Wednesday, August 6, 2003
Also, in today's update from HonestReporting (not yet up on their web site):
On Wednesday, Israel released 339 Palestinian prisoners as a goodwill gesture to support the road map peace process, despite the absence of any such Israeli obligation under the actual terms of the road map.
In response to Israel's announcement of the prisoner release, Yassir Arafat made the following derisive statement to reporters on Tuesday: "They say they are going to release 400, and then they turn around and arrest 800. What is this? Deception? Are they laughing at us? Is this the implementation of the road map?"
HonestReporting asks: What 800 recent arrests was Arafat referring to? No reports in the recent past indicate any arrests of that magnitude (though scattered IDF anti-terror raids have included some 50 arrests).
Yet London's The Guardian not only quoted Arafat in full, but repeated his "mass arrests" claim as actual fact: "The list of 342 [prisoners] fell about 200 short of the number the Israelis said they would free...Hundreds more have been arrested in the meantime."
HonestReporting encourages readers to challenge The Guardian to provide evidence for their claim that "hundreds" of Palestinians have been recently arrested — a claim used by The Guardian to downplay, in cynical fashion, the significance of Israel's large-scale prisoner release.
Comments to: letters@guardian.co.uk
Impression: Typical. Arafat can pretty much say what he wants and he knows damn well that a sufficient amount of the press will be either sympathetic enough to repeat the lie unchallenged, or too lazy to do the fact-checking themselves so that his mere statements will make the reality, rather than damage his credibility as they should.
