The left side of the blogosphere is dancing around this AP article about the Iraqi shoe-throwing journalist and how he is being hailed as a hero and is emblematic of Bush-hatred in the Middle East.
Which leads me to a question. When an Islamist kills a few people and screams “Allah Ackbar” when he does it, he is likewise celebrated around the Middle East. Iran will actually cut his survivors a check and Saddam Hussein used to the same thing not that long ago. Yet he is not emblematic of his fellow Muslims. Why not? Certainly the widespread rejoicing that the shoe-flinging was no less than the widespread rejoicing we saw immediately after 9/11, yet those killers were not seen by the MSM as indicative of anyone but themselves and maybe a couple other “extremists” squirreled away in Afghanistan.
It looks like the AP and the left are cherry-picking what gestures from the Middle East they accept as a valid “statement”. A flung shoe and the celebrations of it clearly indicates a broadly-held contempt for George Bush and America. But if that is true, then it also must be true that the Bombay killings, the Bali Nightclub bombings, the London Subway bombings, the 7/7 bombings in Spain, the bombing of the USS Cole, 9/11, the African embassy bombings, the Khobar tower bombings, and the hotel bombings in Egypt and Jordan (just to name a few) and the celebrations of them clearly indicate a broadly-held contempt for infidels. You can’t say one is a big deal but the other one isn’t, not and keep any semblance of consistency.
Tags: Afghanistan, America, Fighting the Islamists, Iran, Iraq, Media Bias, Saddam Hussein
