It was an Iraqi reporter who yanked Muntadhar al Zeidi to the ground after he hurled his shoes at President Bush earlier this week.
Although anyone who looks at the YouTube footage of the press conference in Baghdad can clearly see a journalist whirl around to stop Zeidi, Americans have heard almost nothing about the Iraqi reporter who tried to protect our president. We don’t even know his name.
We owe this guy a thank you. We owe him the good coverage that has been wasted on Zeidi.
The fact that it was an Iraqi reporter who took down Zeidi speaks volumes about the Iraqi press corps’ heroism.
Whenever someone goes berserk in Iraq, everyone gets nervous—and with good reason. The horror of conflict is still in the near-past and Iraqis are painfully aware of how far they’ve come in five years and how easily they could lose it all. No one welcomes behavior like Zeidi’s unless they support the most militant and violent factions in that war torn country.
Much has been made of how Zeidi himself has suffered, how he was kidnapped by gunmen in a Sunni district (his family later claimed he had been kidnapped by Al Qaida), and how, after being freed by them, he was detained by American soldiers who searched his property. But Zeidi is not a special case. Many Iraqi reporters have been kidnapped and tortured by Iraqi factions, some have been detained and questioned by Americans, many have lost children, parents, wives and husbands in the war, and yet they have managed to cling to their belief in a higher ideal, an ideal of truth and balance, of democracy and freedom of the press, to rise above their grief and anger to do some of the finest reporting in the world today.
Ghazi Balkiz, a producer for NBC news in Iraq, told The Today Show’s Meredith Viera that the other Iraqi journalists in the room were embarrassed by Zeidi’s shoe-launching.
“They went up to the president and apologized,” Balkiz said. “They told him that this does not represent the Iraqi media or Iraqi journalists.”
He added, “They consider what happened to the president an insult to them because this does not represent Arab hospitality.”
Zeidi has suffered and his suffering is apparent, but the fact that he could throw his shoes without being put to death tells the world that the United States has met one of its most important goals in Iraq: securing freedom of expression.
Sure, he was taken into custody, just as you and I would be if we threw shoes at President-elect Obama or anybody else for that matter (police officers here in the U.S. usually call it simple battery or some form of assault if you throw something at someone with the intention of hurting them), but he won’t be hanged or made to face a firing squad and, in Iraq, that’s progress.
“During the old days, during Saddam’s days, any insult to the president or the president’s guests used to be punished by death,” Balkiz said.
We have helped Iraq to achieve a society in which such freedom of expression, though unwelcome in certain forms, like hurling things at people (just as it would be in any country) is nonetheless much more tolerated than was the case a mere five or six years ago. We can be a bit proud of our part in bringing that about, even despite all the blunders and the heartbreak.
Was the war worth it? Our own war for such freedom was worth it, and other wars that have secured freedom of the press, freedom of expression, freedom of religion, and freedom of association, among other civil rights, have all been deemed by enlightened societies to have been worth it. In the personal context, however, no such equation can exist free of the factor of grief. Expecting someone who has suffered a deep personal loss to be able to see what is achieved might be expecting too much, and yet most Iraqi journalists maintain a clear and accurate view of how far their country has come since the toppling of Saddam Hussein.
We invaded, but it has been the Iraqis themselves who have held the ground we won. And it will be up to them to continue doing so in the intellectual, cultural and social sense.
In the meantime, those shoes flying through the air tell us that a day of freedom has dawned in Iraq; and that other, unnamed, reporter who quickly turned to protect the American president, tells us that there are many who respect and value the dignity of peaceful dialogue. After all, in a room full of reporters, only one threw his shoes. The others, almost every one of them, walked up to Bush afterward and apologized for the conduct of their colleague.
Keep in mind, too, that this must have been a huge disappointment for them. Most of them had been given the only opportunity they would ever have to question President Bush and that opportunity was ruined by Zeidi’s antics.
As reported by the Associated Press, “Al-Zeidi may have also been motivated by what a colleague described as a boastful, showoff personality.
‘He tried to raise topics to show that nobody is as smart as he is,’ said Zanko Ahmed, a Kurdish journalist who attended a journalism training course with al-Zeidi in Lebanon.
Ahmed recalled that al-Zeidi spoke glowingly of anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, whose followers organized protests Monday to demand his release.
‘Regrettably, he didn't learn anything from the course in Lebanon, where we were taught ethics of journalism and how to be detached and neutral,’ Ahmed said. SP