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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36:27Hey, I'm Latif, this is Radiolab and we are back with Sara Kari. Yeah, so when we left off, Muntather had just found out that George Bush was going to be at a press conference in Baghdad and instead of volunteering to go cover it, he hightailed it back home.

36:47And I run home because I was wearing a brand new shoes that I bought from Beirut, Lebanon.

36:57But you didn't want to throw.

37:00I want to get the dirtiest and the ugliest one.

37:08And it was that actually I covered many massacres by the Americans before. So he's really thought this through. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like every last detail. What did the shoes look like? The ones you picked out?

37:27It was a very comfortable one and it was quite heavy. Nice.

37:33It was kind of like medical shoe, you know. Like an orthopedic type of shoe? Yes. I bought it from Egypt. Okay. Like color? Black. Okay. But size, you want to know the size? What size? My shoes, same number of George W. Bush president. Same size. How did you know that? He's 43 president of United States.

38:0243rd? So your size is 43 and he's the 43rd president? Is that what you're trying to say? Okay. It was completely a coincidence.

38:15Anyway, as he was driving over to the press conference, Muntadar said he just stopped for a second.

38:26Right on the banks of the Tigris River.

38:30It was sunset. So I stood by the river and I was just staring at the river at the sunset and I thought to myself, this would be the last sunset I would ever see.

38:50Like I might, there's going to be secret service there. Like there's a good chance I get shot and don't make it out alive. So he's willing to die to do this? Yeah.

39:03Were you thinking through a game plan in your mind?

39:09It was very simple. I just wanted to throw my shoe at him and that's it. Can you just walk me through what happened step by step? Are you curious? I'm very curious.

39:23I think you know the answer to that question. Yes. So here goes. He told me he entered this area called the green zone. That was an area where most of the Saddam Hussein palaces were. It's where the Americans were based pretty locked down. When I passed all of the checkpoints I saw my colleagues there from the Baghdad TV station. And they were kind of like oh okay you

39:54came after all. And he said no no no I'm coming here as a citizen I'm just coming here to watch. And he handed them his press credentials his ID and when he entered the press conference somehow he was the first person in there. he looked around the

40:25hole was quite massive. I saw all of the Iraqi and American flags podium I saw the red carpet in the rows of chairs he was trying to figure out where to sit.

40:41In the beginning he went and sat on the first row but then he thought if I gonna throw my shoe at him then I better be a little bit behind. Why? Because that was too close because if I was on the front row and I throw the shoe then I will be shot dead straight away. But if I am on the third row they will think before shooting at me. As people were filing in I could feel my heart

41:12was popping out of my chest. He could feel his body catching up to the reality of what he was about to do. Excitement, fear, what is it?

41:28And then right before they all took their seats some guards came in and they were giving us all of these orders and it was quite degrading.

41:40They say you know what you're going to have to even be searched. and when he went up to get searched there were two body guards there was this one guard who was wearing a pilot suit and the pilot one he was extremely rude after he was done searching somebody he would literally smack them on their bottoms and say off you go. Wow. And Muntadar

42:14at this point was so amped up you know that if he got this guy he just didn't even know how he was going to react.

42:23Thankfully I ended up getting searched by the other guy and when he's getting searched I ended up taking off my shoes and when he put them back on I wore them like slippers because I wanted to be able to take them off easily.

42:42I was laughing inside because I thought like if only he knew that this is my actual weapon. Yeah. Wow. Okay.

42:56Finally when Muntadar sat back down it was time. George W. Bush walked in. Thank you for your kind invitation. George W. Bush starts saying I am quite hungry. I'm looking forward to some food. He was just thinking that the only thing that the president is going to taste is his shoes.

43:22When George Bush is giving the speech are you listening to what he's saying? No, no, I don't know what he said. I'm in another world.

43:33I was reciting Quran.

43:40I was trying to do the whole ceremonies as if I am leaving this world. Oh, wow. He told me it felt like like a very nasty flu. And in this feverish haze he heard this voice inside and this voice in his head was saying like look at your life.

