Unemployed Iranian hurls shoes at President Ahmadinejad

An unemployed man threw his shoes at Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad who was making a speech in a northern Iranian city, Xinhua reported, citing Iranian media. According to the Mehr news agency, a recently laid-off 45-year-old textile industry worker forced his way through the crowd in the city of Sari, the capital of the Mazandaran province. The man loudly complained about unemployment in the region and threw his shoes at the president. The boots apparently missed the target. It is not immediately clear whether the man was arrested. In the Middle Eastern culture, hurling shoes is considered one of the strongest ways to show disrespect. In 2008, Muntazer al-Zaidi, 30, an Iraqi correspondent for the Cairo-based Al-Baghdadiya TV channel, hurled his shoes at Bush during a news conference in Baghdad and shouted in Arabic: "This is a farewell kiss from the Iraqi people, dog." Bush managed to duck out of the way as each shoe flew past. Since that time, shoes were thrown at Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari, Chinese premier Wen Jiabao, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and former IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn.