Shoes: An Arab Form of Protest???

More than 20,000 demonstrators marched against the Israeli air campaign in Paris and more than 10,000 in London, where some threw shoes at the prime minister’s residence, a particularly Arab form of protest that has gained worldwide currency since an Iraqi journalist hurled his shoes at President Bush last month in Baghdad.

Source: New York Times, January 3rd 2009

I was disturbed when I read this, and when I shared it with my Lebanese friend Z, she reminded me of this article she came across, about a young Lebanese boy who got upset when his teacher punished him for not doing his homework, so he took his shoe off and threw it at her. (I wonder if he thought of himself as some oppressed hero after he got expelled from school!)

Then, today, I received an email about a series of events taking place in New York in solidarity with Gaza, and the first event on the list said:

Stand with Gaza: Shoes to Bloomberg (Rally and Shoe In Against Bloomberg)
Presented by the Break the Siege Coalition

When: Wednesday January 7th, 4:30 PM
Where: City Hall

** Bring Old Shoes, the Smellier the better!

Seriously now, I find it very disturbing that people have been inspired by Muntazer Zubaidi to turn shoe tossing into some common form of protest. Generally, the issue of how people express themselves at demonstrations has been on my mind for a while, but I was withholding my thoughts because I felt perhaps it's not the time to be critical. Then a combination of the shoe email, a series of online discussions with a wise friend in Amman, and Naseem's brilliant post today inspired me to just hit the keyboard.

To be fair, I didn't go to that Shoes to Bloomberg protest but my friend who was there told me that people ended up not throwing shoes, and that the spirit of it was just protesting the Mayor's recent stand on the issue.

I only went to one of the protests that took place in New York. It was in front of the Israeli UN mission; with a pro-Palestinian crowd on one side of the street (perhaps around 1000 people), and a smaller pro-Israeli crowd on the other. It was interesting to see how much media coverage there was; so many SLRs, television cameras and audio recorders. I saw CNN there, as well as some other local stations. But then, I found it very disappointing that most of the messages held and shouted by the crowd were overly emotional and totally lacking in substance. Not only that, at some point they started shouting in Arabic. And all those New Yorkers passing by or standing and looking at the protest out of curiosity had no clue what was being said. I felt it was a shame; to have media coverage and a chance to get a meaningful message across and then not use it well.

I have to admit I'm a bit conflicted about the notion of "sending a message" and what kind of difference it makes. Part of me likes to think it does - I would like to believe that when people collectively express a strong opinion, this impacts policy decisions or steps taken by governments and leaders - at least in some parts of the world. And while protests are emotional by nature, I really wish we could start seeing protests in the Arab world that are more rational and that have well-thought out messages, where people know what they want and how they propose to get it rather than blind reactions.

And while we're at it, I hope our Parliament would observe moments of silence over something other than support for a shoe-tossing journalist.

Sigh.