The Shoe Thrower

0:00Just before we start, this episode discusses war, casualties of war, and torture. It may not be suitable for young or sensitive listeners. Wait, you're listening? Okay. All right. Okay. All right. You're listening to Radiolab. Radiolab. From WNYC. See? See? See?

0:30This is Radiolab. I'm Latif Dasar, and today we have a story from our reporter, Sarah Kari. Um, okay. So, a couple months ago, I got in the studio to do this interview that I'd been trying to make happen for close to a year. Hello. Hi, Sarah. Can you hear me? Yes. Yes. I'd been trying to connect with this Iraqi guy in Baghdad. Oh, hold on. I can't hear you. But things were not really going to plan. So, we are waiting. Hmm. It turns out my interviewee was taking his time having a little tea after his lunch.

1:03Um, and then, after about 45 minutes, he shows up. Ya, ahlan. Ahlan, untadhar. Kayfa halak? Uh, Sarah, did you speak Arabic? La, la. You don't speak Arabic? Uh, only a little bit. We fumble through, mostly me doing the fumbling. Shaya, shaya. With the help of... Sarah, Mays. Iraqi journalist, Mays Al-Baya. Chiarrafna. Mays, ahlan, usahlan, bikum, hayakum, Allah. Ahlan, bik. But then... We have one hour, right? Sarah? So, I was hoping to talk to you for longer because I want to get lots of details about

1:36your life and tell your story. And I don't want to miss any details. Okay. I hope you have another question or new questions. You have new questions. It was pretty clear that he was sick of talking about the one thing that I really wanted to ask him about. And if you're feeling frustrated, just tell me. Don't worry, I will tell you. Which is what? Well, okay. So maybe let's just start with introduce yourself and tell me why you're famous. And I threw my shoes at George W. Bush.

2:20Oh, yeah. Do you remember him? Yeah. I remember that guy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Well, just in case for anyone who doesn't remember, let me just do a quick refresher. Okay, yeah. It's December 14th, 2008, more than five years into the war in Iraq, and George W. Bush makes a surprise visit to Baghdad, where he's giving a press conference. Thank you for your kind invitation. Next to him is Nouriel Maliki, the prime minister of Iraq. And I'm looking forward to some food.

2:51Now, officially, Bush is there to sign an agreement, shake some hands. You're leaving the next president with a stable foundation for the future. As he's on his way out at the end of his second term. Yeah. But he's also clearly trying to make this point. The war is not over. That in his eyes. But with the conclusion of these agreements, it is decisively on its way to being won. The war has been a success. At the end, he says, thank you, in Arabic. Shukran Aziru. Shukran Aziru. And then.

3:22Whoa.

3:25Holy. So you see this guy just sort of pops out of the crowd out of nowhere and throws a shoe and George Bush dodges it. And then he throws a second one and Maliki tries to swat that one out of the way.

3:39Yeah. And then it's just chaos. He's tackled to the ground. They're dragging him out. And then the clip ends. Yeah. It's so quick. I know. It's so quick. And it blows up. I mean. Extraordinary scenes took place. You know, it's basically top of the news across the globe. George W. Bushpark. Montezar Al-Jaydi. And the clip.

4:05It's all over the Internet. Call it the shoe herd around the world. It's really as viral as something can be in 2008. Yeah. But even today, I feel like with most people, if you're like, hey, that shoe thrower guy, they're like, oh, yeah. I remember it feeling silly. Right. I mean, and definitely there were some, like, how dare he kind of reactions, but generally here in the U.S., it's slightly painful. It was as much, like, late night show fodder as it was news.

4:37Shoo me once. Shoes on you. And for so many people, their main reaction was like, George W. Bush was weirdly agile there. Like, props to him. He was quick on his feet. I remember that. And he did a little side to side. Looks like we finally found something President Bush is good at. Dodgeball! And, you know, for me, when this happened, I was 14 years old. I was growing up in a very Muslim immigrant community, going to Islamic school.

