That is because he/she did not have the macro-view of the
war.
I am no hero. I just acted as an Iraqi who witnessed the pain
and bloodshed of too many innocents
Muntazer al-Zaidi
I am free. But my country is still a prisoner of war. There has
been a lot of talk about the action and about the person who took
it, and about the hero and the heroic act, and the symbol and the
symbolic act. But, simply, I answer: what compelled me to act is the injustice that
befell my people, and how the occupation wanted to humiliate my
homeland by putting it under its boot.
Over recent years, more than a million martyrs have fallen by
the bullets of the occupation and Iraq is now filled with more than
five million orphans, a million widows and hundreds of thousands of
maimed. Many millions are homeless inside and outside the
country.
We used to be a nation in which the Arab would share with the
Turkman and the Kurd and the Assyrian and the Sabean and the Yazid
his daily bread. And the Shia would pray with the Sunni in one
line. And the Muslim would celebrate with the Christian the
birthday of Christ. This despite the fact that we shared hunger
under sanctions for more than a decade.
Our patience and our solidarity did not make us forget the
oppression. But the invasion divided brother from brother,
neighbour from neighbour. It turned our homes into funeral
tents.
I am not a hero. But I have a point of view. I have a stance. It
humiliated me to see my country humiliated; and to see my Baghdad
burned, my people killed. Thousands of tragic pictures remained in
my head, pushing me towards the path of confrontation. The scandal
of Abu Ghraib. The massacre of Falluja, Najaf, Haditha, Sadr City,
Basra, Diyala, Mosul, Tal Afar, and every inch of our wounded land.
I travelled through my burning land and saw with my own eyes the
pain of the victims, and heard with my own ears the screams of the
orphans and the bereaved. And a feeling of shame haunted me like an
ugly name because I was powerless.
As soon as I finished my professional duties in reporting the
daily tragedies, while I washed away the remains of the debris of
the ruined Iraqi houses, or the blood that stained my clothes, I
would clench my teeth and make a pledge to our victims, a pledge of
vengeance.
The opportunity came, and I took it.
I took it out of loyalty to every drop of innocent blood that
has been shed through the occupation or because of it, every scream
of a bereaved mother, every moan of an orphan, the sorrow of a rape
victim, the teardrop of an orphan.
I say to those who reproach me: do you know how many broken
homes that shoe which I threw had entered? How many times it had
trodden over the blood of innocent victims? Maybe that shoe was the
appropriate response when all values were violated.
When I threw
the shoe in the face of the criminal, George Bush, I wanted to
express my rejection of his lies, his occupation of my country, my
rejection of his killing my people. My rejection of his plundering
the wealth of my country, and destroying its infrastructure. And
casting out its sons into a diaspora.
If I have wronged journalism without intention, because of the
professional embarrassment I caused the establishment, I apologise.
All that I meant to do was express with a living conscience the
feelings of a citizen who sees his homeland desecrated every day.
The professionalism mourned by some under the auspices of the
occupation should not have a voice louder than the voice of
patriotism. And if patriotism needs to speak out, then
professionalism should be allied with it.
I didn't do this so my name would enter history or for material
gains. All I wanted was to defend my country.
Muntazer al-Zaidi is an Iraqi reporter who was freed this
week after serving nine months in prison for throwing his shoe at
former US president George Bush at a press conference. This edited
statement was translated by McClatchy Newspapers correspondent
Sahar Issa www.mcclatchydc.com
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/sep/17/why-i-threw-shoe-bush
