On This Day: Journalist Muntadhar al-Zaidi Flung Shoes At George Bush After Iraq War

Today, amid the outrage over US aid to Israel and its rejection of a ceasefire in Gaza strip, coincided the anniversary the “shoe incident” that took place on 14 December during a conference taking place in Iraq where George Bush and the Iraqi prime minister met in a room filled with journalists. Muntadhar al-Zaidi had waited until Bush’s speech ended and flung both of his shoes at him saying “This is a farewell kiss from the Iraqi people, you dog!” A moment that stunned everyone in the room, and determined the upcoming decades of the al Zaidi’s life.

AL Zaidi’s act of resistance, received by the Iraqis as such, lives in the collective imagination of the people as an effective protest taken by an individual person that speaks for the loss of Iraq as a result of the five year war with the United States, a war that is estimated to have murdered more than 160,000 Iraqis.

Al Zaidi, now 44 and living in Baghdad, was immediately detained by the Iraqi security, violently beaten, and tortured for day, then spent nine months in prison, three of them he was in solitary confinement. In an interview with New York Magazine he said he “felt satisfaction, but then I felt the pain…they beat me, they broke my nose, and they broke my teeth. I think I even swallowed a tooth.”

While in prison, a statue was erected of his shoes, but the government tore it down the next day. When he was released, the first statement he made was “I’m a free man now, but the nation is still in a prison.”

In another interview with Reuters he said that the incident “Stands as proof that one day a simple person was capable of saying no to that arrogant person with all his power, tyranny, arms, media, money and authority.”

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