5:08You know, in this post-9-11 war on terror era, very aware of, like, how so many people had died in Iraq. And like a lot of people, I had a very intuitive understanding of the anger and frustration that this guy was expressing. Mm-hmm. But at the same time, I'll admit, like, I just sort of thought he was, like, a random crazy guy. You know, I didn't think there was that much to it. Yeah. Yeah. It feels like a rash move made in anger. But fast forward to today, with everything that is happening in the world right now and things that the U.S. is contributing to in Gaza, in Lebanon, and now in Iran, it feels

5:43like we're in another never-ending, sort of out-of-control war. Very unpopular war. Very unpopular, right. I just find myself flashing back to that era and specifically to that guy. Huh. And so a while back, I just looked him up. Mm-hmm. And the first thing I learned was that he was a journalist, like an Iraqi journalist. Oh, I didn't know that. Same. And suddenly I was like, oh, okay, like this act of throwing a shoe, I mean, it's not what

6:13anybody is supposed to do, but it's especially not what journalists are supposed to do. Right. That's right. Yeah. Right? You know, like even for us, like we're not supposed to protest or advocate or even express opinions or emotions that could be seen as political. It's like literally in our job description here. Yeah. Right. Exactly. And for good reason. And like, the reason is we want people to trust what we say, the coverage we do, that we're not spinning it in one way or another. We don't have our thumb on the scale. Right. No, totally. So I guess to see him not just like express his opinion, but to actually throw something

6:48at the president. Yeah. I just kept thinking like, what exactly got him to that point? You know, what happened there? And what does he think of that moment now? I can smoking some cigars. I think so. As long as you stay close to the mic. My smoke without voice. Okay. Don't worry. Okay. Okay. And once we sort of got warmed up, actually this one interview turned into several, like we ended up talking for, I think something like eight hours. Wow.

7:18And there was so much about Muntather, what happened, that I had, and I think most people have no clue about. Hmm. And also this act at the center of it, this act of throwing the shoe, the more I learned about it, the more it became really layered and fascinating and weirdly kind of perfect. Huh.

7:50Okay. Just to back up a little here. When did you decide to become a journalist? And why did you want to become a journalist? Mm-hmm.

8:03He grew up with big imagination. Muntather says that growing up as a kid in Iraq, his mom would read to him every night before bed. Which was very inspiring to him.

8:17And he fell in love with stories and books. He used to visit any neighbors or any family members who have a library, and he would just read all of the books that he can lay his hands on.

8:32And in particular, as he got older, and Saddam Hussein was at the height of his dictatorship,

8:40he started to read the work of journalists and political poets who wrote about the plight of ordinary people under repression.

8:53Then in 1990, Saddam Hussein invades Kuwait. Immediately after the Iraqi invasion. And in reaction, the U.S. and its allies. Together with many other nations, I ordered an embargo. Placed sanctions on Iraq. The stakes are high. Iraq is already a rich and powerful country. And of course, the impact of that is mostly felt by the people of Iraq. It was like a cancer.

9:19Eating your bones, eating your soul. By some estimates, over half a million children died. Muntather was just 14 years old at the time.

9:32He had three brothers and three sisters and his mother. So he started lining up at construction sites, just looking for any job that he could get.

9:44He would work from the morning till the evening. And all of the income he would get out of it is literally to buy two bags of bread. And then 9-11 happens. At this hour, George W. Bush. American and coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations. Claiming that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, which now obviously we know wasn't true. Right. Decides to invade Iraq. To disarm Iraq, to free its people, and to defend the world from grave danger.

10:15Muntather, can you tell me about some of your memories of when the invasion started? And how old were you when that happened? He was a 24-year-old.

10:32The first memory of the invasion for him, it was when he was in a bus, and he saw a convoy of the American soldiers in Humvees.

10:45And one of the American soldiers, he got out of his Humvee in the middle of the traffic. And he actually pissed on a car.

10:58And his colleagues were laughing.

11:02He told me that in that moment, he could feel... As he put it, the disaster that was coming their way. They didn't come to liberate them. They came to piss on people.

11:24And this feeling started to come over him. It turned out to me that he has the duty to write about what's happening. Like, I want to become a journalist. Because he felt that journalists actually have this very real power. He said this thing to me very along the lines of that saying that journalists write the first draft of history. Yeah. They are the people that set the record on things.

11:58And he began writing in newspapers. Eventually, he ends up at a TV station called Al-Baghdadiya.

12:11And he starts reporting... ...on all the ways that the invasion is unleashing, as he put it... ...suffering. ...pain.

12:31...humor.

12:36...agony.

12:40On ordinary people.

