Radical Islamic clerics and their followers are refusing to accept Newsweek’s apology for printing unsourced lies about Gitmo investigators “desecrating the Quran:” Muslims skeptical over Newsweek back-track on Koran.

Can you blame them? There hasn’t been a story this useful for whipping up anti-American rage since Abu Ghraib.

KABUL (Reuters) - Muslims in Afghanistan and Pakistan were skeptical Monday about an apparent retraction by Newsweek magazine of a report that U.S. interrogators desecrated the Koran and said U.S. pressure was behind the climb-down.

The report in Newsweek’s May 9 issue sparked protests across the Muslim world from Afghanistan, where 16 were killed and more than 100 injured, to Pakistan, India, Indonesia and Gaza.

Newsweek said Sunday the report might not be true.

“We will not be deceived by this,” Islamic cleric Mullah Sadullah Abu Aman told Reuters in the northern Afghan province of Badakhshan, referring to the magazine’s retraction.

“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.”

Speaking of illiterate peasants, Markos Moulitsas “Screw Them” Zuniga’s opinion is remarkably similar to that of Mullah Sadullah: Daily Kos :: The Right’s crusade against truth. (Hat tip: Soxblog.)

Looks like the “progressives” have been given their talking points.

Facts are facts. There are opinions on issues, on which you can have a conservative and a liberal view. But facts are universal. They are not liberal. They are not conservative.

Conservatives can’t deal with facts when it fails their world view. Hence their jihad against the truth.

I love the smell of cognitive dissonance in the morning.

UPDATE at 5/16/05 8:43:52 am:

Notice how Markos uses the words “crusade” and “jihad” interchangeably.