This is not a happy story; it has a sad beginning and a sad end.  No one was physically hurt, though the emotional pain lives on.

I was talking recently with a close friend of mine of whether he had lost many friends following 7 October.  I can say that any friends who I might have lost disappeared 12 years ago during Operation Protective Edge in 2014.  For my friend though, this was not about him it was about his son David.

David is a very bright young man and was studying at a prestigious university in the UK. David is Jewish. One of the members of his friend group was a fellow student called Iqbal. A Muslim man. Iqbal is fiercely intelligent and in sometime in 2022 or 2023 Iqbal had a problem.  He had known for a while that he was gay and whilst his student friends knew this, his family didn’t.  Iqbal finally plucked up the courage to tell his family, with disastrous results.  They disowned........

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