FUSsa-talk Mailing List: Fw: " Why I Threw the Shoe"

[jojane (jojane]

Published on Friday, September 18, 2009 by The Guardian/UK 
Why I Threw the Shoe
I am no hero. I just acted as an Iraqi who witnessed the pain and
bloodshed of too many innocents
by Muntazer al-Zaidi
I am free. But my country is still a prisoner of war. There has been a
lot of talk about the action and about the person who took it, and about
the hero and the heroic act, and the symbol and the symbolic act. But,
simply, I answer: what compelled me to act is the injustice that befell
my people, and how the occupation wanted to humiliate my homeland by
putting it under its boot.
Over recent years, more than a million martyrs have fallen by the bullets
of the occupation and Iraq is now filled with more than five million
orphans, a million widows and hundreds of thousands of maimed. Many
millions are homeless inside and outside the country.
We used to be a nation in which the Arab would share with the Turkman and
the Kurd and the Assyrian and the Sabean and the Yazid his daily bread.
And the Shia would pray with the Sunni in one line. And the Muslim would
celebrate with the Christian the birthday of Christ. This despite the
fact that we shared hunger under sanctions for more than a decade.
Our patience and our solidarity did not make us forget the oppression.
But the invasion divided brother from brother, neighbour from neighbour.
It turned our homes into funeral tents.
I am not a hero. But I have a point of view. I have a stance. It
humiliated me to see my country humiliated; and to see my Baghdad burned,
my people killed. Thousands of tragic pictures remained in my head,
pushing me towards the path of confrontation. The scandal of Abu Ghraib.
The massacre of Falluja, Najaf, Haditha, Sadr City, Basra, Diyala, Mosul,
Tal Afar, and every inch of our wounded land. I travelled through my
burning land and saw with my own eyes the pain of the victims, and heard
with my own ears the screams of the orphans and the bereaved. And a
feeling of shame haunted me like an ugly name because I was powerless.
As soon as I finished my professional duties in reporting the daily
tragedies, while I washed away the remains of the debris of the ruined
Iraqi houses, or the blood that stained my clothes, I would clench my
teeth and make a pledge to our victims, a pledge of vengeance.
The opportunity came, and I took it.
I took it out of loyalty to every drop of innocent blood that has been
shed through the occupation or because of it, every scream of a bereaved
mother, every moan of an orphan, the sorrow of a rape victim, the
teardrop of an orphan.
I say to those who reproach me: do you know how many broken homes that
shoe which I threw had entered? How many times it had trodden over the
blood of innocent victims? Maybe that shoe was the appropriate response
when all values were violated.
When I threw the shoe in the face of the criminal, George Bush, I wanted
to express my rejection of his lies, his occupation of my country, my
rejection of his killing my people. My rejection of his plundering the
wealth of my country, and destroying its infrastructure. And casting out
its sons into a diaspora.
If I have wronged journalism without intention, because of the
professional embarrassment I caused the establishment, I apologise. All
that I meant to do was express with a living conscience the feelings of a
citizen who sees his homeland desecrated every day. The professionalism
mourned by some under the auspices of the occupation should not have a
voice louder than the voice of patriotism. And if patriotism needs to
speak out, then professionalism should be allied with it.
I didn't do this so my name would enter history or for material gains.
All I wanted was to defend my country.
© 2009 Guardian News and Media Limited
Muntazer al-Zaidi is an Iraqi reporter who was freed this week after
serving nine months in prison for throwing his shoe at former US
president George Bush at a press conference. This edited statement was
translated by McClatchy Newspapers correspondent Sahar Issa
www.mcclatchydc.com
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Posted in iraq invasion, iraq occupation 
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