I’m starting to smell a nasty little propaganda story building up around Muntadar al-Zaidi, the anti-Bush journalist for an Egyptian-based television station who chunked a couple shoes at the President. Al-Zaidi also had a curious run-in with “insurgents” a couple of years ago where he was kidnapped and released without ransom or incident. He’s not exactly what you’d call a poster-child for transparency and above-board behavior.
Al-Zaidi’s brother reported to Reuters yesterday that his brother sustained a broken arm and a rifle-butt injury to his head in the scuffle during his arrest in the press room. Those are the sort of injuries you’d expect someone to sustain in that situation. However, the BBC also reported a statement from his brother on Tuesday that’s far different from what he told Reuters.
The brother of the Iraqi journalist who threw his shoes at US President George W Bush has said that the reporter has been beaten in custody.
Muntadar al-Zaidi has suffered a broken hand, broken ribs and internal bleeding, as well as an eye injury, his older brother, Dargham, told the BBC.
Which one is correct? It’s hard to say at this point. I’m inclined to believe that it’s possible that al-Zaidi was beaten in custody. Arab nations, even fairly liberal ones, have a far different view on police brutality than we do here. I don’t agree with it but since the left says I can’t condemn Arab nations for their strange and unknowable ways lest I prove myself a megalomaniacal neo-con, what’s to be done? I will say that, given that the shoe-throwing was perhaps the most publicized event of the day, it’s less likely that the Iraqi goverment would beat the dogsnot out of Al-Zaidi, thus bolstering his point that George Bush murders widows and orphans or whatever his point was.
I’m wondering if al-Zaidi’s brothers and others sympathetic to him aren’t trying to run a little game on us. They have to know that any faint whiff of mistreatment is going to get 20-point headlines from a world media that’s still not tired of kicking George Bush in the ribs and casually treating the Iraqis like a bunch of primitive dopes incapable of understanding democracy. I’m not saying they are, but the vast difference between these two news stories with the same source makes me wonder.
It’s not like the media hasn’t jumped on a vaguely-sourced but laughably wrong story about the President or Iraq before. I’m not saying it’s so, and if the BBC’s report is correct, then there should be discipline all around, but it does seem suspicious to me.
Tags: Fighting the Islamists, Iraq, Media Bias
