If, in spite of the
economic crisis and
media coverage, you
have managed to travel
lately - maybe you can
guess where these
photographs were
taken.
DID YOU GUESS RIGHT?
Scroll down for the
answer!
DID YOU GUESS RIGHT?... Gaza!!Wednesday, 26 May 2010
Fancy restaurants and Olympic-size pools:What the media won’t report about GazaSpecial to the National Post May 25, 2010By Tom GrossFancy restaurants and Olympic-size pools: What the media won’t report about GazaMay 25, 2010 – 9:44 am
By Tom Gross
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-size 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?)
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.
National Post
Tom Gross is a former Middle East correspondent for the London Sunday Telegraph and the New York Daily News.
Posted in: Full Comment Tags: Israel, Middle East, Gaza
MORE FROM SPECIAL TO THE NATIONAL POST
Read more: http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2010/05/25/fancy-restaurants-and-olympic-size-pools-what-the-media-won’t-report-about-gaza/#ixzz0p4DXNv8nTom Gross is a former Middle East correspondent for the London SundayTelegraph and the New York Daily News.Tuesday, 19 January 2010
The next time someone sends you a story lamenting the plight of the “poor Palestinians” send them a copy (or print them a copy of this story by Tom Gross one of the most respected Middle Eastreporters (worked for the NY Times in the days when it was truly the newspaper of record)
----------------------------
BUILDING PEACE WITHOUT OBAMA'S INTERFERENCE
Tom Gross
Wall Street Journal, December 2, 2009
It is difficult to turn on a TV or radio or pick up a newspaper these days, without finding some pundit or other deploring the dismal prospects for Israeli-Palestinian peace or the dreadful living conditions of the Palestinians. Even supposedly neutral news reporters regularly repeat this sad tale. "Very little is changing for the Palestinian people on the ground," I heard BBC World Service Cairo correspondent Christian Fraser tell listeners three times in a 45-minute period the other evening.
In fact nothing could be further from the truth. I had spent that day in the West Bank's largest city, Nablus. The city is bursting with energy, life and signs of prosperity, in a way I have not previously seen in many years of covering the region.
As I sat in the plush office of Ahmad Aweidah, the suave British-educated banker who heads the Palestinian Securities Exchange, he told me that the Nablus stock market was the second best-performing in the world so far in 2009, after Shanghai.... Later I met Bashir al-Shakah, director of Nablus's gleaming new cinema, where four of the latest Hollywood hits were playing that day. Most movies were sold out, he noted....Wandering around downtown Nablus the shops and restaurants I saw were full. There were plenty of expensive cars on the streets. Indeed I counted considerably more BMWs and Mercedes than I've seen, for example, in downtown Jerusalem or Tel Aviv.
And perhaps most importantly of all, we had driven from Jerusalem to Nablus without going through any Israeli checkpoints. The government of Benjamin Netanyahu has removed them all....
The shops and restaurants were also full when I visited Hebron recently, and I was surprised to see villas comparable in size to those on the Cote d'Azur or Bel Air had sprung up on the hills around the city. [And l]ife is even better in Ramallah, where it is difficult to get a table in a good restaurant.... In Qalqilya, another West Bank city that was previously a hotbed of terrorists and bomb-makers, the first ever strawberry crop is being harvested in time to cash in on the lucrative Christmas markets in Europe. Local Palestinian farmers have been trained by Israeli agriculture experts and Israel supplied them with irrigation equipment and pesticides....
Palestinian economic growth so far this year -- in a year dominated by economic crisis elsewhere -- has been an impressive 7% according to the IMF, though Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayad, himself a former World Bank and IMF employee, says it is in fact 11%, partly helped along by strong economic performances in neighboring Israel.
In Gaza too, the shops and markets are crammed with food and goods. But while photos from last Friday's Palestine Today newspaper, for example, depict sumptuous Eid celebrations, these are not the pictures you are ever likely to see on the BBC or Le Monde or the New York Times. No, Gaza is not like a "concentration camp," nor is the "humanitarian crisis in Gaza...on the scale of Darfur," as British journalist Lauren Booth (who is also Tony Blair's sister-in-law) has said.
In June, the Washington Post's Jackson Diehl related how Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas had told him why he had turned down Ehud Olmert's offer last year to create a Palestinian state on 97% of the West Bank (with 3% of pre-1967 Israeli land being added to make up the shortfall). "In the West Bank we have a good reality," Abbas told Diehl. "The people are living a normal life".... Nablus stock exchange head Ahmad Aweidah went further in explaining to me why there is no rush to declare statehood, saying ordinary Palestinians need the IDF to help protect them from Hamas, as their own security forces aren't ready to do so by themselves yet.
The truth is that an independent Palestine is now quietly being built, with Israeli assistance. So long as the Obama administration and European politicians don't clumsily meddle as they have in the past and make unrealistic demands for the process to be completed more quickly than it can be, I am confident the outcome will be a positive one....
(Tom Gross is a Middle East analyst and former Jerusalem
correspondent for the Sunday Telegraph.)
The world's first gourmet starvation experience
As the latest absurd flotilla of fools – eight boats carrying no fewer than 700-800 activists -- stages another confrontation with Israel to draw the world’s attention to the ‘humanitarian crisis’ in Gaza, Tom Gross writes a timely piece pointing out that Gaza’s shops and markets are full. In a piece of particularly happy serendipity, Gaza’s first Olympic standard swimming pool was inaugurated yesterday. But as Gross writes, the western media dutifully pump out the party line that Gaza is starving: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.
... 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.
But according to Greta Berlin, of the Free Gaza Movement, the flotilla intends to
break the blockade of the Gaza Strip and tell the world that Israel has no right to starve 1.5 million Palestinians.
Surely the world’s first gourmet starvation experience?
Biased BBC Wednesday, March 18, 2009
sue #On Oath?One of the biggest obstacles to impartial reporting is the language barrier. At the mercy of Palestinian stringers and translators, how can the audience be sure that what they are being told is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth?Tom Gross has something interesting to say about Jeremy Bowen and his former colleague Chris Gunness. Do read it all.
Labels: biased reporting
“Heartbreak” of Gaza: Another Luxury Shopping Mall
Starbucks is all the way down there? We are OPPRESSED!
When next you hear the “outrage” about yet another Muslim rabble-rouser “having” to send a flotilla of “humanitarian aid” to the “oppressed” Palestinians of Gaza, pull this out and send it to your Islamic-appeaser friends.
(See also: “What the Gaza “Pals” Don’t Want You to See”)
The Elder of Ziyon brings us the “heartbreaking” news of the desperation and despair of the Palestinians in Gaza who opened yet another luxury shopping mall this weekend. Oh the humanity!
Grand Opening of the Gaza Mall
On Saturday night, the starving people of Gaza opened up a luxury mall
.At opening ceremonies attended by ministers and government officials, the Gaza Mall is a multi-story shopping center that includes food, clothing, perfumes, shoes, household appliances, office supplies and more.The mall has a website, where we can see that it has air conditioning and parking, as well as delivery and other amenities that one would expect in any major mall.More pictures here
.The humanitarian crisis continues to grow in Gaza.
Also, i just emailed Catherine Ashton, European Union’s foreign policy chief, who is now visiting Gaza, if she will have the opportunity to visit this mall.
The mall web page advertises “Israeli men’s trousers at an attractive price,” men’s shirts from the US, girl’s dresses from France and boy’s pants from Turkey.
And today there is more of the devastating news:
More heartbreaking pictures from the Gaza Mall
PalTimes has dozens of other photos of the ruins, in three photo albums:1 2 3
Thursday 26 August 2010
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