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 )