Rosa Brooks: Shoe throwing a welcome relief

If you’re going to throw something, better a shoe than a grenade or a bomb.

I’m not defending Muntadhar al-Zeidi, the Iraqi journalist who flung both his shoes at President George W. Bush during a Baghdad news conference. However tempting the target, journalists are supposed to fling barbed words, not heavy objects.

Still, not to worry. Bush merely expressed his mystification about why al-Zeidi might have hurled those shoes. “I don’t know what the guy’s cause is,” he told reporters after al-Zeidi was beaten and dragged away by Iraqi guards.

Maybe no one had bothered to translate al-Zeidi’s Arabic words for the president. As al-Zeidi threw the first shoe, he cried, “This is a gift from the Iraqis; this is the farewell kiss, you dog!” As he flung the second, he was even more explicit: “This is from the widows, the orphans and those who were killed in Iraq!”

Iraqi or not, most people other than our outgoing president probably can understand al-Zeidi’s motives, even if we don’t really hold with shoe throwing.

The U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq triggered a spiral of conflict that has left somewhere between 89,892 and 1.3 million Iraqi civilians dead (the numbers are contested) out of a population of just 25 million. It doesn’t take much imagination to see that an Iraqi might hold a bit of a grudge. It’s also easy enough to understand why al-Zeidi became an instant hero around much of the globe.

Across the Arab and Muslim world, gleeful crowds have waved shoes in the air along with signs calling for al-Zeidi’s speedy release and a speedy change in American policies. To much of the world – less rich and less powerful than the United States – the United States in the Bush era looks like a greedy, bullying nation. No surprise if plenty of people would be delighted to emulate al-Zeidi and throw their own shoes at Bush.

Or something more lethal, like a grenade or a bomb.

There’s a lot of anger out there. Some is directed at Bush, some at the United States and some is more free-floating, directed at all those who are imagined to have power or to be allied with or important to those with power.

Compare al-Zeidi with Ajmal Amir, the 21-year-old Pakistani who took part in the November terrorist attacks in Mumbai, India’s financial capital. In some ways, his story is similar to al-Zeidi’s, full of early lessons in injustice and hopelessness. But his anger was more lethally expressed.

He reportedly grew up in Faridkot, a small town in Pakistan’s Punjab province where few were literate, nearly all were desperately poor and opportunities for prosperity were almost nonexistent. In 2005, he ran away from home. Unable to make a living, he was recruited in 2007 by the Pakistani terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba. In Lashkar training programs, he was taught to connect his own early poverty to broader injustices wrought by India, by Israel and by the United States.

Eventually, he washed up in Mumbai with nine other Lashkar trainees. But they threw grenades instead of shoes at their targets and followed up with a hail of bullets, ultimately killing more than 170 people, including several from Israel and the United States.

This is not a new story. In today’s world, anger and powerlessness are expressed, more and more, through the medium of the hidden bomb and the hurled object: the Molotov cocktail, the stones flung by Palestinian boys at Israeli tanks, the grenades of Mumbai’s terrorists, suicide bombers throwing their own explosives-laden bodies into spaces packed tight with human beings.

Paradoxically, maybe, that’s why I find myself almost cheered by the Iraqi shoe thrower and the folk-hero stature that he is attaining.

Al-Zeidi could have lobbed a grenade at a passing U.S. convoy or strapped on a suicide bomber’s vest and hurled himself toward the Green Zone. But he didn’t. He just threw his shoes, a gesture laden with symbolism but not truly dangerous to anyone but himself (he was lucky the Secret Service agents didn’t shoot him).

By willingly risking prison and death just to throw those shoes, he reminded the powerful and powerless alike that a single symbolic gesture can be more effective than a thousand grenades.

No, shoe throwing’s not exactly a form of nonviolent resistance – and al-Zeidi’s not up there with Gandhi and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. But if al-Zeidi inspires a new global trend of shoe throwing, I’ll take that over bomb throwing any day.