Free Bush shoe-thrower, Iraqis urge
Al Jazeera

Thousands of Iraqis have demonstrated in Baghdad’s Sadr City in support of a journalist being held in custody after throwing his shoes at George Bush, the US president.

Muntazer al-Zaidi was detained for what the Iraqi government on Monday said was a “barbaric and ignominious act” during a news conference the previous day.

The outgoing US leader, who was making a surprise visit to Baghdad, had just told reporters that while the war in Iraq was not over “it is decisively on its way to being won,” when al-Zeidi got to his feet and hurled abuse – and his footwear – at Bush.

Bush, who had been giving a joint press statement with Nuri al-Maliki, the Iraqi prime minister, ducked behind a podium as the shoes narrowly missed his head.

“Millions of Iraqis or rather millions of the people of the world wish to do what Muntadhar did,” Uday al-Zeidi, Mundathar’s brother, said on Monday.

“Thank God he had the guts to do it and avenge the Iraqi people and the country from those who plunder it and have killed its people.”

Al-Baghdadiya television, his employer, has demanded his release after Yasin Majeed, the prime minister’s media adviser, said al-Zeidi would be tried on charges of insulting the state.

An Iraqi lawyer told the AFP news agency that Zeidi risked a miminum of two years in prison if he is prosecuted for insulting a visiting head of state.

Freedom of expression 

On Monday, al-Baghdadiya suspended its normal programming and played messages of support from across the Arab world. 

A presenter read out a statement calling for his release, “in accordance with the democratic era and the freedom of expression that Iraqis were promised by US authorities”.
   

Iraqis have hailed Zeidi’s actions [AFP]

It said that any harsh measures taken against the reporter would be reminders of the “dictatorial era” that Washington said its forces had invaded Iraq to end.

Demonstrations also took place in the southern city of Basra and Najaf, where some people threw shoes at a US convoy.

Khalil al-Dulaimi, Saddam Hussein’s former lawyer, said he was forming a team to defend Zeidi and that around 200 lawyers, including Americans, had offered their services for free.

“It was the least thing for an Iraqi to do to Bush, the tyrant criminal who has killed two million people in Iraq and Afghanistan,” he said.

“Our defence of Zaidi will be based on the fact that the United States is occupying Iraq, and resistance is legitimate by all means, including shoes.”

In Iraqi culture, throwing shoes at someone is a sign of contempt and the incident is likely to serve as a lasting reminder of the widespread opposition to the US-led invasion of Iraq - the conflict which has come to define Bush’s presidency.
 
“Throwing the shoes at Bush was the best goodbye kiss ever … it expresses how Iraqis and other Arabs hate Bush,” Musa Barhoumeh, editor of Jordan’s independent Al-Gahd newspaper, wrote.

But support has not been entirely universal and some Iraqis believe al-Zeidi crossed the line.

 ”I deem it unnecessary. This thing is unjustifiable. It is an incorrect style. We are not violent. One can voice his opinion in other ways,” one Baghdad resident said.

Bush’s visit to the Iraqi capital came just 37 days before he hands the presidency over to Barak Obama, who has vowed to withdraw troops from Iraq.

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Shock and awe on a shoestring
Khaled Diab, Guardian

Iraqi journalist expressed his contempt for President Bush in a manner familiar in the Arab world: by throwing his shoes

Muntadar al-Zaidi will go down in the annals of popular protest as the man who kissed the Bush presidency goodbye by hurling his shoes at the outgoing president. On Sunday, the Iraqi journalist who works for al-Baghdadiya television, an Iraqi-owned station based in Cairo, stood up during a joint press conference with Iraqi prime minister, Nuri al-Malaki, and threw his shoes at Bush on behalf of the “the widows, the orphans and those who were killed in Iraq”.

While throwing your shoes at someone would be considered insulting in any culture, in the Arab world, the gesture has a special potency: footwear is commonly used to deliver both verbal and physical insult. In Egypt, for example, many popular and colourful insults include the mention of shoes: “You son of a shoe”, “You have shoes for brains”, “You’ll follow me like an old shoe”, etc.

