Back to the Shoe Thrower
This is all hypothetical, so I claim no epistemological certainty on the following post, but suppose for a moment that rather than Muntadhar Zaidi being an Iraqi Shi'i shoe throwing reporter, suppose he were a New Orleans reporter, and the press conference was not between Bush and Maliki in Baghdad, but Bush in New Orleans, in a reassessment of Katrina. Suppose as Bush were speaking, the fellow removed his shoes, threw them at Bush, called him a dog for his neglect of New Orleans, accused him of the deaths of hundreds if not thousands of New Orleans residents, and was dragged out of the hall. What happens? Similar to Iraq, there is a serious grievance, and a member of the press corps who carries that grievance internally, and lets it out at a press conference at the President through the throwing of a shoe. What is the reaction?
Here I am obviously not interested in international reactions, clearly neither the Arab nor the Muslm world would be riled up for sensible enough reasons, it had nothing to do with them. But domestically, I wonder, would it be like Muntadhar the show thrower? Would the left leaning media corps actually think of it as funny? Would they be off advertising the model of the shoe thrown? Would they, as MSNBC did, show it over and over and over again and crack jokes about the whole thing? Would the right as per Fox News have been mildly reprobating, emphasizing the proof this offers that Iraq has a free press?
I don't think so. I think the reaction would be quite different. I think the left would have been distancing itself from that reporter faster than Obama did from Jeremiah Wright. I think they would have said it is not indicative of the conduct they wish to be associated with in their criticisms of Katrina. I don't think they'd be showing it a hundred times, in fact I think the right would be showing it a hundred times, as they did the snippets of the Wright sermons, to show in this case that the media was in fact deeply and fundamentally in the hands of the left. I think MSNBC would be backpedalling, I think Fox would be on the attack, I don't think the New York TImes would be giving us human interest stories on people who own similar shoes and how they use them. I think the broad media lesson on all sides would be: if you have a problem with a President, you do not throw a shoe at him. You criticize, you attack, you say he doesn't care about black people, all of this is perfectly legitimate. You do not throw a shoe.
If I'm right about that, and I think I am though obviously there is no way to know this with any level of certainty as I noted above, it is fair to ask why the different reaction. I wonder if we are holding Arabs and Muslims to different standards. An Arab throws a shoes and it's "oh look, how cute, the natives have a free press just like us! Let's tell a joke!" A Western reporter throws a shoe (David Gregory did a lot less than that in his press conference with Scott McClellan about Cheney shooting the other dude in the face and was roundly criticized for it), and we would be shocked at the barbarity of it, the lack of civility in our political culture. We Americans are better than this, the assumption is, we don't do this, the children playing their own little political theater in Iraq trying to be us, well of course this is to be expected, but not us!
Never mind that there are actually press conferences that take place in various parts of the Muslim world, this is not solely a Western phenomenon anymore, and nobody throws shoes at anyone, and indeed if they did it would be a shock. Clearly Bush is an exception to that rule, clearly it was okay to toss a shoe at him among many in the region, but that's a ridiculous manifestation of the whole notion of resistance to occupation and the rest of it. Try that with Megawati Sukarnoputri even when her approval levels were truly in the deepest dumps, I'm not sure you get the same reaction. I think most people know perfectly well how to behave in press conferences, I think they have an exception in their minds in the Muslim world to President Bush in particular but America more generally. Certainly if a student for example tossed their shoe at a teacher in the East, and this just happened in Lebanon, the result is rather predictable--expulsion. Immediate expulsion. No matter the grievance, no matter the legitimacy, good bye. So the problem is double standard in the Muslim world towards certain groups being exempt from rules otherwise long internalized.
But the Muslim double standard in this case is not the point of this post, nor is resistance and all it entails in the Muslim world I've written about that a few times. THe point here is the Western double standard that prevents us from being able to look at the Muslim world and discover that. We wouldn't really know from our own press reports that shoe throwing is not generally okay, nobody would actually examine it, because our underlying assumption seems to be that the natives cannot be held to the same level of rational discourse as the West. We assume that when they're angry out there, they toss shoes. What else can you expect from those people, we implicitly think, even if poltiical correctness never allows us to complete that thought entirely. So give them a bit of a break, that's how it works out there, we think.
