Things are happening all over the world - 2

Tunisia issued an international warrant "for ousted President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali and six relatives, accusing him of taking money out of the North African nation illegally". I expect he did, too.

Mind you, freedom is not precisely blossoming under the new regime:

As [Justice Minister] Chebbi spoke, Tunisian police fired tear gas at hundreds of protesters who have been pressuring the interim government to get rid of old guard ministers who served under Ben Ali. The clashes broke out in front of the prime minister's office in Tunis, the capital. Some demonstrators responded by throwing stones at police.

Several injured protesters were carted away from the melee. Others tried to smash the windows of a police van, leaving the ground covered in blood. There was no immediate word on casualties.

It's always easier to overthrow an old regime than to build a new one, as the Russians found in 1917. Let us hope that the Tunisian experience will not be as horrific as the Russian was.

Meanwhile, protests are going on in Egypt. Secretary of State Clinton is urging restraint all round, the avoidance of violence (too late for that, I should have thought) and political reform. Understandably, the riots have affected stock prices and are expected to affect foreign investment in the country. Will they affect the stupendous amount of aid Egypt receives from the West? Hard to tell.

Meanwhile, the Egyptian government is trying to crack down on the remaining protests and blocking social media such as twitter, whose only use, as far as I can tell, is to aid protesters and demonstrators in highly authoritarian countries.

There have been rumours that President Mubarak's family, possibly accompanied by him, have fled the country to Britain but this has now been denied.

Let us note something interesting about the protesters in both countries: none of them seem to care about or even remember the Palestinians. As has been noted before, that particular myth is being exploded (if one may use that expression).

The experts were wrong

As were all politicians, most of the media and the entire contingent of the chattering classes with all their followers. As Caroline Glick points out, events in Tunisia prove that beyond any doubt.

For nearly a generation, successive US administrations have based their Middle East policies on the collective wisdom of the likes of Ross, Hadley, Berger, Indyk, George Mitchell, Dan Kurtzer, and Tony Blair. And for nearly a generation, these wise men have argued that Arab reform, democracy, human rights, women's rights, minority rights, religious freedom, economic development and the rule of law can only be addressed after a peace treaty is signed between Israel and the Palestinians. In their "expert" view, Arab autocrats and their repressed subjects alike are so upset by the plight of the Palestinians that they can't be bothered with their own lives.

Tunisia's revolution exposes this "wisdom," as complete and utter piffle. Like people everywhere, what most interests Arabs is their own standard of living, their relative freedom or lack thereof, and their prospects for the future.

Mohammed Bouazizi, the 26-year-old Tunisian college graduate who set himself on fire last month after regime security forces destroyed his unlicensed produce cart did not act as he did because of Israel.

The Egyptian man who set himself on fire in Cairo on Monday outside the Egyptian parliament, and the Algerian man who set himself on fire in Tebessa on Sunday, did not choose to self-immolate in the public square because of their concern for the Palestinians. So too, the anti-regime demonstrators in Jordan are not demonstrating because there is no Palestinian state west of the Jordan River.

The Tunisian revolution demonstrates that "Arab unity" and commitment to "Palestinian rights," is little more than a sop for Western "experts."

The chief concern of Arab dictators is not Israel, but the prolongation of their grip on power. From their perspective, one of the keys to maintaining their iron grip on power is neutralizing US support for freedom.

Somehow, I don't think anything much will change in Western political discourse.