Who Shot Mohammed?

When I first sat down to read "Who Shot Mohammed Al-Dura?" I really had no expectations for it, and I really did not care to read it at all. As I got into the first page or so, it drew my interest closer and closer as it went on. I do not remember the incident as it happened, because I've barely paid attention to politics until the last year or so. I guess the part that caught my attention was how the Palestinian world martyred Mohammed so quickly, and actually martyred him at all. I guess in the Palestinian world a martyr is perceived differently then what I am accustomed to. The other interesting part is the amount of evidence that is stacked up to rebuttal the claim that the Israeli's shot Mohammed Al-Dura. I think James Fallows does a good job of showing the sides of the incident, and then focuses on the hard evidence a lot towards the middle and the end.

When Fallows shows the evidence that rebuttals the Palestinian version of the incident, he talks about a teacher at the Israel Military Academy, Gabriel Weimann, and when his class was assigned a project a student stood up and said "I was there, we didn't do it" and then Weimann just says "prove it." The kids went on to do a project that proves to them, that the Israeli's did not do it. Fallows also introduced Nahum Shahaf, a physicist and engineer who became obsessed about the shooting. He would keep tapes of the shootings running at all times, just to see if he could spot something he hadn't seen before. Now, Shahaf did some investigating of the physical evident of the shooting. The physical evident showed that the Israeli's could not of shot Mohammed based on physical evidence. This part wasn't a huge shock to me, but the obviousness of the science of it was, and how the Israeli's went out and said that they did it, and apologized, without investigation. Because if they did investigate it, with ease they would've found that it would be near impossible. In the article, Fallows mention a website ( http://www.masada2000.org/al-dura.html) and I went to it when I was done reading it, that's how I know that the article had me interested and hooked on this incident. That website showed pictures, and a video clip of the shooting, and I am convinced that the Israeli's did not shoot Mohammed. It's interesting how the movie clip that it zooms off of Mohammed and his father when shots from a Palestinian post that had a direct shot fired, and how Mohammed's father's first words at the hospital were "They shot my boy in the back" when the only people to the back of them we're Palestinians. The end of the essay had a nice message to it, Fallows ends it with "The case of Mohammed al-Dura suggests the need for much more modest assumptions about the way other cultures-in particular today's embattled Islam-will perceive our truths." This caught my attention because I've always wondered how other cultures perceived things in America that happen, and obvious a lot of the Islam nations do not perceive American too well. I think it's something to think about when Americans ridicule or jump to conclusions about other countries problems.