Giving The Finger

‘THE V sign, beloved by Winston Churchill, Richard Nixon and pop stars, has a rival.

Make way for the raised index finger. Everyone’s doing it. At least they are in Iraq, where lifting the index finger of your right hand in the air and smiling for the cameras is all the rage.

You see, Iraqis have been voting again, this time to choose who they want to be in the four-year parliament. On December 31, the finger prints will have been totted up and the country’s parliament will begin.

And, as the picture on the Telegraph’s cover shows, not all the voters were men. The one-fingers salute has been enthusiastically taken up by Iraqi women, who are not only allowed to vote but are required to occupy 25 per cent of the

new parliament’s 275 seats.

Of course, the index finger is also known as the trigger finger, and, as is the way with post-Saddam Iraq, we expect the story of “a great act of hope” (Telegraph) to be stained with blood.

But no. Rather than the usual depressing scenes of destruction and shattered lives, the news is that for the first time since the fall of Saddam, Sunnis turned out to vote alongside the Shias and the Kurds. And, unlike in the days under Saddam, not everyone was voting for the same person.

As one man tells the paper: “I must vote because it is not up to the Americans to determine the future. This is our country.”

Bingo! The fastest way to get the foreign troops to leave – including those murderous forces loyal to al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups – is for Iraqis to take charge.

So there they are in the Times, the Iraqis dipping index fingers into pots of ink and making their marks. And pointing the way to a less violent future…’

Posted: 16th, December 2005 | In: Uncategorized Comment | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed: RSS 2.0 | TrackBack | Permalink