44:05You're chief correspondent. You have your own program. People love you. You have a house. You have a car. Your future is wide open.

44:17Do you really have to do this?

44:22And I almost backed off and I thought what am I doing?

44:28But suddenly it was like he woke up.

44:34And then I was talking to myself and saying if I back off now I would call myself a coward every day for the rest of my life. If I lose my self-respect I don't care if the rest of the world would respect me.

44:52And so when George W. Bush neared the end of his speech way of being one.

45:00Clearly George W. Bush was practicing a lot to say thank you in Arabic.

45:06In an effort to be at least somewhat honorable and not take him by surprise he shouted.

45:17This is my goodbye kiss to you your dog. I never thought actually of saying that but I just said it at that moment. Oh you didn't plan to say that? No no no no. How bad of an insult is it to call someone a dog? Is it a very bad insult? Yes it's very bad and George Bush when he saw I lifted my arm I could

45:50see his face went completely pale very pale and he froze and then I threw the shoe at him and he he bent forward and the shoe came above him and then of course he was taking the other shoe yeah was that always the plan to throw both shoes?

46:18My my original plan was just one shoe because I thought that as soon as I'm gonna stand up and I throw one shoe I'm gonna be shot dead. but then when I threw the first one and there was nothing I thought okay it's time for me to actually do the second side so I threw the second one. Were you surprised at how quickly he he dodged the shoes? I was mainly focusing on

46:49my own actions yeah and I kept releasing all of the anger from all of the stories that I've covered for all of the anger that I was building up inside me for years and years swearing at him and his father and I

47:20kept saying that this is for all of the Iraqis they've killed they're raped they affected so I managed to actually release all of that in one time the one who stopped me it was an Iraqi journalist he tried to strangle my hand you know hold my

47:50hand but then after that they all gathered on top of me then I was taken by the security of the Iraqi prime minister we'll be back with the rest of the story after this quick break this episode is sponsored by BetterHelp these are just some of the therapists

48:21who are getting shouted out on BetterHelp dot com and BetterHelp says some of its best reviews are for the therapists themselves according to BetterHelp their providers maintain a live therapy session rating of 4.9 out of 5 stars based on over 1.7 million client session reviews BetterHelp says its therapists must have at least three years and 1,000 hours of hands on experience in addition to holding all required certifications across a range of

48:51specialties and BetterHelp says it's easy to get started with one of their therapists answer a few questions get matched based on your needs and switch therapists at any time if it's not the right fit see the reviews see what stands out and see if BetterHelp is right for you visit BetterHelp dot com slash Radiolab that's BetterHelp dot com slash Radiolab Simone Sanders Townsend and I have known each other for more than a decade tussling over politics and policy

49:23when she worked in the White House and I reported on it and now we're friends and colleagues and on our podcast Clock It we are positioning ourselves at the intersection of culture and politics Clock It is where we talk about what we see and hear in the news so you can start to clock it too clock it with Simone and Eugene all episodes available now all right so we ended with

49:53you getting tackled to the ground for most people obviously this is the end of the story but for Manthader it was not the bodyguards gathered on me they were beating me really really bad they broke my teeth they punched me in the eyes and then they were shouting oh he's a terrorist he's a terrorist an

50:23Iraqi court sentenced him to three years in prison they stripped me completely and just kept me with my underwears he claims he was tortured pretty horrifically doused with cold water shocked with electricity beaten with iron bars jesus jesus maliki's staff kept telling me that people are resentful about what i did and that people hated me and then they

50:54they took me in solitude confinement and they locked me there for three months three months oh my goodness every single day was way longer than any days that ever spent in my entire life on one of these days mantather

51:25was sitting in his cell i just looked at my cell's door which had two holes only so there was barely any light coming from it then suddenly i just saw zahra zahra wearing an off-white dress she came and she sat on the bed i knew

52:01it was zahra because her mother gave me some of her pictures when i was reporting on the story and she just looked at me and then then she disappeared i was just surprised he he he he knows that this might be sound like he was crazy but