12:43Muntadha, can you give me some examples of the kinds of stories that you reported? The story of that little girl, eight years old girl called Zahra. One day in 2007, in Baghdad... ...some American soldiers found an explosive device on their convoy. It exploded in front of them. And they start to shoot randomly after that. And because there was a school nearby...

13:15...the school guard, he came out from the school... ...and he's like, please don't shoot. But they kept shooting.

13:23This little girl, Zahra, was shot and killed.

13:29At that time, the Americans threatened everybody in the area... ...and said that you must not say she was killed by the Americans. And so, Muntadha says... ...a lot of journalists were intimidated by the story. And they didn't want to cover it. Mahi decided... ...he was going to do it.

13:51He interviewed the little girls who were with her outside the school.

13:58They were playing with her and they were talking and laughing. And then suddenly, that girl, Zahra, just fell on her face. And her friends, they thought that she was joking. They nudged her and she didn't say anything. And they saw blood streaming out of her body. He was heavily impacted by Zahra's story.

14:32I'm curious, did you just report the facts? Or did you add, I don't know, some commentary? Or, yeah, what was your perspective in that story?

14:42The way he was writing the story itself, it was very emotional. The final image was like a group photo of Zahra with her friends.

14:59So, he said, this is the picture of Zahra, who was killed by the American soldier who actually claims that he was in my country to build democracy. Even when he read the script to his colleagues, everyone was crying. Wow.

15:25Now, one note I want to make here is that while I've been able to independently confirm many of the broad strokes of Zahra's story, I actually haven't been able to track down Muntadhar's own report on her. The Baghdadia archives are really hard to track down all these years later, which means that for a few of the specific details that you just heard, we only have Muntadhar's account to go off of. However, from all of my sources familiar with this time period in Iraq, stories like Zahra's were far from the exceptional case.

15:56Because what we know today, what is now well-documented about the Iraq war, is that the United States military caused widespread harm to civilians. There were rampant abuses of power, like U.S. forces doing arbitrary raids, stealing, arresting civilians en masse, committing torture and sexual violence, and indiscriminate killing. The estimates of senseless civilian deaths go into the hundreds of thousands. But to this day, we don't actually know the full extent

16:27of the civilian loss of life. Mm. Yeah. But to go back to Muntadhar, what we do know is that a couple of days after the Zahra story came out... He was in the street, and a car stopped by him and said, get in our car, or it's going to get nasty. So he actually got kidnapped. They put him in a small room. They wanted Muntadhar... ...to be quiet and not speak again. Like no more publishing stories

16:57like the one about Zahra. He believes it probably was someone from the Iraqi government who was connected at that time with the Americans. And I should point out that now it's also well documented that the U.S. forces were like actively shutting down news reports and reporters who were trying to get these kinds of stories out into the world. And in fact, a couple of months later... ...American soldiers actually took him into custody. They raided his home

17:29and they detained him. Why? I don't know.

17:34The shameful part of it was they took him in his pyjama. It was a baby blue pyjama as well. In your mind, was the arrest also connected to your reporting? I don't know. I don't know why. But as this was happening to him, the way he was seeing the Iraq war covered in the news around the world... ...felt so upside down.

18:08Like even before the invasion started. George W. Bush, he said... ...the Iraqis are going to welcome the American soldiers with roses and everybody will be happy. Full disclosure, I haven't been able to find evidence of this exact moment. It's actually possible that it wasn't Bush, but it was some other administration official. I mean, Dick Cheney said something like, they're going to welcome us as liberators, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that rhetoric was definitely really prevalent at the time. And weirdly enough, this specific image of Iraqis

18:38greeting Americans with flowers or roses is a thing that a lot of people I've talked to actually do remember hearing. Yeah. It was heavily marketed by the American media, but also the Western media. What does that make you feel?

18:56When Muntabar heard it, he said he really wanted to kind of say, this is not happening. People are not welcoming the American soldiers with roses. Yeah, I mean, I can imagine how galling that would be. Like, it's your job to tell the story of your country, of what's actually happening. And not only is no one listening, like insult to injury, the story that is being told is dead wrong. Exactly, exactly. And with all of these things piling up, it wasn't long before he hit

19:27a breaking point. It happened one day when he was reporting on the bombing of a house. An Apache war plane strike the house. And as he was looking into the rubble, he saw an elderly man wearing the Iraqi dish dasha, the white robe, in the middle of the wires and the concrete. All of his intestines were out. He could see hands and arms

20:04of children trapped under the collapsed roof.

