As Matthew Yglesias notes, when commenting on a shoe throwing incident involving Sudanese President Omer Hassan Al-Bashir, throwing shoes means, "you suck!" in every society out there:
My continuing question about this shoe-throwing business is in what culture, exactly, is it not the case that throwing a shoe at a guy giving a speech is a sign of contempt? I recall going as far back as when shoes were thrown at Iyad Allawi media types calmly explaining that this is an insult “in Arab culture.” But is the message really so unclear that we needed to break out our handy-dandy Arab cultural translation manual for? I think one thing that makes the shoe-toss such an effective gesture of protest against figures in the global news is that the message is loud, clear, and unambiguous to an audience from any culture. You’re talking to an audience, I’m in the audience throwing a shoe at you—it’s disrespectful.You see, young Yglesias, the press is, or believes that their audience is, full of racists, and so they feel the need to describe the behaviors of brown people as if they were tour guides on safari.
An even more obscene example of this pattern is when the media explain to us that threatening prisoners with dogs or forced nudity is offensive to Arabs becuase it is works against their cultural sensitivities.
ReplyDeleteSee, for example, the New York Times on Abu Ghraib:
"Many of the abuses seem specifically tailored to humiliate Arabs and Muslims, where horror at being exposed in public is a deep cultural artifact."