Muntazer al-Zaidi had plotted his shoe-heaving for months,
discussing it openly in the newsroom, according to
colleagues.
So far it looks like a good career move. Job offers to host
Crossfire on Al-Baghdadia Television may be forthcoming.
According to programming director Muzhir al-Khafaji, Zaidi is an
“open-minded man.”
He now enjoys the accolades of the Arab world (while the
restraining journalist next to him is reviled), and a note of
sympathy has even crept into a few American reports on his deed.
They report that he and his family have suffered much during the
American occupation. Was Bush running the “risk” of minimizing
the seriousness of his complaint by shrugging the incident off? a
correspondent on MSNBC pondered.
Bush described the incident as a “sign of a free society,” sort
of like, he recalled, the time a Falun Gong member crashed a
press conference at the White House. Iraq is evidently catching
up to the free world.
But, alas, Iraq’s old brutality, at least in some ways,
stubbornly persists. Al-Zaidi, noted a few reporters, did get
“beaten” as he was dragged away and the primitive propagandistic
instincts of Iraq’s Prime Minister kicked in: he wanted all
footage of the incident confiscated. Reporters also noted that
Zaidi is looking at possibly two years in jail, not for trying to
bean Bush, but for embarrassing Maliki.
Bush acquitted himself well during the incident. He has crashed
on his mountain bike a few times and choked on a pretzel, but
even reluctant historians will have to acknowledge that his
athletic side has proven helpful at several crucial moments
during the war on terror. Before the eyes of the world, as Mark
Steyn has written, he was able to throw out first pitches at
baseball games effectively and now he has calmly dodged Zaidi’s
pair of shoes.
The Secret Service, however, looked pretty leaden. What happens
to an agent who fails to take a shoe for the president? A kernel
of a Clint Eastwood-style movie might be contained in this. Zaidi
was screened, according to the Secret Service, but perhaps a more
astute team would have looked into his eyes and seen his sole.
That he managed to get two throws in, with only Maliki’s hand to
protect Bush, is astonishing.
Heretofore Helen Thomas and Adam Clymer had posed the greatest
threats to Bush. But how could he have anticipated this burst of
media bias? An administration famous for requiring passengers to
take off shoes before boarding planes will now have to ask
reporters to do the same before asking questions.
The thrown shoe holds great cultural significance, according to
the press. It signifies that Bush is regarded by the Arab world
as lower than the dirt on Zaidi’s shoes. “It is the farewell
kiss, you dog,” Zaidi yelled.
Like a phone thrown down, a thrown shoe does offer a note of
finality to a relationship gone awry, and Bush’s press relations
have been marked by nothing if not rancor. “Throwing the shoes at
Bush was the best goodbye kiss ever,” Musa Barhoumeh, editor of
Jordan’s independent Al-Gahd Arabic newspaper, told AFP. It
vividly “expresses how Iraqis and other Arabs hate Bush.”
Western freedoms, however, do come in handy at times, and Zaidi’s
editorial bosses are busy invoking them to call for his release
from jail. “Al-Baghdadia television demands that the Iraqi
authorities immediately release their stringer Muntazer al-Zaidi,
in line with the democracy and freedom of expression that the
American authorities promised the Iraqi people,” they announced
in a statement. “Any measures against Muntazer will be considered
the acts of a dictatorial regime.”
The beneficiaries of Bush’s “freedom agenda” once lifted blue
fingers (after voting) to celebrate the new Iraq. But historians
in tallying up his legacy are more likely to record with
enthusiasm Zaidi’s thrown shoe.
