Blessed Shoes
“This is a gift from the Iraqis; this is the farewell kiss, you dog” — he threw one of his shoes at the president, who ducked and narrowly avoided being struck.
As chaos ensued, he threw his other shoe, shouting, “This is from the widows, the orphans and those who were killed in Iraq.” The second shoe also narrowly missed Mr. Bush as Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki stuck out a hand in front of the president’s face to help shield him.
After flinging the shoes at Bush – who ducked behind the protective hand of his puppet, Iraqi PM Nouri al Maliki – Zaidi was set upon by Iraqi security forces, who dragged him into a nearby room, where his cries could be heard for several minutes, as McClatchy reports. Later, a reporter for a television station run by Maliki’s party said that Zaidi had been kicked and beaten until “he was crying like a woman,” the New York Times reports. He’s now being held in one of the Green Zone government’s notorious prisons where the local goon squads, having learned from two stern masters – the Bush Family’s old protégé Saddam Hussein and Bush’s very own handcrafted torture program – subject detainees to horrible abuses. Zaidi’s employers, who are based in Cairo, have called for his release, and up to 100 lawyers from across the Arab world have offered to defend him.
Yet McClatchy, as usual, digs deeper and reports that Zaidi had been especially affected by the American bombing of the thickly populated civilian areas of Baghdad’s Sadr City during one of the brutal pacification operations of the so-called surge earlier this year.
As for Zaidi, AbuKhalil asks another pertinent question: “Will those fancy Western journalistic associations now demand that he be released? Will they speak on his own behalf? Or will they now say that shoe throwing is a brand of terrorism and that the man should be shipped to Guantanamo?”
No points for guessing the answer to that one.
Source has a dead link, will update when online
