Anti-imperial protest from non-Western victims is dismissed as reckless by neoconservative critics

Evidence

An Iraqi journalist named Muntadar al-Zaidi threw his shoes at George W. Bush in Iraq as a protest against a war criminal, with the words “This is for the widows and orphans and all those killed in Iraq.” Is he, too, a “reckless mind”—and how would Lilla deal with him? How can an intellectual be so blind to crimes against humanity? Is it because the perpetrators are white and the victims are colored and situated halfway around the globe? — Hamid Dabashi, Brown Skin, White Masks, 261

Categorization

• QUESTION: The shoe-throwing protest and the charge that selectivity is race-based is worth chasing further into the record of public responses at the time.
• XREF: Mirrors the critique of selective elite outrage discussed in other postcolonial theorists like Said on ‘the intellectual defensively positioned by empire.’