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Well the truth may be out there, but the lies are certainly in some peoples heads :roll:
Perhaps if more of the population were armed rather than criminals or the police this could have been nipped in the bud quicker.
Yes I know that some accidents would happen too, but the public in the UK are not trusted by those in power either. (possibly with good reason)
Fancy restaurants and Olympic-size pools: What the media won’t report about Gaza
http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2010/05/25/fancy-restaurants-and-olympic-size-pools-what-the-media-won%E2%80%99t-report-about-gaza/By Special to the National Post May 25, 2010 – 9:44 am
By Tom Gross
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-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).
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.
National Post
Tom Gross is a former Middle East correspondent for the London Sunday Telegraph and the New York Daily News.
So starving hard done Palestinians my a*es
:lol:
Well 10 things will change now Jonah’s gone.
1. Statistics will bear some relation to reality
2. A politician smiling will not engender fear in under-fives
3. The Government’s stapler and mobile phone bill will be decimated
4. Number Ten’s press office might answer the phone
5. The Labour Party won’t have to translate what its leader says any more
6. The NHS will no longer need two sets of books
7. There’ll be nobody to save the world
8. Banana imports will halve
9. The PM will no longer be called ‘Rain Man’ behind his back
10. Everyone will be poorer, but much better off :lol:Well at least Pete will have somewhere decent to drink again saying as he wont drink in non-premiership towns. :lol:
And so we wait another day to find out who will be our next Prime Minister. Astonishingly, if we don’t have a new one by Monday morning then Jim Knight, Mike O’Brien, Shahid Malik, Vera Baird, Angela Smith, and Ann Keen – who all lost their seats on Thursday – will still be reporting for work as Ministers. Badger Eyebrows will be flying to Brussels to sign up to a multi-billion bailout of the Euro despite the fact that we had the common sense to stay well away from it (or so we thought). It’s being done under majority voting because the EU have called their currency a “natural disaster”*. A position which will be supported by likely incoming Chief Secretary of the Treasury Vince “I predicted 17 of the last 2 recessions” Cable. Sums it up, really.
For all those who think that this is outrageous, you’re going to love PR…
* Article 122 of the EU Constitution Lisbon Treaty – the thing everybody promised us a referendum on.
@amber wrote:
thats one helluva a rant mr quiet man. i am also concerned about the things you are concerned about but we cant cover all of that in one thread hey?
ok first i didnt start this thread as a sympathy thread i was asking if anyone had been affected by it. i was interested in all aspects of how people could be affected not just those stranded abroad.
affluent upper middle classes who dont deserve our sympathy for being stuck cos they got credit cards. ok. lets take the 3 guys my hubby has stuck in other parts of the world. the guy stuck in dubai is with his wife and 3 kids it is their first ever holiday abroad and they have scrimped and saved for it. they went over the easter break cos it was cheaper than going in the summer holidays. he is stressed out cos he cant afford the hotels and extra food and drink but he has to look after his kids but his insurance havent decided if they will pay out or not. the holiday reps have disappeared and his holiday of a lifetime is a holiday in hell. the guy stuck in cairo took his annual leave time to go and do some charity work and cairo was where they sent him. not affluent, not living it up but heaven forbid he is a do gooder. the guy stuck in india went home for his mothers funeral. he is lucky in he can stay with family but unlucky cos he arranged the flight himself and is being told it will be around 2 weeks before he can get a flight out unless he goes first class which he cant afford.
ordinary people not affluent people who are affected.
I wonder what they would have done if the French or Spanish air traffic controllers had decided to have their annual unpaid leave/strike?
You go abroad, you take your chances. As it is looks like the government over-reacted so they may get their money back.
Charity begins at home too.
Fly to Spain (it’s still open) get a train to London. Hire a car, get to Calais, get on a bus (These can carry lots of people. Talk to the people around you who are also sleeping on the floor and then hire one from a local firm.) Get off in Calais
It’s not rocket science now is it?
I’ve got to be honest and say that I don’t have a lot of sympathy for the estimated 150,000 British people stranded in various parts of the world by the flight ban.
People who take holidays at Easter in places such as Florida, Lanzarote, Thailand and Australia tend to be fairly well to do people – what we would have called the upper middle class twenty years ago or so. They have credit cards with which they can pay for hotels, ferries, train tickets, buses, hire cars and food and in most cases they will have insurance through which they can recoup most if not all of those costs.
Consequently, I’m a bit fed up hearing about these “abandoned” Brits abroad. Nobody forced them to fly to far off places and everyone who does that does it knowing full well that it only take a French or Spanish air traffic controller strike to leave them stranded in some foreign airport for days.
I’m more concerned about the abandoned Brits in council estates plagued by feral youth, crime, drugs and anti-social behaviour.
I’m more concerned about the abandoned Brits jettisoned from their jobs because of unfair foreign competition, cheap immigrant workers or because the foreign owner of their factory has decided close it down and move production to Malaysia.
I’m more concerned about the abandoned Brits whose children struggle to get any sort of education in schools without discipline, where bullying is rife and where a small clique of disruptive pupils hold sway over the majority who just want to learn.
I’m more concerned about the abandoned Brits in hospital corridors and cupboards left to die in squalor and indignity – unfed, unwashed and unwanted – while hospital chief executives enjoy bumper pay rises and protected pensions.
There are millions of abandoned Brits up and down this country who are far more deserving of attention, help and consideration and are left to struggle through no fault of their own than a relatively small number of affluent jet setters who wouldn’t know real hardship if it bit them on the backside. The real abandoned Brits are left to fend for themselves with little hope of rescue from the problems that blight their lives – crime, drugs, unemployment, immigration, rubbish schools, lousy hospitals and so on and so forth.
They are the abandoned Brits we ought to worry about.
@(f)politics? wrote:
Why shouldnt they get in though if prospective lib dem voters didnt try and vote clever “because they wont get in” and vote else where they might start getting a chance, like i said b4 we are a stronghold for lib dems down here and they have always been amazingly good mp’s not a grumble from me on them, so why not lets have a change we aint going very far under the last few decades change is as goos a s arest and all that :D
Have you read the Lib Dem manifesto?
Amnesty on illegal immigrants (Spain tried it, it’s now worse than ever as the new batch hope for an amnesty)
More idiotic non workable windmills and carbon foot-printing.
More powers to the EU.
They still believe in global warming.
Oh yes and if you checked out Cleggs speech on what he would do if he formed a coalition government he dropped proportional representation.
Vince Cable the Lib Dem chancellor also suggested that they would put up VAT the most unfair tax of all.Personally I think non of the 3 are fit to govern.
