Fancy restaurants and Olympic-size pools: What the media won’t report about Gaza

IMRA ^ | 5-27-10

[SJackson]

Tom Gross on Fancy restaurants and Olympic pools in Gaza

Fancy restaurants and Olympic-size pools: What the media won’t report about Gaza
By Tom Gross
The National Post
May 25, 2010

For item with links to videos, etc.:

http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2010/05/25/fancy-restaurants-and-olympic-size-pools-what-the-media-won%E2%80%99t-report-about-gaza

In recent days, the international media, particularly in Europe and the Mideast, has been full of stories about “activist boats sailing to Gaza carrying desperately-needed humanitarian aid and building materials.”

The BBC World Service even led its world news broadcasts with this story at one point over the weekend. (The BBC yesterday boasted that its global news audience has now risen to 220 million persons a week, making it by far the biggest news broadcaster in the world.)

Indeed the BBC and other prominent Western media regularly lead their viewers and readers astray with accounts of a non-existent “mass humanitarian catastrophe” in Gaza.

What they won’t tell you about are the fancy new restaurants and swimming pools of Gaza, or about the wind surfing competitions on Gaza beaches, or the Strip’s crowded shops and markets. Many Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza live a middle class (and in some cases an upper class) lifestyle that Western journalists refuse to report on because it doesn’t fit with the simplistic story they were sent to write.

Here, courtesy of the Palestinian Ma’an news agency, is a report on Gaza’s new Olympic-sized swimming pool . (Most Israeli towns don’t have Olympic-sized swimming pools. One wonders how an area that claims to be starved of water and building materials and depends on humanitarian aid builds an Olympic size swimming pool and creates a luxury lifestyle for some while others are forced to live in abject poverty as political pawn refugees?)

And if you pop into the Roots Club in Gaza, according to the Lonely Planet guidebook, you can “dine on steak au poivre and chicken cordon bleu”.

The restaurant’s website in Arabic gives a window into middle class dining and the lifestyle of Hamas officials in Gaza. And here it is in English, for all the journalists, UN types and NGO staff who regularly frequent this and other nice Gaza restaurants (but don’t tell their readers about them).

And here is a promotional video of the club restaurant. In case anyone doubts the authenticity of this video, I just called the club in Gaza City and had a nice chat with the manager who proudly confirmed business is booming and many Palestinians and international guests are dining there.

In a piece for The Wall Street Journal last year, I documented the “after effects” of a previous “emergency Gaza boat flotilla,” when the arrivals were seen afterwards purchasing souvenirs in well-stocked shops. (You can also scroll down here for more pictures of Gaza’s “impoverished” shops.)

But the mainstream liberal international media won’t report on any of this. Playing the manipulative game of the BBC is easy: if we had their vast taxpayer funded resources, we too could produce reports about parts of London, Manchester and Glasgow and make it look as though there is a humanitarian catastrophe throughout the UK. We could produce the same effect by selectively filming seedy parts of Paris and Rome and New York and Los Angeles too.

Of course there is poverty in Gaza. There is poverty in parts of Israel too. (When was the last time a foreign journalist based in Israel left the pampered lounge bars and restaurants of the King David and American Colony hotels in Jerusalem and went to check out the slum-like areas of southern Tel Aviv? Or the hard-hit Negev towns of Netivot or Rahat?)

But the way that many prominent Western news media are deliberately misleading global audiences and systematically creating the false impression that people are somehow starving in Gaza, and that it is all Israel’s fault, can only serve to increase hatred for the Jewish state – which one suspects was the goal of many of the editors and reporters involved in the first place.

Tom Gross is a former Middle East correspondent for the London Sunday Telegraph and the New York Daily News.

(A longer version of this article appears here: www.tomgrossmedia.com/mideastdispatches/archives/001114.html )

[SJackson]

Middle East and terrorism, occasional political and Jewish issues Ping List. High Volume

If you’d like to be on or off, please FR mail me.

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Like anywhere else, it's important government officials live well.

[subterfuge]

“activist boats sailing to Gaza carrying desperately-needed humanitarian aid and building materials.”

Actually, the "humanitarians" are just going there to party with the donations they received from gullible liberals.

[SJackson]

From Tom Gross' blog

BLAIR’S SISTER-IN-LAW: GAZA IS “WORLD’S LARGEST CONCENTRATION CAMP”

In an appalling insult to Holocaust survivors everywhere, British journalist Lauren Booth said last week that the situation in Gaza was just like a “concentration camp,” and added that the “humanitarian crisis in Gaza is on the scale of Darfur.”

Booth’s brother-in-law, Quartet envoy to the Middle East Tony Blair, does not share her views. Her sister, Tony Blair’s wife Cherie Blair, once made comments appearing to justify Palestinian suicide bombs against Israeli school buses, but later apologized for the remarks.

Lauren Booth was recently issued a Palestinian passport by Hamas. Here is a photo from AFP (Agence France Presse) of Lauren Booth shopping in a grocery store in Gaza a few days before she made her Israeli “concentration camp” comments. Does it look like Auschwitz, or Darfur?

Here she is again in Gaza last week

And here she is meeting Hamas terrorist leader, Ismail Haniyeh, who presents her with a special Palestinian “diplomatic passport”.

Booth writes for several British newspapers, including the Daily Mail, New Statesman, Mail on Sunday and the Sunday Times, and is often a guest on the BBC.

[Big Mack]

The donations do not come from “gullible liberals”. Libs are great at using other peoples money, but real slow donating their own. Most donations come from gullible Christians or conservatives

[pyx]

I highly recommend you post recently DATED photographs WITH clearly worded captions of the Gaza fancy restaurants and swimming pools. Items like these have a way of making the rounds, if you know what I mean.

[subterfuge]

The donations do not come from “gullible liberals”. Libs are great at using other peoples money, but real slow donating their own. Most donations come from gullible Christians or conservatives

How about we just go with "stupid people?"

[Eleutheria5]

The Israeli blockade has made it nearly impossible to get any good sea food. Look at these lobsters. They’re undersized!

[SJackson]

Undersized, but oil free.

[SJackson]

Yes. Wish there were more out there. They’re not exactly press friendly in Gaza if you don’t tow the line, I’m surprised these are publicly available.

[onyx]

That's a photo worth a thousand words! Nice going SJackson for exposing "the hypocrisy of this lying UK WHORE FOR JIHAD" to quote Yehuda with whom I whole heartedly agree!

I also took a look at the mentioned Roots Club.

[SJackson]

It's a nice website, probably a nice restaurant.

Is that a napkin or someones wife?

[onyx]

ROTFLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOL

A black napkin? Well, MAYBE!