But, but, but…I thought Israel doesn’t allow any building materials into Gaza?
A fancy new shopping mall has opened in Gaza. Gee, I wonder what they used to build it? And why are there no Western media reporting on it?
To BNI READERS: Please pass this on to other blogs that you frequent.
Via: Tom Gross Media
“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?”
The Gaza Center for shopping the first shopping mall in the Gaza Strip is owned by a group of partners, investors, and consists of the Mall of two levels: the ground is a fast-food restaurant and hypermarket has all the needs of the family and institutions, while the upper floor is dedicated to clothing, shoes and accessories, jewelry, children’s games.
The center is characterized by many advantages, namely:
1 – Location: It is located in the sand beside a mosque near the bottom of the Treasure Tower blessing2 – Air-conditioning: the center is equipped with central units adjustment3 – Service Delivery: The center provides the customers to connect all their needs to the house for free4 – Parking: the Centre has a car park below the tower can be used shopper5 – security officers: Provider of the Centre security men on 24-hour6 – surveillance cameras: Centre equipped with the latest surveillance cameras and alarms7 – reception: is characterized by the center staffed reception and a protocol to guide customers8 – Deposit: The center has a dedicated place to put the secretariats of clients and arms
SECTIONS OF THE GAZA CENTER
Many of those poor ‘starving’ Palestinians regularly dine onSteak au Poivre and Chicken Cordon Bleu at fancy restaurants such as Roots.
If you drop by the Roots Club in Gaza, according to the Lonely Planetguidebook for Gaza and the West Bank, you can “dine on steak au poivre and chicken cordon bleu”. The restaurant’s website in Arabicgives 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:In case anyone doubts the authenticity of this video (which is up on the club’s own website), 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.“Gaza, (May 18, 2010): – Ma’an – Gaza’s first Olympic-standard swimming pool was inaugurated at the As-Sadaka club during a ceremony on Tuesday held by the Islamic Society. Note: Israel doesn’t have an Olympic sized pool.Maybe the Turkish flotillas are going in the wrong direction?
ALL photos are from GazaIn 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 almost as high as Turkey’s and 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.”
Tony Blair’s sister, journalist Lauren Booth, said, “Gaza is the world’s largest concentration camp.”
In an appalling insult to Holocaust survivors everywhere, British journalist Lauren Booth said last week that the situation in Gaza was just like a “concentration camp,” and added that the “humanitarian crisis in Gaza is on the scale of Darfur.”
Here is a photo from AFP (Agence France Presse) of Lauren Booth shopping in a grocery store in Gaza a few days before she made her Israeli “concentration camp” comments. Does it look like Auschwitz, or Darfur?
Her sister, Tony Blair’s wife Cherie Blair, once made comments appearing to justify Palestinian suicide bombs against Israeli school buses, but later apologized for the remarks.
And here is Lauren meeting Hamas terrorist leader, Ismail Haniyeh, who presents her with a special Palestinian ‘diplomatic passport.’
