By Tom Gross, National Post, May 25, 2010.
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.
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).
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.
