Now that George Bush is no longer President of the United States, it seems that political protesters with a lot of sole have found a new target to try and shoe: Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao had a shoe hurled at him at Cambridge University by a protester who verbally laced into him.
A SPEECH by Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao at Britain’s Cambridge University has been interrupted by a protester who threw a shoe at him and shouted: “This is a scandal”.
Security staff bundled the protester out of a concert hall at the university, where Mr Wen was giving the speech on the last day of a five-nation tour of Europe.
The shoe landed on the stage about a metre from Mr Wen.
The protest echoed the hurling of shoes by an Iraqi journalist at former US President George W. Bush on his farewell visit to Iraq in December.
The protester, who was held by university security guards, shouted: “How can the university prostrate itself with this dictator?”
Mr Wen hesitated for a few moments in his speech before continuing speaking.
University officials bundled the protester out of the building and security guards fanned out across the stage.
Does all of this represent a kind of shift? For a while, protests of the 60s and 70s were decidedly more rage-filled. As time went on, one in a while you’d hear about a new form of protest on some American universities: the pie in the face. Is this now the era of the hurled shoe? (Since there is a global recession, anything that helps shoe manufacturers is a plus…)
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.