52:32this is actually what happened he told me the next thing he remembered was two officers entering his cell two high-ranking officers two high-ranking officers from maliki's office and they were asking me why why i threw the shoe at george w bush and i just said it's because they killed zahra manzader says that some of the guards that are sympathetic to him

53:04began to leak me some information about what was going on while he was in prison because outside the shoe throw struck a nerve in the days after his arrest people in multiple cities in iraq poured out into the streets in the news footage you can see seas of people waving shoes in the air and not just in iraq

53:34or in the middle east but in latin america europe in the united states i was just watching this really striking footage of these american activists throwing shoes at an effigy of bush in front of the white house take this one on behalf of all the american people

54:04who are disgusted but back to month other after nine months in prison he ended up getting released and by this point like a monument had been put up in his honor one country had offered him a medal and another country had offered him a citizenship i'm pretty sure several people have also offered their daughter's hand in marriage to him no way

54:35yeah someone in saudi arabia reportedly bid 10 million dollars for the shoes oh my god although those allegedly were destroyed wow and month other's impact on the culture didn't even end there because jumping ahead a bit premier wednesday started badly in the few years following month other there's many people used the shoes a speech on economics interrupted with the new fashionable protest the throwing of a shoe there's a rash of copycat shoe throwings at world leaders

55:05really yeah the latest target of a shoe thrower is iran's president mahmoud ahmadinejah you have a shoe yet again this one directed at the prime minister the prime minister of india john howard prime minister of australia hillary clinton was one i didn't even know about what was that a bat that somebody throwing something at me and like truly i'm not even joking this is scratching the surface there's a great wikipedia entry

55:36of all the different shoe throwings and i i actually didn't realize that there was this much of a response to the shoe at the time until i started reporting on this which did make me wonder like before montader there was so much protest against the iraq war already like what was it about this act that made it take on a life of its own yeah and you know there are the obvious reasons like the high profileness of it

56:07the fact that it was like directly at dorsalb bush the symbolism of the shoe that we talked about earlier the fact that there were so many cameras in the room and this era where things kind of newly could go viral yeah even just the timing of it all like coming at this moment in the war where people were sick of what was going on so it does seem like this perfect storm of things but i do still find myself thinking back to the conversation that montader and i had earlier about that goldilocks space

56:38between violence and non-violence it's really something i don't think i ever thought about or even had the words for it before i talked to him yeah i'm just curious how you how you would describe that or what kind of name you would give that yeah so i went looking for somebody who could help me think through it like what's the label we put on the shoebox i actually don't even know how to articulate it well quasi non-violence methods that include uh the use of very low levels of

57:09um i'm not really sure what the term would be fair but i think there is that niche space so this is jamila rakib i am the executive director of the albert einstein institution which is an organization that studies and promotes the use of non-violent action in conflict and she says that niche space actually does have a rich history there's this long history of people throwing objects at political leaders at invaders

57:39at occupiers there's things like throwing eggs tomatoes tomatoes probably tomatoes potatoes potatoes somehow feels more violent than eggs and tomatoes you know what that's that's a tricky one i i think turnips there's a there's historical presence for turnips it's going it goes back to ancient rome no way where people disagreed with the policies of a particular governor and actually threw turnips at him um that sounds painful yeah heavy root vegetables yeah that sounds that sounds more painful

58:10for sure yes exactly and lots of modern day examples come to mind too i heard about like pie throwing glitter oh glitter i mean it's really hard to get off your skin so didn't someone throw a milkshake at someone at some point yes yeah nigel farage right the far right leader in the uk actually important to note here also is the case of someone throwing the sandwich oh i feel like i heard of that one that was in dc is that right yes at border patrol

58:40okay okay yeah yeah part of the power of all of these jamila says is it's a very memorable moment the sheer spectacle of it but also it shows that you can be anywhere at any time and someone can throw a object at you no matter how powerful you are yeah because like one thing i think about with the shoe throw is how it ever so briefly flattens the hierarchy between one father and george w bush you know like it's like it's just they're no longer a citizen and a president

