Wow it's all over!!

Now I can put my feet up- and have a cup of tea and five minutes' peace!

The presentation went very well I thought, apart from we were all squished up one corner, we didn't plan for that, we should have done a dry run in the actual room I guess, to make it flow a bit smoother. Other than that we did good (Jennifer if you're reading this, WELL BLOODY DONE YOU!!! You did so well!)

I feel so weird. I can never normally stand up in front of people never mind have answered all those questions instead of cowering at the back. Hopefully I did ok and nobody suspected I was posessed or something.

The other group seemed well presented and obviously knew their stuff but I thought their Powerpoint was too complicated- I was too busy watching all those rapidly changing images that flickered quickly instead of paying attention to what was being said, whereas our was simple but did the job without stealing the show. (Well done Robin, you star!)

As well as that their content was.. erm.. biased? It felt at the end like they were saying 'yeah well the IRA blew stuff up, and the Palestinians are blowing themselves as well as buildings up, but that's ok because they're Palestinians. Not Irish people.' It felt too much like they approved Palestinian action and hated the big bad Jews and so terrorism's okay if you're a Muslim.

It's not okay no matter what the circumstances, and I'm very strongly biased myself being Jewish Irish descent (yeah I know, check that out! LOL) but if you're gonna do a 'good guy terrorist' and a 'bad guy terrorist' then at least the IRA had the decency to make the phone call before they let rip. The b*stards who did 7/7 never did so some lives could have been saved, so therefore their actions have nothing to do with politics and everything to do with killing as many people as possible. You can make a statement with explosives and have the minimum amount of casulaties possible.

(Yes, yes, I KNOW it's Morton's fork, but there's keeping your honour, and there's taking five minutes to have a bit of human decency. Plus I have a weird take on the whole IRA thing because I've an Irish Catholic Father and an English Protestant Mom, and one of the first things I ever had to learn was which side of the pavement to walk on in Belfast and how to duck when the locals of whichever area I happened to be visiting found out what my parents were.)

I'll stop now because I'm biased and off topic but they'd have been better off doing a presentation that says 'terrorist type a does this, this and this. terrorist b does this this and that' instead of making a moral judgement and trying to sway the audience. They didn't really go into the causes of the Israel/ Palestine conflict anyway, they only did the most obvious causes instead of the real issues that are beneath the surface (i.e, it's all about religion- the Muslims and the Jews have hated each other for a thousand years now to the point of wanting to exterminate the other... I'm not pointing fingers just stating a fact... and neither will give way. Ever.)

I'm not going to just slag off their presentation though. It looked very professional and they'd put a lot of work into it and I was very impressed, actually a little intimidated, by the competition when we went up to talk...

It was very mean of our lecturers to NOT tell us they were going to film us though! It's awful enough having to stand up but that camera was truly evil. I shall have to dispatch my trusty ninja troops to raid Mark's office if he doesn't destroy that tape LOL

Right, we did the work and did our best. I'm satisfied, and signing off now. To the whole group if you're reading this, I loved doing this module with you and Happy Chrimbo to you all!

Katherine