Although their offensiveness is largely lost in translation, delivered in Arabic they are a sure-fire way of getting people’s backs up. But why this obsession with shoes? Does it reflect a weird foot fetish? One shoe-lover I know found the whole episode a terrible waste of a pair of perfectly good shoes.

The offensive power of shoes probably has something to do with the lowly status of the shoe, which resides, downtrodden with its face in the dirt, all the way at the bottom of the clothing hierarchy. That’s why worshippers leave their shoes outside mosques.

That is probably why hot-blooded working-class Egyptian women sometimes take off their shoes or slippers to hit men who harass them on the street: to show that the man belongs in the gutter and is not worthy of contempt. Bizarrely and inexplicably, slapping someone on the back of the neck and calling them a “nape” (’afa) is also a huge insult.

“This is your farewell kiss, you dog!” Zaidi yelled, delivering a second insult, popular in Arabic. In English, there is a gender distinction. While “bitch” is an insult, “dog” has less impact in English. But the same does not hold in the Arab world: if you call someone “ibn kalb” (son of a dog), you’re insulting both the person and his forebears.

The reason could be a difference in cultural perceptions, while dogs in the Anglo-Saxon world are widely seen as “man’s best friend”, in the Muslim world, dogs are regarded as impure animals and usually not kept as pets, except for security purposes. Other popular insults involve mothers and fathers, genitalia and graphic sexual acts, as in many other languages, and, as the word “swearing” in English implies, religion, such as “Curse the religion of your father”.

While this “shoe incident” is little consolation for the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who have suffered under the crush of the Bush administration’s boots, many Arabs are applauding Zaidi’s audacity while others believe he overstepped the bounds of decorum. Let’s just hope that journos will not, as a consequence of this isolated act, be forced, under new Homeland Security regulations, to remove their shoes before entering White House briefings and other presidential media events.

Zaidi has been arrested for his act. Of course, had he caused Bush physical injury, he could have been charged for that. But his action was essentially one of freedom of expression, which includes the freedom to cause offence. If President Bush believes in any of his own rhetoric, he should join the chorus of voices calling for the journalist’s immediate release.

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Brother Explains Shoe-Tossing Iraqi Journalist’s Anger
By Riyadh Muhammad, NY Times

BAGHDAD — The brother of Muntader al-Zaidi, the Iraqi journalist who threw his shoes at President Bush during a joint press conference on Sunday with Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, said Monday that he was “proud of his brother — as all Iraqis would be.”

Muntader al-Zaidi remains in Iraqi custody. When his brother, Maythem al-Zaidi, 28, called his cell phone at midnight, a man claiming to be one of the prime minister’s bodyguards answered. Maythem al-Zaidi said that the bodyguard threatened, “that they will get us all.”

Hitting someone with a shoe is a particularly strong rebuke in Iraqi culture. Although the president was uninjured, the incident overshadowed media coverage of the trip in the Arab world. And it has transformed Muntader al-Zaidi into a symbolic figure in the debate about the American military’s presence in Iraq.

Maythem al-Zaidi said his brother had not planned to throw his shoes prior to Sunday. “He was provoked when Mr. Bush said [during the news conference] this is his farewell gift to the Iraqi people,” he said. A colleague of Muntader al-Zaidi’s at al-Baghdadiya satellite channel, however, said the correspondent had been “planning for this from a long time. He told me that his dream is to hit Bush with shoes,” said the man, who would not give his name.

Muntader al-Zaidi appears to have a long-standing dislike of the United States presence in Iraq. He used to finish his reports by saying he was in “the occupied Baghdad.” His brother said that he hates the occupation so strongly that he canceled his wedding, saying: “I will marry when the occupation is over.”

The correspondent for Al Baghdadiya, an independent Iraqi television station, had previously been detained in November 2007 for two weeks by “a particular party” — his brother didn’t reveal whether American or Iraqi –- after videotaping the scene of an improvised explosive device that targeted an American Humvee. He was held again two months later for several hours by the American army without charges, his brother said. Other reports said he had been kidnapped by Shiite militants.

