Written on Monday, December 15th, 2008 at 9:12am by Alan Bedenko | 50 Comments
Quick Question for Muntazer al-Zaidi
How come you (and your supporters) didn’t have the balls to throw shoes at Saddam Hussein when he was alive?
50 Comments
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Simple–as was said: No Balls.
Get ready friends, now that the Messiah wants to go full bore into Afghanistan, the REAL 21st Century Viet-Nam is about to begin.
Yep—if the Soviets got bogged down there (as did the Empire a century earlier), let’s do them one better and show the world how to really get bogged down….
Any protest in against Saddam would mean instant death. So your right he has no balls, but i guess it takes one to know one huh hank?
Off topic but very important update, Lisa Scott was fired today from channel 4 for being to fat. RIP lisa some of us guys like a cute cubby chick.
Anyone else freaked out that the this guy had the time and opportunity to throw [b]both[/b] shoes at the President of the United States? What if this guy was packed with something a little more lethal than imitation Italian footwear?
No one living in the US has the right to question the “balls” of someone who lives in Iraq.
What a completely idiotic question. Throwing shoes at Saddam Hussein would have meant death not only for the thrower, but also for his entire family.
Well, for one, the Hussein regime ran dissidents through a wood chipper (don’t know if shoe-throwers would have been put through feet-first).
Back when TV was still making an attempt to fulfill Murrow’s vision of a medium that could teach, Steve Allen hosted a great program called “Meeting of Minds,” a roundtable discussion among actors portraying people from history. On one of the episodes “Galileo” was asked why he didn’t stand up for his cosmological beliefs when he was on trial for heresy. If memory serves, he passed a lighted candle around the table, asking if anyone would hold their hand over it and be burned. No one would – and that was his answer.
Hard to judge people in other times and places for not opposing the powerful.
The question does not judge the man for not throwing his shoes during the Saddam years, rather, it questions his right to throw the shoe at the man who gave him that right.
Of course, he doesn’t have the right to throw his shoes at anyone. He’s in jail. And the idea that Bush gave Iraqis any rights — except for the right to be dead — is pretty problematic.
Maybe he read the executive summary and conclusions of the Committee’s report of its inquiry into the treatment of detainees in U.S. custody.
systematic prisoner abuse v. hit in the head–almost–with a shoe? Seriously?
I assume that al-Zaidi doesn’t have the right to assault either Bush or the current Iraqi leader (al-Maliki).
Well Colin beat me to the punch.
@Mike–Only reason I may have no balls is because you won’t spit them out. But I know I have them because you haven’t shaved lately and they’re chafed from bouncing off your chin.
I would like to know who was the noble brave soul who posted the question that we are commenting on? It seems that Maliki took a lesson from the Bush-Rove operatives in this country, only allow your friends into a press conference and make sure that you screen their questions first. The sound bites are better that way.
free Muntazer al-Zaidi
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I always presumed that “Hush Puppy journalism” described a profession a little less hard-hitting, a little less in-your-face. Then, of course, Muntazer’s opinions WERE a little off target. . .
It is a good question unless perhaps his whole family has been killed in the violence since the phony war was conjured up by Bush. In that case I am sure this man would have been very happy to keep his family and keep his shoes on under Husein.
Muntader al-Zaidi was the head of the student union under Saddam Hussein and he earned a diploma as a mechanic from a technical institute before becoming a journalist. (NYT)
Maybe that had something to do with it.
Anyone see the headline on the NYPOST today?
Lame Duck.
hhahahaha. That was great.
Hey BP—missed you at the pre-trial…hope you and/or yours are feeling better.
I’d say a better question would be why didn’t any American’s have the balls to throw a shoe at Bush after 8 years of fucking up the country?
Send your old shoes to the White House. I wish Muntazer had hit ‘em. Bush is a fuckhead.
Just read a report that al-Zaidi has a picture of Che in his apartment. So let me get this straight: he hates Bush and accuses him of being a murderer…yet he’s also a fanboy of murdering thug Che Guevara.
Sounds like a typical confused little drama queen.
Yes, he’s a confused drama queen because he protested the world leader who ordered an invasion of his country….
@ jon – hahhaha.
Che never invaded his country, overthrew his government, or killed hundreds of thousands of his countrymen. So, unless you’re stupid or conservative, it isn’t hard to understand why he feels the way he does.
If you want a look into the maturity and seriousness of our President, take a look at the story from the http://www.Timesonline.co.uk/ If this interview is accurate (Bush seeks new shoe jokes) then we have a world leader who is the bottom of the barrel.
Really, BP? You don’t understand the difference?
The fact of the matter is, despite calling the war phony, illegal, or any other derogatory term, whatever freedoms the Iraqi people now enjoy were given to them by the American through the leadership of George W. Bush.
Ben McD, having to admit that the war actually did some good is too much for some people. Their years of simplistic, black and white anti-war political identification doesn’t allow for any nuance. Anything that questions this view will be met with a torrent of righteous indignation.
You mean the ‘freedom’ to be locked up for making a political statement by throwing his shoe?
Oh I forgot. It’s ‘freedom’ because we didn’t shoot him like Saddam would have.
You guys are so right. He should be grateful his colonial superiors are so enlightened and the war is now completely justified.
Jon,
I guarantee that if an American threw a shoe at Nuri al-Maliki during a visit to the U.S, that person would be sitting in an American prison, and rightfully so.
thanks for the shoe toss, too bad it was wide left
I don’t see any proof that anything has been accomplished in Iraq. Another dictator will be in power two minutes after the US troops leave.
Al-Zaidi’s act is what a filthy grade c student who kills women and children and still has a face to show in town deserves. Had the podium had a drawer, thorny Bush would have locked himself inside.
