Some say it with shoes!
People say it with flowers; to thank in gratitude; to show love and joy.
The Iraqi journalist Muntada al Zeidi of Al Baghdadia TV based in Cairo decided enough was enough. He decided to say farewell differently; he decided to ‘Say it With Shoes’. He hurled shoes as Iraq’s farewell kiss to George W Bush.
What a cruel joke! And he did that in the secure safety of Green Zone in liberated Baghdad! Audacious or enterprising?
But then when heads of state make ‘unannounced or surprise and secret’ visit to a liberated land, a surprise or two make it worth the effort.
What a farewell gift to the Great Liberator! How ungrateful of Iraqis! We had heard from a head of state not too long ago how his people loved George Bush. Were flying shoes an Iraqi way of saying how much and how hard Bush was loved?
Iraqis know missiles that kill; Hellfire missiles that burn entire hamlets and habitats. But this journalist showed his rage by hurling a pair of shoes, which missed the target anyway.
‘Stuff happens’ was what ex-defence secretary had shrugged when the Iraqi Museum was being looted as US Marines watched. Freedom to rage if not freedom from hunger is what the Iraqis were gifted by their liberator in chief. So why anyone should grudge if they make most of their hard earned gift?
Shoes do not kill. But shoes sent a message deadlier than missiles. It hurt though it had to be dismissed by the victim as bizarre. How magnanimous of the guest of Maliki! Yet the message tells, after over five years the commander in chief did not get ‘Mission Accomplished’ in Iraq. Work is in progress; his successor will have to finish the mission.
And Nuri Al Maliki might congratulate him for daring freedom of expression rather than punish him for taking that freedom too literally. Not bad for democracy is it?
By the way, next time around if the next president failed to keep his pledge to withdraw from Iraq, please do not forget to have journalists take their shoes off before coming to press briefing.
Long live liberty! Pray that they do not punish or kill Muntada.
Husain
Dhaka
* * *
It fell to an Iraqi journalist to give the US President George Bush what so many people wanted; throw shoes at him for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent men, women and children that have been killed as collateral damage in his War on Terror. True to form, the president was unflustered and with the Iraqi prime minister at his side, he said he was not bothered by what had been done to him that he thought was no different from hackling! Like so many things the US president is unaware of, in the place he was greeted with shoes, this is the ultimate show of disrespect and humiliation. Surely, even a fiction writer who would have wanted to write something that was intended to show the worst form of disrespect for the world’s most powerful man would not have been able to come out with a script as the one enacted by the Iraqi journalist.
There are so many things about George Bush that are unbelievable and absolutely astounding. When 9/11 occurred, the world’s sympathy was for the victims and support was for the US administration led by George Bush to punish the perpetrators of the terrorism of 9/11. Yet, it took the US president and his neocon colleagues no time at all to turn that sympathy and support into hatred because of the attitude they represented in pursuing the war on terror, particularly when they left Afghanistan and invaded Iraq on lies and falsehood. They behaved in a manner that underlined an arrogance that was shameful as it was hateful, apart from also underscoring an anti-Islam bias. Can one really forget the fact that Bush’s spontaneously blurted out ‘crusade’ live on TV when he was responding to 9/11 immediately after the terrorist attacks?
It is just not that George Bush is unpopular overseas; he is going down in history with the worst popularity rating ever from his own people. In fact, it would be a misnomer to describe the president’s rating as popularity rating because it is so low. It would be more proper to term his rating as unpopularity rating as over 80 per cent of the people of USA consider him as an unpopular president! If the man had any shame, he would hang his head instead and bow out of public life and go somewhere for penance. But then one thing that this man does not have is shame as he showed, again live on TV, after shoes were hurled at him. He appeared unperturbed and while security people were taking out the Iraqi journalist from the scene, he said that what he had done was just an usual act from of a disgruntled person!
There is also another thing we must admit about George Bush. Though he is not young anymore; his reflexes are that of one for he easily avoided both the shoes hitting him in a manner that was quite amazing. Just imagine if either or both had hit him! But then knowing the US president, he would have blurted out something or other and would have behaved in a manner that it is a daily affair for a US president to be felled by shoes.
I wonder how the people of US are taking this act. I wish we have some access to the people of the United States through a TV channel such as the CNN to tell them that in places like Bangladesh, there was probably not a single person who felt sorry for him or did not feel that he did not get what he deserved. In fact there are lots of people outside the US who feel that he should be tried as a war criminal after he steps down. For the time at least, our hats off to Muntazer al Zaidi for his famous act for his hands that threw those shoes were also symbolically the hands of the relatives of those hundreds of thousands on innocent people who died for his misdeeds, including 4000 plus US service men and women who have died in Iraq.
Rashed Ahmed
Gulshan, Dhaka
India acted wisely
Although renegade elements of Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) had possibly a hand in the Mumbai attacks by extremists Laskar-e-Taiba (LeT), India has clearly acted with wisdom by rejecting all calls for military action against Pakistan. India must have realised that democratically elected Zardari government has little or no control over its military establishment. As Tarek Fatah, a prominent Pakistani-Canadian scholar, wrote in the Ottawa Citizen: ‘If at all there was an intelligence agency whose footprints can be spotted at the crime scene, it appears to be rogue elements from Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence (ISI), which was hell-bent on disrupting India’s (recently improving) relations with neighbouring Pakiatsn.’ Whether in power or outside, Pakistan’s military establishment has always considered itself not answerable to any civilian authority. As such, attacking Pakistan to punish it for Mumbai massacre will only undermine the authority of the civilian government.
But the question remains: if Pakistan’s democratically elected government has no control over its military establishment, with whom will India negotiate? It is unthinkable that India will bypass the elected government and try to negotiate separately with the Pakistan army. So a middle way must be found. India should insist that any negotiation with Pakistan for dealing with the issue of terrorism must include a senior member of its armed forces, preferably the chief of ISI which created the LeT and Taliban to fight its proxy war against India and Afghanistan. Moreover, the ISI must be made to realise that by creating the Taliban and LeT to fight its war in Afghanistan and India, it is destabilising Pakistan itself as the extremists are also slaughtering fellow Pakistanis in the name of their version of Islam.
When they ruled Afghanistan, the Taliban engaged in the brutal suppression, including mass executions, of those who didn’t agree with their interpretation of Islam; forbade any education for women and engaged in the wholesale destruction of Afghanistan’s rich cultural traditions and provided safe haven for al-Qaeda to carry out attacks on America. They want to do the same in Pakistan.
Mahmood Elahi
Ottawa, Canada
