Mea Culpa | Axis Retraction |Axisoflogic.com

On January 2, 2013 we published a story that we picked up from AlterNet.org. It concerned a religious 'fatwa' issued by a Saudi cleric, Muhammed al-Arifi. The fatwa urged rebel fighters attempting to overthrow the government of Syria to engage in 'intercourse marriages' for short periods of time. In essence, the fatwa called for gang-rape of Syrian women over the age of 14.

The trouble is, the report appears to have been completely false.

When we picked up the story, we did assume that AlterNet had done its own fact checking, since we consider it to be a reliable source. Nevertheless, we did our own checking and found nothing to deny the story. In fact, several other media outlets - including Salon Magazine and the English language Press TV (in Iran) - had run with the story as well.

Salon learned they had been duped and withdrew the story. So did AlterNet. And now, so have we.

We apologize for being duped, and for running the story as if it were true. As noted, we did do our own fact checking but it failed to turn up evidence that the story was anything other than as originally reported.

So we apologize first to Muhammed al-Arifi. And we also apologize to our readers.

This should be a lesson to us all. It is easy to rush to judgment; much harder to stop in your tracks when that judgment was wrong.

Axis of Logic editors

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