have you believe.....
http://www.tomgrossmedia.com/mideastdispatches/archives/001127.html
He is one sided but the pictures and stats are correct.
Will the Western media show these images?
Please scroll down below for photos of the new shopping mall that
opened today in Gaza. I have also attached new photos and film of
Gaza's hotels, beauty spas, swimming pools, beaches and street markets
-- images the BBC, New York Times and others refuse to show you.
Meanwhile, Hamas are deliberately leaving some Gazans in plastic
tents, in order to fool gullible Western journalists and politicians
who are brought to Gaza to witness a staged "humanitarian crisis."
(Photo of a new mall that opened today, July 17, 2010. If there "are
no building materials allowed into Gaza" how did they build this
shopping center, or the new Olympic-size swimming pool pictured
below?)
Two days ago the EU pledged tens of millions of EU taxpayers' euros to
add to the hundreds of millions already donated to Gaza this year,
much of which has been misused to procure arms.
UPDATE, Sunday July 18, 2010:
Some journalists who subscribe to this list have asked me for a quote.
You are welcome to use the following.
Political and media commentator Tom Gross said:
"On a day when (because EU Foreign Policy Chief Baroness Ashton is in
Gaza) the BBC and other media have featured extensive reports all day
long on what they term the dire economic situation in Gaza, why are
they not mentioning the new shopping mall that opened there yesterday?
"When leading news outlets mention the so-called humanitarian
flotillas from Turkey, why do they omit the fact that life expectancy
and literacy rates are higher, and infant mortality rates are lower in
Gaza than corresponding rates in Turkey? Have they considered that
perhaps the humanitarian flotillas ought to be going in the other
direction, towards Turkey?"
WHAT HUMANITARIAN CATASTROPHE?
Last year, this website revealed to a Western audience pictures of the
bustling, crowded food markets of Gaza that the Western media refuse
to show you. Earlier this year, I reported the new Olympic-size
swimming pool of Gaza (no shortage of building materials or water
here) and the luxury restaurants, where you can "dine on steak au
poivre and chicken cordon bleu". (Over 300,000 people have viewed
photos on that webpage since May, according to my website monitor.)
Now I want to draw attention to the fact that this morning, on the day
that the EU again criticized Israel (but not Egypt) for supposedly
oppressing Gazans, on a day when the BBC TV world news headlines again
lead with a report about how "devastated the economy in Gaza is," an
impressive new shopping mall opened in Gaza (photos below, followed by
a selection of other photos from Gaza).
Will those Western journalists who write stories about "starvation" in
Gaza and compare it to a "concentration camp" report this?
Instead of reporting on the mall opening, the British-based
international satellite broadcaster Sky News reported today "The
humanitarian situation in Gaza remains dire."
NEW GAZA SHOPPING MALL
Photos from Saturday, July 17, 2010:
More photos here.
Here is a news report in Arabic on the opening of the mall from
today's Palestine Times. (Click on each of these thumbnails to view
the full photos.)
This is the official website of the Gaza mall. (UPDATE July 22, 2010:
Warning note: Some browsers have reported that there may be a virus
attached to the Gaza Mall site if you open it, but many others,
including mine, have not found this to be the case. In any event, so
many people have been directed to the Gaza mall website -- www.gazamall.ps
-- from this website that the mall's website's bandwidth has been
exceeded so currently you will be unable to access the site in any
case if you open it. I have posted a screenshot below, translated from
Arabic.)
UPDATE, July 20, 2010
More pictures of the mall here, here, and here from The Palestine
Times.
And this video of the mall has today gone up on YouTube. (The captions
that have been added to this video are not mine, nor do I approve of
all of them.)
The mall is being widely featured in media throughout the Arab world,
for example here (courtesy of AP), but why the continuing silence from
Western media who subscribe to AP and who continue to cover "the
situation in Gaza" day after day without mentioning the economic
progress there?
The mall includes a supermarket, international clothing stores, a food
court, beauty products, a children's playground, a restaurant, an
underground carpark, and much-needed air conditioning. The mall is not
only for Gaza's elite. Tens of thousands of shoppers from Rafah to
Beit Hanoun have already visited the site within a matter of days,
according to Palestinian press reports.
"There are international firms such as Adidas and Lacoste and Paris'
top selling perfumes," said the head of the mall's board of directors,
Salah a-Din Abu Abdo. "Nevertheless, the local traders and businessmen
are those running the business. I hope that in the future we'll get
merchandise from other foreign chains wanting to open branches here."
UPDATE, July 21, 2010
Yediot Ahronot, Israel's largest newspaper, whose editors subscribe to
this email list, has now covered the mall.
UPDATE, July 21, 2010
The National Post, one of Canada's largest newspapers, almost alone
among Western media has run a comment piece about the Gaza mall and
also referring to this (Tom Gross media) webpage.
UPDATE, July 21, 2010
Glen Beck today showed the mall on his show on Fox. He said that the
media will gladly show you a "Palestinian with a bloody face but won't
show you the Gaza shopping mall."
It is fine that Fox have featured the mall, but why aren't the BBC,
CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, NBC, NPR, PBS and others interested in a
balance, rounded approach to covering Palestinian issues?
