Every day Arabs appear bent on proving that they are men of rhetoric not action, adhere to no reason whatsoever, and adopt lopsided concepts. A rude person is labelled “street smart”, a thief “resourceful”, an unfaithful husband or lover “a real man”, a slanderer “brave”, and a terrorist “a martyr”.
It should come then as no surprise that this same unreasonable, lopsided sense characterised Arab response to last week’s incident in Baghdad when Iraqi reporter Muntathir al-Zaidi threw his pair of shoes at President George W. Bush during a press conference. Arab satellite channels held an extended festival of jubilation that revelled at what they saw as behaviour meet for Bush.
Victory over America
Al-Hayat al-Misriya (Egyptian Life) was one of the channels most elated by the incident. In its talk show Al-Hayat al-Youm (Life Today) the channel claims it received 46,000 calls among which 60 were broadcast. All the callers were delighted with Zaidi’s act, one describing it as “the heroic victory over America with Arab shoes,” another saying this was the happiest day in his life, and a third saying he had been born again that day.
As for Liqaa’ al-Osbou (The Weekly Meeting) on the Libyan-owned Arabist channel al-Saaea (The Hour), its host Mustafa Bakri, who is an Egyptian journalist and MP, said that Zaidi had conducted a martyrdom operation since the shoe in this incident was “more potent than weapons of mass destruction”.
Mona al-Shazli, hostess of the widely-viewed al-Ashira Masaa’an (10 o’clock) on Dream Channel, talked to journalist Hafez al-Shirazi who appeared to be the only voice of reason in this melee. He asked out loud the obvious questions: What did this shoe incident achieve? What if a shoe was thrown at a head of Arab State?
When Shazli apparently felt that Shirazi would be a spoilsport she expressed her distaste, to which he asked her: “You met President Bush; could you have done what Zaidi did?” Shazli said: “I wish I could have.” “And what kept you from doing so?” he asked. When Shazli said: “My ethics and professionalism,” she summed it all up.
What if?
From the town of Mallawi in Minya, Rimon Nash’at wrote that Fathy Saad Gomaa had offered his 19-year-old daughter as a wife to Zaidi. “All I possess is my flesh,” the man said, “And this I offer to Zaidi as a prize for his heroic deed. One is tempted to think we have gone back in history to the time when human beings were given and taken, commodities to be dispensed with according to whim.
On their part, members of the Bar Association have offered to defend Zaidi free of charge.
On Tuesday morning the Journalists’ Syndicate issued a declaration of appreciation and solidarity with Zaidi. The declaration offered as excuse for Zaidi’s action the awful conditions in Iraq—as though the country had been better off under Saddam Hussein—and said that the Iraqi journalist had merely exercised his right of free expression.
The question that begs an answer is: What if these same journalists or lawyers decided to express themselves in the same way Zaidi did? What official response can we hope for? And where is reason in all this?
The worst part is that the declaration was issued by the stronghold of the power of the pen, proving—if anything—that the shoe is mightier than the pen.