Shoe-Tosser a Celebrity in Arab World

World | Mon, Dec 15, 2008 at 10:42:35 am PST

The Iraqi TV reporter who threw his shoes at George W. Bush yesterday is rather predictably being hailed as a hero by the Arab world.

Newspapers across the Arab world printed front-page photos of Bush ducking the flying shoes, and satellite TV stations repeatedly aired the incident, which was hailed by the president’s many critics in the region. ...

Wafa Khayat, 48, a doctor in the West Bank town of Nablus, called the attack “a message to Bush and all the U.S. policy makers that they have to stop killing and humiliating people.” ...

Al-Jazeera television interviewed Saddam’s former chief lawyer Khalil al-Dulaimi, who offered to defend al-Zeidi, calling him a “hero.”

In Baghdad’s Shiite slum of Sadr City, thousands of supporters of radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr burned American flags to protest against Bush and call for the release of al-Zeidi. “Bush, Bush, listen well: Two shoes on your head,” the protesters chanted.

Of course, anyone who tried such a thing with Saddam Hussein would have been tortured, murdered, and dumped into a mass grave.