That didn't stop Goldstone from believing it and quoting it uncritically in his infamous report. And that hasn't stopped this ridiculous lie to be found all over the Internet.
In early 2010, Addameer inflated this already absurd number even more, to "nearly 800,000."
And now, thanks to an article written by the Fatah Foreign Relations Commission that was published in Ma'an, we see that another hundred thousand Palestinian Arabs have been supposedly arrested in the past 20 months - 5000 every month!
The article, supposedly a rejoinder to AP's fact check on Mahmoud Abbas' speech that I had discussed briefly last week, is filled with so many lies that it would take a couple of hours to go through it. But this one is enough to show that Fatah has zero interest in truth:
AP omits that since the Israeli occupation began in 1967, almost 900,000 Palestinians have been detained by Israeli forces.
(PCHR counts about 80 arrests for September, which was a relatively high number of arrests due to the violence at the beginning of the month - and quite a bit less than 5000!)
The capacity of Palestinian Arab spokespeople to lie is infinite.
I am looking forward to the date in 2012 when Israel will be blamed for its millionth arrest, and when credulous media reports the lie without any skepticism.
(h/t CHA)
UPDATE: The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics just released a report claiming 750,000 arrests since 1967. Again, no methodology is given for how they come up with this (h/t CHA)