20:10And after he submitted the footage to the TV station, he had a breakdown.

20:18He couldn't stop crying. He was so broken at that time.

20:27The thing that hit him was that despite the fact that he was reporting all of these stories, he could feel that no one was listening. No one cared. Maybe people would read about it within Iraq. Maybe Maximum would go in the Arab world. But the outside world like Europe and America, these stories were not reaching. People's pain is not being heard.

20:56I really wanted all of this world to hear and understand the pain that people are going through. So, finally, one day, I was in the tech shower. Nice. And I talked to myself. Like, what do I do? I need to do something. Yes. And that is when the idea

21:26pops into his head.

21:30I should throw a shoe at George L.B. Bush. Yes. Yes, he is this. He is this. Okay, that's a great idea. And I kept thinking about it every single day. Every day, when I was going to work, I see him on TV. I say, I swear, as soon as I see you, I'm going to throw my shoe at you.

21:56I don't think, I don't think I fully understand, like, how did you even get the idea to throw a shoe? Like, I understand you were angry and you were, you know, all this was building up over a long period of time, but where does the idea to throw a shoe come from? In my mind.

22:14In my evil. In Shailtini. That loosely translates to mischief, by the way. No, but there's so many ways to do Shailtini, right? Like, you could have screamed at him, you could have waved a flag, you could have asked him a really pointed question, you could have demanded that he apologize, but why shoe? Exactly, that's a good point. I want to speak in Arabic to explain my idea, exactly.

22:44Sure. A key reason was the ultimate gift that you can give in the Arab culture is roses. So it's a huge thing. And that is why Muntadar, he said, I wanted to do something completely the opposite of roses.

23:03The complete opposite of that is actually what people wear in their feet, which is the shoe.

23:12You know, this is a thing in Muslim cultures, but probably a lot of cultures around the world, you know, shoes are unclean, you don't bring them into the house, especially in Arab cultures, it's an insult to show someone the bottom of your shoe. It's like, here's what I think of you, you're beneath me. Yeah, exactly. For our culture, it's by far the most degrading thing to do to somebody.

23:39For example, our mothers, they use slippers on our children in our culture and maybe in your culture as well. Definitely. So that is where it came from. And Muntalar also told me, you know, look, during the occupation, there were two types of resistance in Iraq. One, which was the armed resistance, like militias that had cropped up, fighting the American troops.

24:11And then on the other hand, you had the intellectual resistance. and I felt that I want to be part of the intellectual resistance and hence why I decided to throw the shoe. I mean, throwing a shoe is not intellectual resistance. Like, did you, did you realize you were crossing a line beyond just intellectual resistance into something else? You cannot put yourself in my shoe to know what happened

24:42in my mind in this moment. I'm actually, I'm actually stunned by your reaction. Really?

24:55Because I just told you that half a million children have been killed. Many people have suffered for years and years.

25:07And you were just listening and you just acted like it's okay. It's kind of like it's understandable.

25:17Let me just translate for you. Sorry, let me, yeah, I just want to say it's not that. It's not that I don't think. Let me finish. I'm not obliged to kind of get a reaction according to your Western standard. And he's not, he's saying, let me just, please let me finish because it's, actually he said a lot. He said, yes, I am a journalist.

25:50I've been documenting a lot, whether it's video, audio, written pieces, because no one has listened. No one has done anything. No one was prosecuted. The Americans did not even get my stories. I wanted people to once stop and pause and ask, who is Zahra? What happened to Iraqis? Who are the people who were suffering? By this action,

26:21which was very intentional action,

26:24I made the world ask the question, why this shoe was a throne? Hence why it's been almost 18 years and he's still doing all of these interviews to tell the world why he threw a shoe. If he wasn't doing just a question that could embarrass the American president, this is not going to be enough because that question could be washed away. No, I totally understand.

