First it was President Bush in Baghdad. Now it is Chinese prime minister Wen Jiabao at Cambridge University:
protester threw an athletic shoe at the Chinese prime minister, Wen Jiabao, during his speech at Cambridge University's concert hall on Monday, seven weeks after a similar incident involving President Bush in Iraq. The shoe missed Mr. Wen by at least 30 feet, but security officials promptly escorted the protester from the hall.
The police arrested the man on suspicion of a public order offense. Witnesses described him as a goateed European in his 20s or 30s speaking foreign-accented English. They said he blew a whistle as Mr. Wen spoke, causing him to pause and look up. “You should be ashamed of yourselves,” the man said, according to witnesses. “How can you listen to the lies he’s telling?” he shouted, in a video of the incident shown on Sky News television.
Here's a video link.
What's interesting about this is that while shoes have long been associated with insults in Arab culture, shoe-throwing has no cultural history in China. This is a case of an insult gone viral.
Of course, this leads to a much more fascinating question -- which culture-specific insults would you like to see go global? Shoe-throwing appears to have supplanted pie-facing as the insult du jour. What should replace shoe-throwing as the way to take leaders down a peg?
For some reason my thoughts run to this, though I recognize that what's being described is not exactly an insult.
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