59:12or whatever it's like it's just like a dude throwing a shoe and dude dodging a shoe right exactly it's just like all the roles fall away which when you consider that one of them has the might of the world's most powerful military behind them and the other is a disenfranchised journalist in a war-torn country it's kind of an extraordinary thing that they could even find themselves on the same plane although i will say it didn't come without a cost because when with other tried to get back

59:42to his life as a journalist i cannot find any tv station to work with them he couldn't find anyone to hire him why not because there are more more tv stations in middle east friends with americans and friends with the the iraqi government he claimed that in order to avoid upsetting either the iraqi government or the american government all of these iraqi channels basically blacklisted him which you know is a claim that's very hard

1:00:13to prove but from multiple journalists that i've talked to who knew the media landscape around this time it's definitely plausible but do you think part of it is that they stopped taking you seriously as a journalist that they didn't trust you to i don't know be neutral and not be an activist no no not that reason not that reason that's not reason i mean it was clear that many journalists were genuinely upset by what he did even if you

1:00:44just go back to the first moments after the shoe throw the other journalists in the room that day specifically some of the iraqi journalists were immediately apologizing directly to bush these journalists here were very apologetic they were you know they were said this doesn't represent the iraqi people but that's what happens in free societies where people try to draw attention to themselves when i saw it

1:01:14i felt embarrassed that a journalist would have done something like that so this is mace al-bayah you've heard her already translating my conversations with month other she is an iraqi british journalist because this is just wasn't professional i mean i don't think two journalists can disagree about that i actually called her up after we were done with all of our interviews with month other i think it was just hitting me that you you have been through a lot of the same stuff as

1:01:44month other yeah like him she was on the ground i've been where month other was i've been in the greens reporting on the invasion as it was happening for multiple international news outlets and even though she wasn't one of the iraqi journalists in the room that day she told me that when she saw it i was i was shocked about it no one sane could have done that i guess yeah tell me a little bit more about when i when i reached out to you and said oh i want to interview this guy i don't know what 18 years later what did you think what was

1:02:16your reaction to that i was i was surprised because um like out of all of the stories on iraq he would not come to my mind it's uh you're like there's so much more to say what why him i was genuinely surprised by by your your quest but um but going through the interview i i got why you you were interested in him and and you know what it actually put him in a

1:02:47different light how so how did it put him in a different light for you because i always thought that it was just someone who was absolutely crazy and that it was spontaneous that this happened but when i heard the story and heard about the thought process behind it it took me back in time i had a big flashback back in 2008 mace had been reporting on the iraq war for five years like in a

1:03:17quiet day would be probably 50 people killed wow and she was reporting those numbers day in and day out but she says she started to notice that as the years wore on it became less and less sexy because obviously you know other things happen in the world fair enough and then instead of taking a headline it became the second big story the third big story and then suddenly became page three so she said in some sense she understood how mantal there felt because

1:03:47even though people were seeing her reports they just didn't have the same power anymore people got used to it and and i understand it i work in the news business i understand how how people are wired it's like okay we know about this what's the difference between what happened last month and what's happening today nothing people move on it's a number it's statistics it's a figure but to me they are not numbers they are people i

1:04:18probably even know their names or people i might be related one way or another to them so when i had the interview with you and him i got his frustration i got when he was like no one cares really no one cares and he just wanted to grab attention it changed my mind about him i respected him more as as a person who actually really wanted to make a big statement do you have a sense that like i mean obviously

1:04:49he was expressing a lot of his personal anger and frustration it seems very clear that he inspired other protests but did him throwing the shoe have a real measurable impact like in iraq on the on the war or whatever yeah so yeah i mean just deeply obsessed with the effectiveness question when i called jamila rakib i actually asked her that also and it was interesting to watch her brain work through it i think that it's it's

1:05:19more interesting how it fit into the larger puzzle of what's happening in the rest of society she said what you need to do is is look at the shoe throw in the context of the larger struggle in this case the anti-occupation struggle and ask how did this act affect not just george bush and mother but how did this act affect all the characters involved in this struggle yes so like for example the military did it make it more difficult for them to carry out their policies their military operations did it persuade

