Iraqi shoe thrower released from prison

The Iraqi people celebrated on Sept. 15 when Muntadhar al-Zaidi was released from a Baghdad jail after nine months in prison. Al-Zaidi is the Iraqi journalist who was jailed on Dec. 14, 2008, after he threw his shoes at U.S. President George W. Bush at a Baghdad news conference where Bush was speaking alongside Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki.

Al-Zaidi’s actions, which he said were for the “widows and orphans and those killed in Iraq,” were hailed throughout the Arab and Muslim world and among other oppressed peoples and international anti-imperialist forces, all who oppose the U.S.-led war and occupation of Iraq.

After his release, he spoke at Baghdadiya, the television station where he had worked and the site of the news conference where he boldly protested the war.

Al-Zaidi thanked all his supporters in Iraq and worldwide. He explained that what led him to act was the “injustice that befell my people, and how the occupation wanted to humiliate my homeland by putting it under its boot. ...” He spoke of the million “martyrs” and the millions of orphans, widows, injured Iraqis and displaced homeless.

He said, “Dozens, no, hundreds, of images of massacres [brought] tears to my eyes and wound[ed] me. The scandal of Abu Ghraib. The massacre[s] of Fallujah, Najaf, Haditha, Sadr City, Basra, Diyala, Mosul, Tal Afar, and every inch of our wounded land.”

As a journalist, he said, he saw “the pain of the victims and [heard] ... the screams of the bereaved and the orphans.” He said he felt shame because he was “powerless.”

“The opportunity came, and I took it,” he explained.

“Do you know how many broken homes that shoe that I threw had entered because of the occupation? How many times it had trodden over the blood of innocent victims? And how many times it had entered homes in which free Iraqi women and their sanctity had been violated? Maybe that shoe was the appropriate response. ...

“When I threw the shoe in the face of the criminal, Bush, I wanted to express my rejection of his lies, his occupation of my country, [and] my rejection of his killing my people ... his plundering the wealth of my country, and destroying its infrastructure. ...

“All that I meant to do was express with a living conscience the feelings of a citizen who sees his homeland desecrated every day.”

For this he was beaten, tortured and jailed.

Al-Zaidi also criticized Maliki’s deception on his arrest. While on television the prime minister expressed concern about the journalist’s safety, “[I] was being tortured with the most horrific methods. ...” Al-Zaidi’s screams were heard by journalists at the news conference as he was tortured in the hall’s backyard.

On his release Al-Zaida also called for justice for the hundreds jailed for years without a trial under the occupation. He pledged that his life’s work would now be to assist “all those whose lives were damaged by the occupation.”

He warned that his life is endangered by government and army officials, as he plans to name those responsible for his imprisonment and torture, and by U.S. intelligence agencies “because I am a rebel opposed to their occupation.”

Expressing his steadfast love for his country, Al-Zaidi ended by saying, “If the night of injustice is prolonged, it will not stop the rising of a sun and it will be the sun of freedom.”

Muntadhar al-Zaidi will go down in world history as a people’s hero!

Al-Zaidi’s speech, “The Story of My Shoe,” was translated by McClatchy special correspondent Sahar Issa.