If I break into your house and shoot you 5 times and one of the shots removes a cancerous mass, should you thank me? It’s hard to imagine that those calling for “nuance” would have a very reasoned response if this bastard had incinerated their family or tortured their friends.
Shoe toss was wide left? Sure the shoe thrower wasn’t from Buffalo?
The ref probably called “NO GOAL” too, eh?
STEEL—since you know so much, who’s the next dictator going to be? What party/group/faction does he represent, and which organizations will support him?
Perhaps you should spend more time wondering about how Chicago’s going to get all the copperheads back in the box, eh?
For thos who want to make a relation between bush and if the journalist did it with sadam, one question (is there a big difference but Saddam and Bush ?? Both are Iraqi Killers) …………
Colin, are you talking about when Hussein massacred the Shiites or the Kurds?
I’m not talking about Hussein at all. He’s dead, which makes him only slightly less relevant than he was in 2003, when Bush and Blair decided that removing him from power was worth a few million lives and a few trillion dollars.
Che is hero for millions of people with heroic struggle against autocratic regimes in Latin America. He believed in dignity of life, liberty and freedom. He never believed in invading another country for selfish purpose. He never advocated killing innocent civilians, raping women and torturing helpless people.
Colin, Hussein was very relevant to the families of the tens of thousands of people he killed. You are simply lying when you say a few million people died due to decisions Bush and Blair made in Iraq, it could be only in the tens of thousands. Many more people have died in the Sudan in the same time period, where there is no oil, and where no head of a democracy who can easily, safely, and reflexively blamed.
I meant to omit that last “who”.
Timothy, when last did you travel to or read about Sudan? And who told you there is no oil? Some of the things people say embarass them. I thought you would rectify that error (if it qualifies to be one anyway) but you’ve gone for ‘who’. Your talk of millions dying seems, atleast, to concur with Ahmadinejad’s argument about Holocaust. In some quarters, you have to be very specific when talking of Holocaust for it is believed that many more Holocausts, of greater magnitudeds at that, have occured elsewhere over the years. And, like Bush, the perpetrators of the other Holocausts have done it in the guise of giving democracy to the people:) How does one give democracy to people by killing the same people? You don’t dig a dangerous pit in order to obtain soil to fill another life-threatening pit.
Yeah you’re right about the oil in Sudan, I didn’t think they had any. That doesn’t change my point which is not that Bush gave democracy to Iraq, don’t put words into my mouth. My point is that innocent people were dying at a fast clip in Iraq long before we got there, and that was Saddam’s intent, not like Bush in Iraq. I brought up Sudan just as an example of another country with a lot of problems and people dying because of them, which can’t be tagged on the US, as is the fashion. The conclusion I’m trying to draw is that just because the US invaded Iraq doesn’t mean that people weren’t dying there before we came, as it would if we invaded, say, Switzerland.
Yes, die they did, Timothy. But what triggered their deaths? They tried to assasinate their leader who then was being supported by the US. The assasins that never were got assistance from Iran, a country that was US enemy number one in the region following the Islamic Revolution of 1979. I’ll not be very wrong to suggest that maybe, just maybe, Saddam got help from the US to quell the unrest and silence his political enemies, including killing the people that he did. Remeber tha eight-year Iran-Iraq war? You cannot use the deaths caused by the then US ally (Saddam) to justify Bush’s killing of the Iraqi people. Now that Bush invaded Iraq have the locals stopped dying? Saddam was far much BETTER than Bush: women were not raped during his tenure. But because Bush the coward wanted to get rid of him, he ensured that the trial was conducted in Iraq where they still have the death sentence and not the Hague where he would have been handed a life sentence. And why do you seem quite convinced that the US doesn’t have a hand in what is happening in Darfur, Sudan? Do you know who is extracting oil there? The rivalry between China and the US, on all fronts, is common knowledge the world over. And, markyou, Sudan doesn’t manufacture any weapons. If you want to know the origin of the weapons being used there, just let me know. You don’t give people guns to finish each other and then say they are dying like flies.
Seriously BP, this has to be your Dumbest. Post. Ever. (Most of your posts being pretty insightful and interesting, it’s a relatively low bar to clear, but you did it with style).
Why didn’t he have the “balls” to throw his shoes at Saddam? Perhaps because Saddam was a better, more efficient authoritarian than our esteemed President and wasn’t dumb enough to hold a PR stunt press conference in region that was largely hostile to him. To use your same ridiculous framing, why was George Bush doing a “victory lap” in the first place?
Maybe if we had the balls to throw shoes when this disaster was being foisted on this country in 2003. . . Then, that reporter wouldn’t have felt it necessary to show disgrace to the leader of a nation that has killed hundreds of thousands, displaced millions, tortured untold numbers, etc. of his fellow Iraqis.
How many “shoes” have you thrown?
Jamal, you’ve got the same old line of BS that I was alluding to. Everything is the fault of the US, even what Saddam did before we invaded to get rid of him. No one was raped in Iraq before the US came? Saddam had a rape room. The Iran – Iraq war proves my point about how Saddam was worth getting rid of. I also said that tens of thousands have died since the war, which is less than half as many than have died in the Sudan, maybe even a quarter, which shows how bad it can get in a country with a bad government. But of course the US did all that too. And we did 9/11 didn’t we? You’re full of sh*t.
And proud of it for I tell it as I see it, Timothy. People degenerate to name-calling when ideas dry up. Saddam’s rape room? Just like the weapons of mass destruction? Be sarcastic as it may, your 9/11 ‘quip’ could be true. After all, what else would the grade C student use to justify the invasion of Afghanistan? He went, he bombed, but achieved nothing! Where is Mullah Omar? Where is Osama Bin Laden? Whose dollars were spent? No rocket science here; just sobriety.