1:05:50them in any way yeah or say like the people of iraq what impact did it have on ordinary iraqis did it empower them for iraqi journalists did it make it harder for journalists to do their job in the future or even for people outside of iraq did it bring more people to the cause i am i'm curious these i mean i don't know the answer to any of this and and honestly i don't know either i mean in some cases it felt hard to know definitively how a certain group was

1:06:21affected and on balance i just came out of the conversation feeling like it's just hard to imagine how you know this one moment changed all that much but it did precisely what it set out to do which is undermine the narrative that iraqis were welcoming u.s forces as liberators jamila reminded me that you know ending the occupation was never the

1:06:51goal of the shoe throw it was always about getting people to pay attention and in that sense it's hard to deny the legacy of this thing you know i have more than 100k followers in twitter there's many people from america okay yeah yesterday from america he said montazar we need you america need you we will have an pile of

1:07:23shoes at your disposable please come throw the our government in your shoes every time the american people said please come to throw biden please come to throw trump no i know and i feel like i see this on the internet remember that dude that threw his shoes at george w bush like every couple of days someone thinks of you i'm a big fan of so many comedians

1:07:54but the funniest thing that's ever happened on television in my life was that someone thinks of you someone reenacts the shoe throw on social media oh that's funny someone just sent me a picture of someone on instagram that made a ring etched into the ring is like a panorama of the mother throwing the shit whoa wow people are still thinking about and referencing this moment is it on george w bush's wikipedia page oh good question i wonder if that

1:08:24is enough of i mean i will say like it is one of the things that george w bush still gets asked about mr president before donald trump there weren't a lot of funny clips like i just found a clip of george w bush going on jimmy kimmel just a few years ago and the first thing that jimmy kimmel asks him about is this clip yeah you were very you have very good reflexes and my guess is that laura had done that before oh it's it is on george w bush's wikipedia page

1:08:55is it oh my god here's what it says is it a section it's not a subheading it's like a sub subheading okay yeah but it's like a little it's like a little section it says 2008 baghdad shoe throwing incident the word shoe comes up 14 times on this page it's in multiple places on the wikipedia page so like you know one could argue it has become a small part of the legacy of george w bush yeah and even beyond that honestly i mean the most powerful thing to me about the shoe

1:09:25throw is that it's this funny looking trojan horse where initially you're like oh haha that was crazy boom next thing you know we're talking about messed up stuff that happened in iraq you know like to me that's what journalism is supposed to do it's supposed to create an opening to talk about these things especially in a world where i don't think most of us americans at least are eager to revisit all of the dark stuff that our country did during that time

1:09:56i'm sorry sarah but i think i'm gonna have to go by now you have to go okay back in the interview with manthader by this time we were in our third sitting mace had to go mariam are you okay taking over i mean we can try you want to give it a try and we'll see how it goes yeah yeah that'd be great and my producer in baghdad mariam doidar took over for translation you might have to like share earbuds now mariam it so happens in addition to helping me report parts of this story is a documentary filmmaker who is making a

1:10:27film about one other i think at one point he said to me it's a shame i wasn't like a caterpillar like a caterpillar with 40 pairs of shoes i would have just kept throwing them like one after the other and when she first met him back in 2018 he'd gone from trying to find a job as a journalist to trying to run for parliament in iraq can you tell me about him running for office yeah so there was a day when i was in iraq and i went to a market and i was just pulling people off the street and i just said like hey did you know that montaldezedi is

1:10:58running for parliament what do you think about that i remember there was one woman that was like it's like a rough translation of a phrase but she's like oh i would carry him and his shoes on my head which is like an honor statement she said if i have a son i'm gonna name him montaldezedi so montaldezedi's reputation did get him a lot of attention in the election but i think the shoe throw only took him so far because come election day he did get some votes but not enough to win the seat on some level it does feel like for a lot of the world the image of

