Within six hours, the airwaves in the region were invaded by the ‘shoe Jihad.’ Within 12 hours, friendly voices beaming from Western networks joined the orchestra in aggrandizing the matter. ‘A shoe in the Arab culture is the worst epithet one can use, it expresses so deep an anger,’ blasted one of the oldest international media out of Europe. More seasoning was added on this side of the Atlantic. ‘Analysts’ for mainstream networks - most of whom can’t speak the language - began lecturing the stunned public on the ‘lessons to be learned and on the pain felt in those lands at the sight of President Bush.’ And the framing continued on. By the second day, both the Arab satellite cohorts and the ‘specialists’ on ‘how to understand the region’ were breaking to the world the grandiose news: a new hero was born in the Muslim world, the shoe thrower. Give it a few weeks and Hollywood will buy the story and make a movie out of it. Give it a year and it will be taught as a course by our academic cinema. Do read it all. The Fifth Column Of The Fourth Estate
The indispensable Walid Phares reflects upon the way in which the useuful idiots of the western media have, in their ineffable ignorance and stupidity, not to mention malice, once again done the jihadists’ dirty work for them in the way they have responded to the bloke who threw his shoe at President Bush:
Monday, 22 December 2008
Minutes after the incident took place and was captured by the media feed and aired worldwide, a snowball flurry of releases, special shows with commentators - gathered too fast for the circumstance - were on the airwaves. Interestingly al Baghdadiya TV issued – faster than the speed of light - a long press release calling for struggle. Minutes after, a vast magma of satellite channel sympathizers of Jihadism, and of sites virulently anti-democracy, exploded with incitement and calls for mobilization - and some were even as provocative as characterizing the ballistic exercise by al Zaidi as an ‘act of Jihad.’
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