UPDATE, July 22, 2010
While almost all Western journalists based in the Middle East are
continuing to refuse to report on the Gaza shopping mall (or the new
Gaza children's water park, or the new swimming pools and restaurants
and resorts), this dispatch has now been linked to in several
prominent blogs, among them that of former U.S. presidential
speechwriter David Frum, Stephanie Gutmann at the (London) Daily
Telegraph, Mark Krikorian and Jonah Goldberg on National Review's The
Corner, Melanie Phillips on the website of the British magazine The
Spectator, Tim Montgomerie at Conservative Home (under "more here"),
Charles Johnson at Little Green Footballs and Miriam Shaviv at The
(London) Jewish Chronicle.
BIAS IN A LEAGUE OF ITS OWN
Before I draw attention to other photos below, please let me restate
again my overall position since several other commentators have
misrepresented it recently:
I have consistently supported the creation of an independent
Palestinian Arab state alongside Israel since I first became
interested in politics. But there is no point in creating a new
Palestinian state if it will primarily be used as a launching ground
for armed attacks on Israel, which would only in turn likely lead to a
much bloodier war between Israelis and Palestinians than anything we
have witnessed in the past.
In order to make sure any Palestinian state is peaceful, and respects
human rights for both its own citizens and its neighbors, it is
crucial for Western policy-makers not be misled into making bad policy
(as they have so often done in the past) in part, at least, as a
result of believing the utter distortions of Western journalists, who
greatly exaggerate the suffering of Palestinians and consistently
cover up for the misdeeds of Hamas and Fatah.
Of course, one should not forget that the media is full of stereotypes
and mistakes about other issues. Yet when every allowance has been
made, the sustained bias against Israel is in a league of its own.
I am not for one moment suggesting that Israeli misdeeds should not be
fully and unsparingly reported on (and indeed Israel being a vigorous
democracy, such misdeeds are widely reported on in the Israeli media
itself, and debated in the Israeli Knesset). But propagating the
falsehoods of Fatah and Hamas propagandists has done nothing to
further the legitimate aspirations of ordinary Palestinians, any more
than parroting the lies of Stalin helped ordinary Russians.
Such bias, I believed, is not only wrong in itself but seriously
detrimental to international efforts to bring about peace between
Palestinians and Israelis.
MALNOURISHMENT?
These are some of the photos previously carried on the dispatch "Fancy
restaurants and Olympic-size swim pools: what the media won't report
about Gaza" (May 25, 2010).
Above: the courtyard of the Roots restaurant in Gaza.
Above: A part of the restaurant's 12-page menu, which includes a wide
range of meat, poultry and seafood dishes. The restaurant is popular
with Gazans holding weddings and other celebrations, UN and NGO
workers, and foreign journalists.
Here are more pictures of the restaurant. (Also see more pictures of
Roots further down this dispatch.)
EVERYDAY LIFE FOR ORDINARY GAZANS
Whereas the restaurant above is one of those popular with wealthier
Gazans, the pictures below show life for ordinary people in Gaza.
These photos of Gaza are from the November 26, 2009 edition of the
Hamas-controlled Gazan newspaper, Palestine Today. It is hardly the
"World War II-era concentration camp" that some Western journalists
and commentators have claimed Gaza resembles.
Fruit and vegetable markets
Sweets on sale in an outdoor market
A cake shop and a bakery
A children's clothing store
Tom Gross adds: As I have written before, of course there is poverty
in parts of Gaza. There is poverty in parts of Israel too. But 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?
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 U.K. We could produce the same
effect by selectively filming seedy parts of Paris and Rome and New
York and Los Angeles too.
MAYBE THE TURKISH FLOTILLAS ARE GOING IN THE WRONG DIRECTION?
In Turkey, life expectancy is 72.23 and infant mortality is 24.84 per
1,000 births.
In Gaza, life expectancy is 73.68 and infant mortality is 17.71 per
1,000 births.
Turkey has a literacy rate of 88.7% while in Gaza it is 91.9%. (It is
much lower in Egypt and other Arab countries where Israel did not
establish colleges and universities in the 1970s and 1980s.)
Gaza's GDP is not as high as Turkey's but it is higher than some other
places in the Arab world, and it is much, much higher than most of
Africa that gets 1,000th of the aid per capita that Gaza gets from the
West.
(Source for above info: CIA World Factbook)
World hunger organizations report that 10-15 million children below
the age of 5 die each year, and 50,000 people die daily. One-third of
all deaths in the world are due to poverty.
While famine kills millions of children in Africa, India, and
elsewhere, life expectancy for Gaza Arabs, at 72 years, is nearly five
years higher than the world average. In Swaziland, for example, life
expectancy is less than 40 years, and it is 42 years in Zambia.
Meanwhile Western governments, misled by Western media, continue to
pour more and more money into Gaza for people that don't need it,
while allowing black Africans to starve to death.
As the correspondent for one of Japan's biggest newspapers said to me
last week, "Gaza and the West Bank are the only places in the world
where I have seen refugees drive Mercedes."
Photo above: India, where hundreds of millions live in poverty.
Photo above: A beach in Gaza.
STEAK AU POIVRE AND CHICKEN CORDON BLEU
(Repeat item from May 2010 dispatch.)
If you drop by the Roots Club in Gaza, according to the Lonely Planet
guidebook for Gaza and the West Bank, 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).
Please take a look at the pictures on the above website. They are not
the kind of things you see in The New York Times or CNN or in
Newsweek, whose international edition last week had one of the most
disgracefully misleading stories about Gaza I have ever seen,
portraying it in terms which were virtually reminiscent of Hiroshima
after a nuclear blast.
And here is a promotional video of the club restaurant:
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