1:11:29him did just get paused on him throwing the shoe how about now what are what are you doing these days what has what's happening in your day-to-day life i'm just to write something in social media about the corruptions and follow the news for the dumb trump and what what happened in our glove he does a lot of political commentating um cooking at home playing the piano which he does a lot lighting candles his favorite scents are

1:12:00gardenia and vanilla and i'm steady now oh today i'm i have a new specialized uh the interior design interior design in university oh wow yes what made you want to do that i have more skills it seems like he's also left the door open to maybe running for office again but yeah i would say like the shoe throw was it didn't improve his life in the way i think a lot of people expected

1:12:30no the thing i want to know is like do you miss being a journalist yes what did you say i don't understand it's worth he's trying to say it's worth it it's worth it yes why worth why was it worth it the tax he paid was worth it for what he did even though he lost a lot for example like working in the field of media which he loves even up until this day yeah this makes me think about so as i was

1:13:01telling you yesterday the reason i wanted to talk to you is because i've been having all of this anger and frustration about things that are happening in the world that i feel like i can't change and i don't know what to do with it you know yes i get you you get me i get you if you do like me maybe you will you will without job yeah if you want a career change you

1:13:31you know what to do i get you i don't know if i'm being honest with myself i i do wonder sometimes if i should continue being a journalist or maybe if i maybe i should leave journalism and go do something else like be an activist or work in politics or you know something different no don't leave journalism i don't want you to leave your work but your work should be for

1:14:02a cause and you can help to support in one way or another month other told me he still thinks that journalists do actually have real power to cause change especially in today's world and especially in the u.s he's talking about you in the third person in this but he said yes because she has more freedom of speech more freedom of movement more freedom of influence and there is a difference because you're in the heart of decision making in

1:14:33america the thing he said to me was like look within the constraints of my life i was trying to figure out what worked for me how i could make a difference and eventually i did think of something essentially he was like you're in very different circumstances everybody's case is different find something that works for you the way that throwing a shoe worked for me

1:15:03but i guess the thing i was wondering as much as anything else was when he found that thing and did it did it work for him like did it actually help him as a person you know when we were talking before you were telling me about the anger and the frustration that was building up inside of you right like that you had about zahra or you know seeing that bombing um i guess i just want to know did throwing the shoe

1:15:34help with any of those feelings yes of course it was an expression of my feelings he told me he does still of course carry around a lot of those memories from the war when i think of zahra i feel grief i was thinking the other day when i was talking to you if she was alive she could be a student today or married or

1:16:05something but at the same time he told me this other story too when i saw zahra's mom at the house she told me that when i threw the shoe she felt like i got um the literal translation would be like i got my daughter's rights but i think it's like i guess it would be the equivalent of revenge revenge for my revenge it's something

1:16:37along the lines of justice revenge no no no revenge yes revenge for revenge revenge yes okay i think that's all the questions that i have um uh are you sure um yeah i think so i think so so you just

1:17:07say your name and however you want to describe it this episode was reported by sarah kari with help from mariam dwedar translation by mace albaya and mariam dwedar it was produced by sarah kari sound design contributed by sarah kari with mixing from jeremy bloom and fact checking by emily krieger and hiba el-urbani if you want to know more about mediam's work and believe me when i say her documentary about month other is going to be amazing keep an eye out for it

1:17:39or mace's incredible journalism about iraq i will link to both of those and their social media in the episode description special thanks also to azmat khan and mustafa salim if you like this episode and want to hear more deep dives into the bush era war on terror check out our episode 60 words or our series the other latif to find those search for 60 words radio lab or the other latif radio lab on your favorite

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1:19:12from brooklyn and here are the staff credits radio lab is hosted by lulu miller and latif nasa soren wheeler is our executive editor sarah sandback is our executive director our managing editor is pat walters dylan keith is our director of sound design our staff includes jeremy bloom w harry fortuna david gable maria paz gutierrez sundu nyanam zambandan matt gielty mona madgalca annie mckeown alex neeson

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