One Thousand Shades of Grey

1986 was a strange year for me I was eleven; my best friend was a ten year old haemophiliac. 1986 was the year my great grandmother died at the age of 89, my cat that I’d known all my life got run over and my best friend got injected with HIV contaminated blood by the National Health Service at the local children’s hospital. Haemophilia is a condition that restricts your blood from clotting; put simply a small cut would without medication continue to bleed indefinitely, where as in an average human the blood would coagulate and a scab would form. That year we had been riding our skateboards together and my friend had accidently hit a parked car, if it had been me there would have just been some minor bruising but for him this meant a visit to the hospital to stop any internal bleeding. The treatment he received (factor8) was to be ultimately fatal to him. I remember being told by the adults that my friend had AIDS, this turned out to be not entirely correct, but HIV/AIDS was at the ti...

So like many people I opened my paper yesterday to be confronted by pictures of the three dead children of the Samouni family in Gaza, like most people it sickened me to my stomach so I was both surprised and disgruntled that the first person I heard mention it when I went into town was sticking to the same old line of “its justifiable, Israel are just defending themselves”. I have tried to understand this ideology but it just doesn’t really hold any water, in a purely statistical sense it is recorded that only 13 Israelis have been killed by rocket attacks from Gaza since the attacks started in 2001, so how can that justify the continuous years of massacres and brutality perpetrated on a people forcefully evicted from their homes in what is now part of the state of Israel and pushed into the Gaza strip by a foreign aggressor? The Gaza strip is only 25 miles long and at its widest about seven miles wide, so not dissimilar to the Isle of Wight except it has a population of approximate...