Muntadar al-Zeidi: Hero, Martyr, Symbol of Resistance
Reach for your shoes…
by
Justin Raimondo
by Justin Raimondo
DIGG THIS
 The
shoe-throwing
Iraqi journalist, who is, by now, probably half beaten to death
for the "crime"
of paying back – in very small measure – George W. Bush for his
crimes against the Iraqi people, is a folk
hero to millions. And his admirers aren't all Iraqis or other
Arabs, not
by a
long shot.
The shoe-wielding
Iraqi television reporter, one Muntadar
al-Zeidi, managed to sum up, in a single gesture, how much of
the world feels about the 43rd president of the United States –
including Americans.
Remember waaaay
back when we were supposedly going to be greeted with showers
of rose
petals and high fives by the "liberated" peoples of
Iraq? Mr. al-Zeidi seems to have definitively put that
one to rest for all time.
 What
gets me, however, is the neocons' response to this instance of life-imitating-art:
typical is the always clueless Ralph
Peters, a military "expert" who blames the failure
in Iraq on bad execution of a flawless policy
and avers al-Zeidi's act, just proves the War Party was right all
along:
"When
an Arab heel aimed those shoes at our president, it showed the
world the extent to which Bush loosened the laces of Middle Eastern
tyranny. If an Arab journalist had thrown his shoes at Saddam
Hussein or one of his guests, the tosser would've been
beaten, then tortured, then killed. Today's Iraqi government is
considering whether the man should be charged under the state's
democratically validated Constitution."
The charge
against al-Zeidi is "aggression
against a president," a provision in the Iraqi "legal
code" (and I use the term loosely) that makes it a crime to
attempt to murder either an Iraqi or a foreign head of state,
punishable by 15 years in prison.
Read
the rest of the article
December
18, 2008
Justin
Raimondo [send him mail]
is editorial director of Antiwar.com
and is the author of An
Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard and Reclaiming
the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement.
Copyright
© 2008 Antiwar.com
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