Muntader al-Zaidi was the head of the student union under Saddam Hussein and he earned a diploma as a mechanic from a technical institute before becoming a journalist. He worked at al-Qasim al-Mushterek newspaper, an Iraqi daily founded after the 2003 invasion, then he joined al-Diyar satellite channel, an Iraqi channel founded after the war. Two years later, he joined al-Baghdadiya satellite channel, another Iraqi channel, which is based in Cairo.

Maythem al-Zaidi contacted a judge to ask him if what his brother did is a crime under Iraqi law. The judge told him that he might serve two years in prison or pay a fine for insulting a president of foreign country unless Mr. Bush withdrew the case. “If they manage to imprison Muntader, there are millions of him all over Iraq and the Arab world,” Maythem al-Zaidi said.

Maythem al-Zaidi said has been contacted from about 100 Iraqi and foreign lawyers offering their services free of charge — including Saddam Hussein’s lawyer Khalil al-Dulaymi. When asked if he will accept Mr. al-Dulaymi’s services, he replied, “Why not, we are all Iraqis.”

The Rusafa office of Moktada al-Sadr organized a demonstration in Sadr City to support the shoe thrower. Across Iraq, everyone seems to have an opinion about the case.

According to his brother, Muntader al-Zaidi is “a calm man.” Both of his parents are dead, and he has 10 other siblings. Maythem al-Zaidi said that his brother is politically independent, but several people who know him mentioned that he was a Baathist who turned into a Sadrist after the war.

Meanwhile, al-Baghdadiya satellite channel’s Baghdad bureau chief is not responding to reporters to comment on the incident and he prevented all his staff of doing so.

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Libyan group gives shoe-throwing reporter award
Reuters

TRIPOLI, Dec 15 (Reuters Life!) – The Iraqi journalist who threw his shoes at U.S. President George W. Bush was given a bravery award on Monday by a Libyan charity group chaired by leader Muammar Gaddafi’s daughter.

The charity group Wa Attassimou also urged the Iraqi government to release television reporter Muntazer al-Zaidi after he was detained on Sunday for hurling footwear at Bush and calling the president a “dog” — both severe insults in the Middle East.

“Waatassimou group has taken the decision to give Muntazer al-Zaidi the courage award … because what he did represents a victory for human rights across the world,” the group, headed by Aicha Gaddafi, said in a statement.

The group said the Iraqi authorities should honour the journalist for his actions.

Zaidi, accused by the Iraqi government of a “barbaric and ignominious act” will be tried on charges of insulting the Iraqi state, said the Iraqi prime minister’s media advisor, Yasin Majeed.

Arab and Iran TV stations have gleefully replayed the footage of the incident, which for many in the region was seen as a fittingly furious comment on what they view as Bush’s calamitous Middle East legacy.

Aicha, a lawyer by training, was fiercely opposed to the U.S. invasion of Iraq. She offered to defend Saddam Hussein after his capture by U.S. forces from an underground hideout at the end of 2003.

After years of tension between Libya and the United States there have been recent signs that ties between the two countries are warming. (Reporting by Salah Sarrar; editing by Matthew Jones)

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Saddam lawyer to defend Bush shoe attacker
AFP

AMMAN, Dec 15 – Saddam Hussein’s former lawyer said on Monday that he was forming a team to defend the Iraqi journalist who hurled his shoes at US President George W. Bush during his farewell visit to Baghdad.

“So far around 200 Iraqi and other lawyers, including Americans, have expressed willingness to defend the journalist for free,” the Amman-based Khalil al-Dulaimi told AFP.

“I took the decision on Sunday night to defend the man after the incident. I am currently contacting Arab bar associations to form a defence committee.”

Television journalist Muntazer al-Zaidi jumped up as Bush was holding a press conference with Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki on Sunday, shouted “It is the farewell kiss, you dog” and threw two shoes at the US leader.

Both missed after Bush ducked, but Zaidi was wrestled to the ground by security guards and frogmarched from the room.

“It was the least thing for an Iraqi to do to Bush, the tyrant criminal who has killed two million people in Iraq and Afghanistan,” said Dulaimi.

“Zaidi should be released immediately.”

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JOURNALIST CONFRONTS BUSH IN BAGHDAD WITH EMMY-WINNING THROW

News Dissector has more coverage here.

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