Across the pond

The Iraqui judge, who has been dealing with Muntadhar al-Zaidi, the Iraqui journalist who threw his shoes at George W Bush at last Sunday’s press conference, today said that he has been beaten up. Which means that I have to do yet another U-turn in this issue.

In my first post on this, two days ago I highlighted the shame of journalism, in noting that the mainstream media played down the story, except for The Guardian, which made it the second lead on its web page. Yesterday, I had to retract, because The Guardian did not even mention it in the print newspaper yesterday. Although one of his brothers had told The Guardian that his arm had been broken and he had been severely beaten up. Yesterday, faced with silence from The Guardian, I made a partial retraction, based on the Washington Post story, which said that another of his brothers had denied the story, giving credence to the stance of the Iraqui government line that he had not been beaten up.

Today’s statement by the judge gives the lie to that.

Although we still do not know for certain how badly he was beaten up, we now know that he WAS beaten up. And that is a story that journalists above all, should be telling their readers about. Because the Iraqui government is acting with the tacit support of the US government and Gordon Brown’s British government.

Other regimes, in Zimbabwe and possibly in Putin’s Russia, tacitly condone the murder of journalists. By comparison a beating up is not front page news. Hence the great difficulty of the American and British press in dealing with the treatment of prisoners in Guantamino Bay and rendition, etc, etc. Do their readers care, when faced with international terrorism, that some American and British soldiers have been a bit heavy-handed in dealing wish suspects in their custody?

In the case of Muntadhar al-Zaidi, there is the additional difficulty, that al-Zaidi as a journalist working in the dominant Anglo-American tradition, is supposed to suppress his own personal feelings in the interests of objectivity. By throwing his shoes at George W, al Zaida was breaching what western journalists are schooled to do, or not do.

And clearly it would be impossible to run press conferences, if any journalist who felt strongly felt free to throw shoes, or rotten tomatoes or bad eggs, at the head of state giving the conference.

So we should not expect journalists, or media propietors, to support al Zaida’s behaviour. But it is news. It should be examined, and be given prominence.

Which it has not been.

Although many Iraquis and young people throughout the Arab world are talking about a shoe infidia. One Egyptian has even offered the hand in marriage of his twenty-year-old daughter to al Zaida.

By the usual criteria of the western press it is a good story. And al Zaida acted as he did because he claims to have been arrested and beaten up a few years ago by the Iraqui regime established by Bush’s Iraq war.

His story should be told. And it is possibly much more important to maintaining a vigourous free press, which calls on governments to account for their actions, than some of the stories making the headlines over the last few days. Like the murder of Rachael, the British father who raped his daughters, the Archbishop of Canterbury, who has written an article for the New Statesman, saying he is not quite sure, but he thinks that dis-establishment of the Church of England might not be a bad thing.