Dear HonestReporting Subscriber,
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: [email protected]
— AUTH CARTOON FOLLOW-UP — 
The HonestReporting communique of July 31 addressed syndicated cartoonist Tony Auth’s portrayal of the Israeli security fence as a Star of David that traps Palestinians within:
Weblogger Mike Silverman has found a Nazi propaganda poster from the 1930s that is disturbingly similar to Auth’s cartoon. 
The Nazi version depicts a “Star of David Wall” around various European peoples:
It is unlikely that Tony Auth realized he was replicating a Nazi cartoon. On the other hand, if he didn’t realize, that’s in a sense far more unsettling — that this Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist would independently revive what is historically considered the worst anti-Semitic imagery.
Either way, the appearance of classical Nazi imagery in major American newspapers is certainly alarming.
Comments to Lee Salem, Executive Vice President and Editor of Universal Press Syndicate, distributors of the Auth cartoon: [email protected]
Thank you for your ongoing involvement in the battle against media bias.
HonestReporting.com
