The Shoe Thrower Speaks

Commentary By Ron Beasley

Muntazer al-Zaidi, the Iraqi journalist who threw his shoes at George W. Bush, is free and talking.

I am free. But my country is still a prisoner of war. There has been
a lot of talk about the action and about the person who took it, and
about the hero and the heroic act, and the symbol and the symbolic act.
But, simply, I answer: what compelled me to act is the injustice that befell my people, and how the occupation wanted to humiliate my homeland by putting it under its boot.

Over
recent years, more than a million martyrs have fallen by the bullets of
the occupation and Iraq is now filled with more than five million
orphans, a million widows and hundreds of thousands of maimed. Many
millions are homeless inside and outside the country.

Iraq - before and after the invasion:

We used to be a nation in which the Arab would share with the
Turkman and the Kurd and the Assyrian and the Sabean and the Yazid his
daily bread. And the Shia would pray with the Sunni in one line. And
the Muslim would celebrate with the Christian the birthday of Christ.
This despite the fact that we shared hunger under sanctions for more
than a decade.

Our patience and our solidarity did not make us
forget the oppression. But the invasion divided brother from brother,
neighbour from neighbour. It turned our homes into funeral tents.

And he remains unapologetic:

As soon as I finished my professional duties in reporting the daily
tragedies, while I washed away the remains of the debris of the ruined
Iraqi houses, or the blood that stained my clothes, I would clench my
teeth and make a pledge to our victims, a pledge of vengeance.

The opportunity came, and I took it.

I
took it out of loyalty to every drop of innocent blood that has been
shed through the occupation or because of it, every scream of a
bereaved mother, every moan of an orphan, the sorrow of a rape victim,
the teardrop of an orphan.

I say to those who reproach me: do you
know how many broken homes that shoe which I threw had entered? How
many times it had trodden over the blood of innocent victims? Maybe
that shoe was the appropriate response when all values were violated.

When I threw the shoe in the face of the criminal, George Bush,
I wanted to express my rejection of his lies, his occupation of my
country, my rejection of his killing my people. My rejection of his
plundering the wealth of my country, and destroying its infrastructure.
And casting out its sons into a diaspora.

He is a hero in Iraq because a vast majority feels just as he does.  Is this the success of the surge that the neocons are crowing about?  And this is the very same "success" we are creating in Afghanistan.