myBlessedHope

This is an amazing set of articles on the topic of what is Gaza really like.  Is the media really telling us the true story.  Judge for yourself from the pictures below.  Link to full article: Mideast Dispatch

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

May 25, 2010

* While prominent Western media continue to lead their viewers and readers astray with accounts of a non-existent “mass humanitarian catastrophe” in Gaza, fancy restaurants (video below) and an Olympic-size swimming pool open there

* Most Israeli towns don’t have Olympic-size swimming pools

* 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 drop into the Roots Club in Gaza, according to the Lonely Planet guidebook, you can “dine on steak au poivre and chicken cordon bleu” (video, photos below)

* UN-run summer camp for Palestinian children burned to the ground for being “un-Islamic”; UN staff there threatened with murder; UN Security Council fails to react

* It is quite something when the president of a country (Shimon Peres) sees the need to criticize a foreign newspaper, such are the depths that The Guardian sunk to yesterday

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.

Above: A Palestinian newspaper photo (May 18, 2010) shows Gazan children in the newly built Olympic-sized swimming pool which opened earlier this month, despite continuing claims by some Western journalists and NGOs that there are no building materials and a severe shortage of water in Gaza.

Above: Recent photos from one of Gaza’s fruit and vegetable markets, from a cake shop, and from a children’s toy store in Gaza city. Hardly the “World War II-era concentration camp” that some Western journalists have claimed Gaza resembles.

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Update: Thank you to all those commentators that have recommended reading this dispatch, such as Melanie Phillips at the British magazine The Spectator.

This dispatch was also referred to in this Jerusalem Post news article and this Jerusalem Post editorial, and in news articles in The New York Times, The Washington Post and other publications.