The beginning of the end...

...or the end of the beginning?
Rico wonders what events in Tunisia might foretell for the rest of the Islamic world, but Roger Cohen has the story in The New York Times:

This is where an Arab revolution began, in a hardscrabble stretch of nowhere. If the modern world is divided into dynamic hubs and a static periphery, Sidi Bouzid epitomizes the latter. The town never even appeared on the national weather forecast.
The spark was an altercation on 17 December of 2010. It involved a young fruit & vegetable peddler named Mohamed Bouazizi and a policewoman, much older than him, named Faida Hamdy. What exactly transpired between them— who slapped or spat at whom and what insults flew at whom— has already entered the realm of revolutionary myth.
Soon after— this, at least, is undisputed— Bouazizi set himself on fire in front of the modest governor’s building where protesters now gather around portraits of the martyr. Bouazizi would live another eighteen days. By then, an Arab dictatorship with a 53-year pedigree was shuddering. Within another ten days, it had fallen in perhaps the world’s first revolution without a leader.
Or rather, its leader was far away: Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook. Its vehicle was the youth of Tunisia, able to use Facebook for instant communication and so cyber-inspire their parents.
Anders Colding-Jorgensen, a Danish psychologist, conducted an experiment in 2009 in which he implied that Copenhagen’s Stork Fountain was about to be demolished and started a Facebook group to save it. The threat was fictitious but the group soon had two new members joining every minute.
The Tunisian revolution was that experiment on steroids. Castro spent years preparing revolution in the Cuban interior in the Sierra Maestra; Facebook propelled insurrection from the interior to the Tunisian capital in 28 days.
How could a spat over pears in Nowhereville turn into a national uprising? No Tunisian newspaper or television network covered it. The West was busy with Christmas. Tunisia was the Arab world’s Luxembourg: Nothing ever happened. Some poor kid’s self-immolation could never break a wall of silence. Or so it seemed.
That day, 17 December, a dozen members of Bouazizi’s enraged family gathered outside the governor’s building. They shook the gates and demanded that the governor see them.
“Our family can accept anything but not humiliation,” Samia Bouazizi, the dead man’s sister, told me, sitting under a bare light bulb in a small house near a trough where sheep were feeding. Humiliation is an important word in this story. It was the “hogra,” or contempt, of the dictator’s kleptocracy that would cyber-galvanize an Arab people.
The protests soon swelled. Participants uploaded cellphone images onto Facebook pages.
“My daughter, Ons, who’s 16, started showing me what was going on,” said Hichem Saad, a Tunis-based entrepreneur.
The Arab television network al-Jazeera was alerted through Facebook. Along the way, Bouazizi, who did not even have a high-school diploma, cyber-morphed into a frustrated university graduate: that resonated in a nation where many graduates are jobless. This myth went round the world. Information moving this fast is inspired, rather than bound, by facts.
When Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, the now ousted dictator, addressed the nation, as he would three times, Facebook-ferried fury was the response. Ben Ali might have 1.5 million members in his puppet party; he soon faced two million Facebook users.
By now Faida Hamdy, the policewoman, had slapped Bouazizi across the face. Perhaps she did. Her cousin told me he slapped her: more hurtling facts too good to check.
Hisham Ben Khamsa, who organizes an American movie festival in Tunis, watched with his kids as Ben Ali made his last speech on 13 January. Now the strongman’s confrontational fury had gone. Like the shah of Iran in 1978, but too late for him, he had “understood”. He felt the people’s pain. Bread prices would come down.
“He hadn’t understood a thing,” Ben Khamsa told me. “This was about dignity, not bread. His political autism was terminal. Everyone was live-commenting the speech on Facebook.”
The next night, Ben Ali fled after 23 years in power, short of his predecessor’s 30 years. It’s said the average age of a Tunisian is one dictator and a half. That nightmare is over.
Now the new youth minister, a 33-year-old former dissident blogger, tweets from cabinet meetings. Everyone is talking where everyone was silent. “Every Arab nation is waiting for its Bouazizi,” his sister told me.
Some observations: First, the old nostrum goes that it’s either dictators or Islamic fundamentalists in the Arab world because they’re the only organized forces. No, online communities can organize and bite.
Second, those communities have no formal ideology, but their struggle is to transform humiliation into self-esteem.
Third, cyber-uprisings can go either way: Iran hovered on a razor’s edge in 2009, Tunisia’s regime fell in 2011. In both societies, the gulf between the authorities and young and wired societies was huge. The difference is probably the degree of sustained brutality a dictatorship can muster.
Fourth, Internet freedom is no panacea. Authoritarian regimes can use it to identify dissidents; they can try to suppress Facebook. But it’s empowering to the repressed, humiliated and distant — and so a threat to the decayed Arab status quo.
Tunisia was a Facebook revolution. But I prefer a phrase I heard in Tunis: The Dignity Revolution.

Rico says that whistling sound is the shithammer coming down on Islam, this time from within. (But we've been at this since at least 1187, if not 637 or 1086...)