UNITED NATIONS
President Bush is receiving sympathy and advice here over the shoe incident that is captivating his critics around the world.
“There isn’t anything you can do,” said Soung-ah Choi, who knows exactly what she’s talking about.
When U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon made a surprise trip to Baghdad in 2007, a bomb went off in a nearby neighborhood during his press conference. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who was used to the daily rattle of explosions, didn’t move. But Mr. Ban and others in the room ducked.
The video of that moment went viral, and the secretary-general’s startled face lived for weeks on YouTube and for months among bloggers in his native South Korea.
“It went into the summer,” said Miss Choi, who is a spokeswoman for Mr. Ban.
The size-10 shoes that Iraqi journalist Muntadhar al-Zeidi threw at Mr. Bush on Sunday seem to have landed around the world.
Games have sprouted all over the Internet in which players can toss shoes at the U.S. president. A Facebook profile of Mr. al-Zeidi had nearly 2,000 fans by Wednesday afternoon.
In Egypt, one joke had President Hosni Mubarak scheming to hold future press conferences in a mosque, where everyone must remove shoes before entering. An Egyptianman offered Mr. al-Zeidi his 20-year-old daughter in marriage and the woman agreed. “This is something that would honor me,” Amal Saad Gumaa, a college student, told Reuters. “I would like to live in Iraq, especially if I were attached to this hero.”
Demonstrators held a candlelight vigil outside the U.S. Consulate in Lahore, Pakistan, on Wednesday, waving hand-painted signs proclaiming: “Hush, Hush Bush. We Hate You.” A man in Pakistan’s bustling port city, Karachi, painted “10” inside a large outline of a foot, with an arrow pointing to “Bush.”
In Ankara, Turkey, demonstrators gathered outside the Iraqi Embassy, where a union leader waved a pair of shoes that he said he plans to send to Mr. al-Zeidi as a show of support.
The Iranian media dubbed Mr. al-Zeidi’s action the “shoe intifada” - a reference to the Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation. A reporter for Iranian state television handed Tehranis his own shoe and told them to let it fly at a tree or other target that they should imagine is the U.S. president. Many complied, with gusto.
But one young man told the reporter that he believes “a journalist’s gun is his pen, not the shoe.”
“It’s such a dramatic and visually stunning gesture, so simple yet such an effective way to convey one’s dismay and disgust,” said Ahmad Fawzi, a senior strategist in the U.N. public affairs section who has worked throughout the Arab world. “There is nothing you can do to make it go away.”
In Iraq, meanwhile, a melee erupted in parliament when several lawmakers loyal to radical Shi’ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr demanded that the body deal with Mr. al-Zeidi’s case and allegations that he has been beaten in custody. Amid screams and shouts, the speaker of parliament, Mahmoud al-Mashhadani, threatened to resign.
Mr. al-Zeidi was supposed to appear in court Wednesday, but instead, a judge visited him in his jail cell and told his family to return to court in a week.
“That means my brother was severely beaten and they fear that his appearance could trigger anger at the court,” the journalist’s brother, Dhargham al-Zeidi, told the Associated Press.
Several public relations specialists here praised Mr. Bush’s fast reflexes and easygoing manner - important elements in diffusing what could have been an even worse videotape.
“Can you imagine if it actually hit him?” said a cringing Miss Choi. “He looked pretty good dodging the shoes.”
Others advised Mr. Bush not to refer to the incident, not to watch the inevitable “Saturday Night Live” sketch and not to complain to the media.
“My advice to President Bush would be to take it easy and try to make an effort to understand and respect other cultural ways of expressing disagreement … even if they are so different,” said Enrique Yeves, the spokesman for former Catholic priest and now U.N. General Assembly President Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann, who this week received death threats related to what some interpret as anti-Israel comments.
“And, in any case,” Mr. Yeves added, “please do not prohibit to wear shoes in the next press conferences as a security measure.”
• Hadi Nili in Tehran contributed to this story, which is based in part on wire-service reports.
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