Muntadhar al-Zeidi, the Iraqi TV reporter who threw his shoes at President George W. Bush during a press conference in Baghdad last December, was released from prison on September 15 after serving nine months of a one-year sentence. (Throwing a shoe at a person is considered highly disrespectful in Islamic culture.) Immediately hailed as a hero in the Arab, Muslim, and NPR-listening worlds last winter for his act of defiance — he yelled “This is your farewell kiss, you dog!” and “This is from the widows, the orphans, and those who were killed in Iraq!” as he hurled each shoe at Bush — al-Zeidi emerged from prison into a world with a new American president and a decreased U.S. military presence in his home country. Now, in a loosely translated Popdose exclusive, he speaks out about his experience.
When I went into prison last year, I was 29 years old. Now I am 30 years old. I am a man now, and in prison I was the man, as you Americans say. People made T-shirts. A game on the Internet called Sock and Awe was created by people with much time on their hands. (It is fun. Play it. You could waste your life in worse ways.) And the video of me throwing my shoes at President George Bush “went viral,” I was told. My prison guards even threw me a birthday party in January. They gave me bright green shoes with holes on the top side that are called Crocs. It was amusing at first.
Many things can change in a short amount of time, however. The zeitgeist — it has shifted. The world has moved on. My people say to me, “The sectarian violence is not like it was, Muntadhar, and this new American president, unlike the previous one, he has a brain.”
Now there is a very bad crime wave, however, and it is led by the same people who almost pushed Iraq into a civil war. They cannot find jobs, so they kidnap and demand ransoms instead. Learn new skills, gentlemen. Take computer classes. Oh, that is right, I have forgotten — there is no electricity to run the computers! Carry on then, sectarian thugs.
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JACKYL
Since I’m usually ready to give any movie a go (unless the name Uwe Boll is attached to direct), I figured I’d check out a film I wouldn’t normally be attracted to, and see how it holds up. I have to admit up front that I’ve never been a big fan of Sacha Baron Cohen’s comedy; I’ve never intentionally watched Da Ali G Show, nor did I get caught up in the cultural phenomenon that was Borat.
Lots of people have found lots of reasons to harp on the fact that we haven’t yet caught Al Qaeda’s grand poobah. Americans do like to see bad guys caught and punished – that’s why Law and Order variants play 24/7 on basic cable – and we prefer quick, tidy endings, which is why (despite the red-herring “surge is working” mantra) we’ve turned away in droves from the Iraq War. For Democrats, meanwhile, Osama is a valuable symbol of George Bush’s (and, by extension, the Republican Party’s) strategic failures and incompetence – and particularly of the foolishness of prioritizing the neocons’ Saddam obsession over “finishing the job” in Afghanistan.