I usually hate to speak in baffling generalizable terms, but the way Western governments have reacted to the remarkable events in Tunisia is outright sickening. The unctuous statements coming out of Western capitals about the bravery of the Tunisian people is hypocritical at best. Only now do we read about the scores of Wikileaks cables detailing the corruption of Ben Ali and his clan as if they were dark characters in a brilliantly-scripted drama. All this information and much more is available to the same Western leaders who insist Arabs deserve democracy. Well, that's exactly what Tunisians have done over the past few weeks, but much like in the 1990s when Islamists won in Algeria but the elections were canceled with the help of France at the time, Western leaders don't really mean it when they say Arabs need democracy. If the threat in 1990s' Algeria had an Islamist face, what's wrong with 2011's Tunisia, where the uprising has been entirely secular? There is an incredible window for real change in the Arab world, but once again the silence is just deafening. There has been meager coverage of Tunisia in American media even as the events there intensified last week. If the faces of people in the streets of Tunis matched the stereotypical image of the Islamist clamoring for an Islamic state while burning an American or Israeli flag, I bet the coverage would have been much different, certainly constant. The images of young Tunisians (non-veiled women and non-bearded men as in the images below- of course no offense to those who wear the veil or beards) holding signs reading "Yes We Can" and "Game Over" just didn't fit the popular frame and narrative about the Arab world. How sad!



If the unrest in Tunisia has shown us anything, it's that we should give ordinary Arabs more credit and start treating them as partners; not potential Islamists who need heavy-handed regimes to quell their uprising. Just closely follow what's going on in that part of the world and know that information is flowing to most Arabs whether they watch Al-Jazeera (where most Arabs followed the events of Tunisia) and/or use Twitter. Marc Lynch's post in Foreign Policy on the new Arab media space is perspicaciously indicative of why things happened the way they did in Tunisia. My point here is not to support more chaos and uprising all over Arab streets, but I want to see more honest statements about the accountability of leaders to their own people, and please in this age of Wikileaks, spare us those hypocritical Western denunciations of the lack of democracy in the Arab world while you keep propping up dictators there to help calm your fears about bearded men taking over. Tunisia could be the first slow step towards a new dawn in Arab governance, but they need courageous partners; not fearful patronizers.This is a turning point not for Arabs only but for Westerners as well if they're serious enough about finding democracy in Arab land.