Stomach This
One recent Saturday, while plowing through a healthy dollop of baba ghanoush at Jerusalem Bakery near Westport Road and Roanoke, we looked up and saw a little boy with his head wrapped in bandages. Then we saw a lady with a blood-caked face, wailing at the newsmen who were aiming their microphones at her. She pointed at a crater full of rubble. The debris might have been her house, but she was speaking in Arabic, and we don’t understand Arabic.
“Where is this?” we asked the guys behind the counter.
“Iraq,” they said.
It didn’t look like the Baghdad we’d seen on TV — a ziggurat-festooned horizon glowing beneath a symphony of exploding light. This bleeding-woman, crying-kid stuff was something entirely different.
The horror show was being served up by Al-Manar, a Lebanon-based media operation with a Web site that brags about being “the first Arab establishment to stage an effective psychological warfare against the Zionist enemy.”
It’s just part of the exotic fare at Jerusalem Bakery. “I want Jerusalem Bakery to be a place that always provides fresh food and a good atmosphere to watch different types of international news,” says owner Fred Azzeh.
We kept returning to find all kinds of people — long-haired midtowners, a blond real estate agent from Olathe, a black preacher from KCK, two dental students from Kuwait, an Iranian investment broker — staring up at the TV screen while they filled their bellies with steamy stuffed pitas and savory parmesan-pesto mushroom salad.
“I enjoy the food, I enjoy the culture, and I oppose the war intensely,” says Phil Harris, a pastor at Church of God and Christ.
Most of the time, Jerusalem Bakery’s satellite dish is trained on EuroNews, a 24-hour operation boasting calm British voices and a middle ground — somewhere between MSNBC’s “Showdown With Saddam” and Al-Manar’s “Assault Against Iraq.”
“You’re going to see a different angle here,” Harris says. “Americans just want to show how they’ve overcome. Here they show the whole perspective.”
One afternoon, a woman threatened to take her business elsewhere if the guys didn’t change the station. Her son was fighting in Iraq, she said, and she didn’t want to be subjected to gruesome images.
They let the customer slip away. After all, turning the channel to Wolf Blitzer would be like replacing the falafel with ribs. And Kansas City has plenty of barbecue.
