ONLY BY FREEDOM:

It must be bliss to be alive, young and Arab in this dawn of revolution: Spend time in Tunisia or Egypt and it is clear that the protests are not driven by ideology but the search for equity (Henry Porter, 3/06/11, The Observer)

To spend time with the protesters is to understand the scale of the change underway in the Arab world. There is almost a shift of consciousness: people are beginning to think differently about themselves and they are exhilarated by the possibilities of political debate. I lost count of the number of young women and men who spoke about self-respect and dignity and how those two could only be attained with freedom.

Tunis-based banker Adel Dajani told me that everyone he knows has become political. Hip-hop artists such as Balti are rapping about Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali and the 40 Thieves. The newspapers, once a dire noticeboard for the regime, have become racy and are full of scurrilous stories. Suddenly, life is a hell of a lot more fun.

In the Kasbah, Ahmed Maaioufi, a language teacher in his mid-50s, translated the words of the crowd around us into very good English. We were both moved by what we heard and after a little while he confessed that his generation had completely failed to understand and trust their children. And it is true that young Arabs are tired of the paternalism that decides everything for them and tells them what to think. They're especially sick of abusive father figures who steal their country's money and blame everything on Israel and America. Only once was the United States mentioned in these conversations and that was by a young man commending the honesty of American diplomats, as revealed in US diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks.