"I swear by God that all Iraqis with their different nationalities are glad about this act," said Yaareb Yousif Matti, a 45-year-old teacher from Mosul, in northern Iraq... In central Damascus, a huge banner hung over a street, reading, "Oh, heroic journalist, thank you so much for what you have done." Read the Article at the IHT: Shoe-hurling Iraqi Becomes a Folk Hero.

After millions of views on YouTube and other sites, the "shoe throwing" meme spread to video games, with multiple versions of the incident being translated to websites such as "Sock and Awe," "Bye Bye Bush," and "The Bush Shoe Incident" offering people the chance to recreate the event by throwing shoes at the President, and racking up points for direct hits.

Bush’s immediate reaction was, "I don't think you can take one guy and say this represents a broad movement in Iraq." (Washington Post) Indeed, if everyone had the courage of Zaidi to stand up and express their opposition to the worst abuses of imperial power in a similar manner, the US occupation would never be able to stand and Bush would never have been elected in the first place. The compliancy of the US media in reporting the administration line while deceiving the public about the threat of weapons of mass destruction, chemical and nuclear, in Iraq before the country was attacked is symbolized by the case of Judith Miller of the New York Times and her lunches with Scooter Libby.

"On September 7, 2002, Miller and Times reporter Michael R. Gordon reported the interception of metal tubes bound for Iraq. Her front page story quoted unnamed 'American officials' and 'American intelligence experts' who said the tubes were intended to be used to enrich nuclear material, and cited unnamed 'Bush administration officials' who claimed that in recent months, Iraq had ‘stepped up its quest for nuclear weapons and has embarked on a worldwide hunt for materials to make an atomic bomb.’ Miller added that 'Mr. Hussein's dogged insistence on pursuing his nuclear ambitions, along with what defectors described in interviews as Iraq's push to improve and expand Baghdad's chemical and biological arsenals, have brought Iraq and the United States to the brink of war.' Although Miller conceded that some intelligence experts found the information on Iraq's weapons programs ‘spotty,’ she did not report specific and detailed objections, including a report filed with the US government more than a year before Miller's article appeared by retired Oak Ridge National Laboratory physicist, Houston G. Wood III, who concluded that the tubes were not meant for centrifuges. Shortly after Miller's article was published, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell and Donald Rumsfeld all appeared on television and pointed to Miller's story as a partial basis for going to war. Subsequent analyses by various agencies all concluded that there was no way the tubes could have been used for uranium-enrichment centrifuges. Miller said of the controversy, ‘[M]y job isn't to assess the government's information and be an independent intelligence analyst myself. My job is to tell readers of The New York Times what the government thought about Iraq's arsenal.’” (Wikipedia)

Given that weapons of mass destruction were never found in Iraq, Muntadar al-Zaidi’s job in this instance must have been to tell the world what the Iraqis thought about George W. Bush.