"How women's lives were revolutionised in Tunisia" Notice the BBC's careful choice of words: "These Tunisians are not doing at all badly. This is one imagines they are as emancipated as any girl can get" "He [the first president] gave ... He banned ... He introduced ..." "He was the liberator of Tunisian women." Women as passive creatures, victims waiting for a saviour, have no agency of their own. Now, imagine that someone says that this or that British, French or German leader was the liberator of British, French or German women. It doesn't happen because that not how it happned. But in a country like Tunisia, Egypt or Syria, an "enlighteneed dictator" has to be there to liberate women. If one looks at the movies, posters, photographs of Iranian university students, upper middle class Egyptian women on the beaches, meetings and social gatherings of the women of the elite, etc., of the 1950s and 1960s (google...
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” —Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisation and the Remaking of the World Order, 1996, p. 51