelevant Constitution...

My mom taught me truthfulness in a very terrifying way: she took me exactly at my word. She made it clear to me that if I ever lied to her, that this complete trust in me would be broken and that things would never be the same between us. I can't say i was always truthful, but I never lied about big or important things to her -- when I told her something, she could believe it. If I couldn't tell her the truth, I said nothing and took the consequences. The truth became a terrifyingly powerful thing in this way; the alternative was utter ruin and despair.

How have we so bastardized the concept of "free speech" to such an extent that we dare not call a lie by name? How can we not punish a lie? The answer is that we have allowed lies to pass without consequence. We did not respect each other enough to demand the truth, and now we are reaping the whirlwind.

let's keep in mind our central goal: crucifying every Newsweek employee on the planet.

I think Megan's got it exactly right.

Michael Isikoff
John Berry
Evan Thomas.

I say we don't let up until these three guys apologize, then lose their jobs.

Yes. There must be vengeance.

GAAAAAANNNNNNOOOOOOOOONNNNNNNNN!

Megan, you are on f'n fire. :)

I second Iblis's proposal. The editors who allowed this crap ought to be extradited to northern Afghanistan and tried under Hazara or Tajik law. Seeing those fuckers locked up in a dusty, cold Mazar al-Sharif prison for a few years would help me sleep a little better at night.

Monty:

Excellent, for the most part, very insightful, very learned.

What I don't necessarily agree with is your next-to-last post that implied it is we (Christian-energized) that would go down a road with no turns if we accept no quarter from the Islamo-theocrats.

It is, in spite of your introduction of minor sects, the mainstream Sunnis and Shi'ites that see the Qu'ranic demand for nothing less than world domination by Islam, by any means possible. That is a scary vision. Far scarier today than the same vision held by Crusaders when the known world was a much smaller place.

Otherwise, your writing is very enlightening. Thanks for stretching my mind.

Since the War on radical Islam started, the Western media has eagerly sought to give aid and comfort to the enemy. Most Muslim atrocities - the photos of head-choppings, the burnt crushed bodies at the Pentagon or Madrid, Zionist civilians ripped to pieces at a disco, the Children of Beslan, corpses of firebombed Hindis, the photos of the body of Van Gough with a knife pinning the Islamic hate note to his chest, the bodies falling and spatting from the WTC - are seldomly shown.

Why, we wouldn't want to promote anti-Islamic bias, don'tcha know!!

Or mention that the usual fate of a discovered Bible in Saudi Arabia or religious tracts in other Religion of Peace countries, is ripping them up and throwing them in the trash and punishing the unlucky Christian found with them.

And we are expected to grovel and apologize for trying to reclaim Christian lands Islam took by the sword 900 years ago. Oh, evil infidels we! Lefties tell us that it is the 3rd most evil thing ever - after the Holocaust and WWII relocation of enemy Jap aliens and their families.

But on the other hand, the media is eager to run any story or sets of photos damaging to America. Exceptionally eager. Every combat casualty is supposed to be a senseless waste whose name is not intoned with honor by cocksuckers like Rather and Kopel...but as tragic victims. Every American battle is proclaimed as lost before it starts. Any inkling of "American atrocities" are run with relish and gladly given out globally by the US media to help bash America.

We know what the traitors at CBS and the NY Times did with Abu Ghraib - told the world this wasn't a deranged pack of sadistic inbred hillbillys having fun - no, it was America - America itself that did it.

We know that a more patriotic media in WWII would have not run the photos. They would have reported on torture allegations and the trial and if punishment was proper, but they would NOT have run photos intended to inflame hundreds of millions. But today's MSM couldn't resist because it would hurt evil America and the Bush-Hitler. Same with the Guantanomo hype - if it could damage America is was All Good with the MSM.

We know the consequence of the MSM torture stories - US soldiers died in consequence at the hands of Iraqis and Muslim foreigners motivated to kill Americans in Afghanistan and Iraq by the Guantanomo and Abu Ghraib coverage. The media knows it to, knows that one day US soldier or civilian deaths will be laid directly to them, but they just can't resist endangering American troops and civilians abroad because trashing America just feels so good!!!

We just couldn't easily point our fingers at the media traitors within and say the Blood of Spec4 William Jones, LT Jim Chaffey, and Pvt Regina Cooley was shed in consequence of their inflaming the enemy. After all, the insurgents have other reasons they are killing us.

But in Afghanistan, we have 15 dead people, endangered US troops in direct consequence to Newsweeks latest foolhardy exercise in America-bashing.

Let's hope that that senior American official is outed..

Damn it, CF, why does it feel so completely wrong to agree with you even when you're so completely right?

Yay! I found something to pick at!

"Zionist civilians ripped to pieces at a disco"

You're citing this disapprovingly? Huh. First time for everything, I suppose...

(Phew, that was a close one.)

I'll bet you anything that the "unnamed source" never said a damned word about Korans or toilets; I'm guessing he said a lot of other stuff and the reporter, seeking to put that perfect little finishing touch on the article, decided to, um, sex it up a bit by reporting the Koran-desecration stuff which had probably been tossed around by some former prisoner and make it more official by jamming it in with the military guy's statements. Anyone writing a final paper on deadline has probably fallen prey, at least once, to the tendency to overattribute to one source several facts which aren't actually *in* the source but which you *know* are true. I'm guessing that's what these people did.

And Cedarford has a good point about the usual fate of a Bible in certain countries. But it's their culture, don't you know. We poor sods who are cultureless just don't deserve that kind of respect, I guess.

I would point out that Christian tolerance (between Protestantism and Roman Catholicism) has less to do with Martin Luther and everything to do with the 30 Years War. Religious tolerance was not the goal of ANY of the combatants, victory and eradication of the other sect was. However, after millions upon millions were left rotting in the European countryside, the exhausted belligerents were grudgingly willing to settle for tolerance.

I suspect (unhappily) that the Islamic world (the Arabic section in particular) will only "reform" if it breaks itself again and again against Western (probably American) military might. When it is clear that jihad is futile and the very idea of holy war is viewed scornfully then you may see the rise of the possibly mythical "moderate Muslim majority."

I'm shocked and appaled . . .

that this story isn't true.

What are we doing down there if not seriously fucking with the jihadis' minds. We should be dropping Korans into the ditch latrines. Anything to fuck up their world.

I heard someone on the radio just now say Newsweek has apologized but has not retracted its statements. Does what ace quoted actually suffice as a formal retraction? Or, is this just another word game?

Actually, you idiots, OF COURSE THE KORAN WAS RIPPED UP AND 'DESECRATED' BEFORE PRISONERS. Newsweek retracted the story because they're total pussies. There are hundreds of independant reports that this shit went down - and frankly I think it's a lot mellower than torturing people to death, which is something we've also been doing. Fuck Islam and Fuck Christianity too.

Monty:
“How have we so bastardized the concept of "free speech" to such an extent that we dare not call a lie by name? How can we not punish a lie? The answer is that we have allowed lies to pass without consequence. We did not respect each other enough to demand the truth, and now we are reaping the whirlwind.”

You're almost correct, Monty. We don't "allow" lies to pass without consequence, we actually encourage them. Sensationalism in the media triggers debate, conflict and confusion. A confused electorate is easy to control. Goebbels once said:

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”

Goebbels also said:
“It is the absolute right of the State to supervise the formation of public opinion.”

Remind you of any recent events in the US? For my money, you cannot read that and not think of the Bush administration and it's role in tthe war in Iraq.

And that's my $.02 worth....