December 16, 2008
By Arsalan Iftikhar
Special to CNN
Editor’s Note: Arsalan Iftikhar is an international human rights lawyer, founder of www.TheMuslimGuy.com and contributing editor for Islamica Magazine in Washington.
WASHINGTON (CNN) — Not since Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev’s famous footwear pounded into a table at an October 1960 United Nations session have we seen a shoe create such a global political firestorm.
Alas, we now have an Iraqi journalist entering into the annals of political history with his contribution to the ongoing historical saga entitled “Shoes Heard Around the World.”
Some regional TV channels in the Mideast have aired the footage from the “shoe” press conference “more than a dozen times in several hours,” according to The Associated Press. The infamous scene has now bounced around Internet networking sites like YouTube and Facebook, showing Iraqi journalist Muntadhar Al-Zaidi standing, hurling both his shoes at President George W. Bush and shouting in Arabic: “This is a farewell kiss, you dog….This is from the widows, the orphans and those who were killed in Iraq.”
Mr. Al-Zaidi, 29, a journalist for private Iraqi television channel Al-Baghdadia, was swiftly overpowered by Iraqi security forces after he threw the shoes at Bush in a gesture described by Agence France Presse as “the supreme mark of disrespect in the Muslim world.”
Continue Reading Arsalan’s December 2008 CNN Column Here…