26:55And Muntada, the reason I'm asking so many questions about this is because this is why I wanted to talk to you, honestly. Like the reason I thought of you, one night, almost two years ago, I was reading the news about Gaza and I was feeling so angry and I was like in bed, I was trying to go to sleep, okay, and I was just so, so, so angry and I, you know, I'm a journalist,

27:26I was like, and I don't know if you had this, but here in the U.S., like, there's a lot of pressure on journalists like, oh, stay neutral, just say the facts, don't say how you actually feel, don't say anything political because then people will think that you're biased, like, I was feeling like, I was feeling like being a journalist was like having handcuffs on, like, I can't say that this is something horrible that's happening, and I swear to God, I don't know why, but in this moment,

27:57I thought of you, I thought of what you did, and that's why I want to understand where that idea came from. Yes. There's so many different options you had, and you picked one specific option, right, which is, I'm going to throw a shoe.

28:15In some moments, I actually thought, maybe I should be, like, an armed resistance. For example, one time, I was called by someone who told me that American soldiers raided the house, and then they raped his wife and his sisters. So I went there, and I talked to the women who were weeping, and they covered their faces because of the shame.

28:46The tears were wetting their veil.

28:51I was very angry,

28:54and actually, as soon as I walked out from the house, I saw a Humvee, and Americans were standing just outside that Humvee, smoking and laughing and joking.

29:06And I thought, honestly, if I could have a weapon, I probably would have killed them. Why did you decide not to do that?

29:20Because for me, these crimes that I've seen and I've covered, it's not enough to prosecute one soldier or kill one soldier or a couple of them, at the end of the day, those are just people who are following the command.

29:40The most important thing is to go to the head of the snake, the person who is giving the orders and who actually allowed and enabled this disaster to happen. when you were thinking about what to do to George W. Bush, did you think of any other options? Did you think of throwing anything worse than a shoe? No, I never thought of throwing anything but a shoe. And I tell you why.

30:10If I have killed the president of the United States, he will become a hero. He will be celebrated as a victim and as a martyr. It's so interesting because it's like you had to find the perfect sweet spot between the two options, right? One is the completely non-violent option, which is like keep reporting or something, ask a really tough question or something. And then the other side is like do something that's actually violent.

30:41And this is like somewhere in the middle and I find that very interesting. It's not quite violent, although maybe, I don't know, maybe it's more on the violent side, but it's like it's somewhere in between the two options.

30:57There's actually, it's interesting you say about that fine line between violence and non-violent. So for example, Borsconi, the Italian prime minister in 2009, someone threw a vase at him. It was actually a small statue, but anyway. Oh, this is after you, 2009. 2009, December maybe. Yeah, okay. And he ended up bleeding. Oh. Do you see this picture?

31:28I can't see it too clearly. Can you describe it? Okay, one minute.

31:36It's of the Italian prime minister and his face is full of blood. Despite him being a corrupt prime minister, people were sympathizing by him because he bled. Even I was sympathizing with the fact that as an old man, he was bleeding. to me, it's hard to swallow. Okay, so tell me, Mandadar, what happens next in the story?

32:06It sounds like you have this idea in 2005, which is like three years before you actually do it, right? Yes. What happens in the meantime? I kept chasing Bush in multiple occasions. Oh, really? And I tried to attend his press conferences multiple times and I did not succeed. I even one time wanted to go to Sharm el-Sheikh in order to

32:37attend the press conference in Egypt, in Egypt, yes, and it didn't happen. And so I kept pursuing him. And pursuing George W. Bush, like how did you do that? How did you figure out where he was going to be and try to track him down?

32:55You know, I am a journalist.

32:58So every single time I know there's a press conference, I try to follow it. And interesting enough,

33:07that incident that when I threw the shoe at him, I didn't even know he was going to be there. No way. Wait, okay, so... That's an interesting story. Monsalder told me that in December of 2008, one day he's at work in the Baghdadia newsroom. It's the end of the day, time for him to get up to go home.

33:29But by six o'clock, one of his colleagues turns to him and says, we need someone like one correspondent and two cameramen to go to cover a press conference. Like, can you go cover this? Because George W. Bush is going to be there. What do you think? What's your reaction? I'm shocked. I'm free. He asked his colleague to repeat himself. Like, are you sure? And then he turns to this other reporter.

34:00And I said, you need to go with the two cameramen. Like, you didn't want to go initially, Monsalder? No. No, no, no. Really? Yeah, in fact, Monsalder told me the next thing that he did was he got in his car and he went home. Huh.

34:20Now, of course, we all know how the day is going to end, but the dramatic story of how it all actually goes down is coming after the break. This

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