Again, it's all largely unprovable, so who knows. Just foam from the camel's mouth, to paraphrase Shi'a Islam's first Imam.
HAH
Here I am obviously not interested in international reactions, clearly neither the Arab nor the Muslm world would be riled up for sensible enough reasons, it had nothing to do with them. But domestically, I wonder, would it be like Muntadhar the show thrower? Would the left leaning media corps actually think of it as funny? Would they be off advertising the model of the shoe thrown? Would they, as MSNBC did, show it over and over and over again and crack jokes about the whole thing? Would the right as per Fox News have been mildly reprobating, emphasizing the proof this offers that Iraq has a free press?
I don't think so. I think the reaction would be quite different. I think the left would have been distancing itself from that reporter faster than Obama did from Jeremiah Wright. I think they would have said it is not indicative of the conduct they wish to be associated with in their criticisms of Katrina. I don't think they'd be showing it a hundred times, in fact I think the right would be showing it a hundred times, as they did the snippets of the Wright sermons, to show in this case that the media was in fact deeply and fundamentally in the hands of the left. I think MSNBC would be backpedalling, I think Fox would be on the attack, I don't think the New York TImes would be giving us human interest stories on people who own similar shoes and how they use them. I think the broad media lesson on all sides would be: if you have a problem with a President, you do not throw a shoe at him. You criticize, you attack, you say he doesn't care about black people, all of this is perfectly legitimate. You do not throw a shoe.
If I'm right about that, and I think I am though obviously there is no way to know this with any level of certainty as I noted above, it is fair to ask why the different reaction. I wonder if we are holding Arabs and Muslims to different standards. An Arab throws a shoes and it's "oh look, how cute, the natives have a free press just like us! Let's tell a joke!" A Western reporter throws a shoe (David Gregory did a lot less than that in his press conference with Scott McClellan about Cheney shooting the other dude in the face and was roundly criticized for it), and we would be shocked at the barbarity of it, the lack of civility in our political culture. We Americans are better than this, the assumption is, we don't do this, the children playing their own little political theater in Iraq trying to be us, well of course this is to be expected, but not us!
Never mind that there are actually press conferences that take place in various parts of the Muslim world, this is not solely a Western phenomenon anymore, and nobody throws shoes at anyone, and indeed if they did it would be a shock. Clearly Bush is an exception to that rule, clearly it was okay to toss a shoe at him among many in the region, but that's a ridiculous manifestation of the whole notion of resistance to occupation and the rest of it. Try that with Megawati Sukarnoputri even when her approval levels were truly in the deepest dumps, I'm not sure you get the same reaction. I think most people know perfectly well how to behave in press conferences, I think they have an exception in their minds in the Muslim world to President Bush in particular but America more generally. Certainly if a student for example tossed their shoe at a teacher in the East, and this just happened in Lebanon, the result is rather predictable--expulsion. Immediate expulsion. No matter the grievance, no matter the legitimacy, good bye. So the problem is double standard in the Muslim world towards certain groups being exempt from rules otherwise long internalized.
But the Muslim double standard in this case is not the point of this post, nor is resistance and all it entails in the Muslim world I've written about that a few times. THe point here is the Western double standard that prevents us from being able to look at the Muslim world and discover that. We wouldn't really know from our own press reports that shoe throwing is not generally okay, nobody would actually examine it, because our underlying assumption seems to be that the natives cannot be held to the same level of rational discourse as the West. We assume that when they're angry out there, they toss shoes. What else can you expect from those people, we implicitly think, even if poltiical correctness never allows us to complete that thought entirely. So give them a bit of a break, that's how it works out there, we think.
Again, it's all largely unprovable, so who knows. Just foam from the camel's mouth, to paraphrase Shi'a Islam's first Imam.
HAH
Great article as always!
One Iraqi writer asked a very reasonable question, after Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni's visit to Egypt:
"How come no Egyptian journalist hurled his shoes at her?!"
Double standards in their most clear example.
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