[MississippiMan]

In the Arab world it is very rude to give the 'thumbs up' signal. It's like giving the middle finger.

Hmmm. There's another article here in which the reporter talks about an Iraqi kid "cheering" our arrival by giving a thumbs-up to passing Marines. So he wasn't cheering at all?

MM

[mdmathis6]

I suspect that the thumbs up sign isn't viewed uniformly across the whole muslim world as an obscenity(though among Arabs it might be).