Iraqi Journalist Throws 2 Shoes; was it Terrorism?

This morning, whilst enjoying my breakfast and watching the morning news I watched as an Iraqi journalist hurled his shoes one after the other towards US President Bush. Dismaying as the image might have been, my initial reaction was to laugh. Not because a security cleared personnel and a man of supposed intelligence took a gamble at the president of the United States, but because of what the act meant.

In the Iraqi culture, throwing a shoe at someone is the lowest of insults and reserved for only the most hated of people. The journalist wasn’t try to kill the US president, he wasn’t even trying to hurt the president instead he was insulting President Bush. The American culture is much more vocal about our insults, but I’m willing to bet it would be the equivalent of a one-fingered upward gesture and a two-worded response. Who knows if the journalists actions were suppose to mean anything more, but without question any punishment he faces will be far worse than if he had been on American soil swearing at the president. In a strange twist of irony, freedom of speech was one of the liberties we first set out to bring to Iraq during Operation Iraqi Freedom. And it is with these weird twists of irony that that these new liberties will test the powers that be (Both the US & Iraqi Governments). Will the shoe throwing felon be tried in a US Tribunal, detained and questioned in the secret US detention camps, or given over to the Iraqi people for a trial by his peers. All very interesting prospects and each would tell a different tale about where US-Iraqi relations are today. I would wager, the poor bloke will be questioned until US forces are sure he is not a terrorist or connected to terrorists. As long as he checks out, it would be most sensible for the US to turn him over to the Iraqi government as a symbol of mutual cooperation and set an example that the US feels the Iraqi government is self-sufficient. I also think, if the journalist does have terrorist connections it is still very likely he would be retained indefinitely; a state of affairs not uncommon in Iraq. If the US was not an occupying force in Iraq or had not gone to war within the country in the past decade, the circumstances might be different.

While throwing shoes at people is not polite, it means that even those educated individuals are sick of American influence in their country. We hear on the news often of suicide bombs and terrorist attacks, but such things can be equated with extremist views and people who have let themselves be brainwashed into an ideology of terrorism. Shoe throwing however is a symbol that even the well educated and well placed people of Iraq are fed-up at least with President Bush. While it’s not polite to throw shoes at occupying countries’ Presidents, the point is well taken. It’s not just the terrorists who are unhappy with the current US presence. In the course of everything this War in Iraq has brought us, I took the hurtling shoes as a message not unlike the stories I read in my morning newspapers. Certainly not the actions of a terrorist, but then again I’m not the one at whom the shoes were being thrown.