French leaders have for long agreed with "experts" that there will be no changes in any "Arab" country, as long as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has not been settled. I'm referring to "experts" such as geostrategist Pascal Boniface, former minister of foreign affairs Hubert Védrine and their friends of the BDS ("Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions for Palestine") who recently pressured singer Vanessa Paradis into canceling her visit to Israel. 

Now the Tunisian rebellion has uncovered the plot. The fate of the Tunisian people was indeed miserable, but not because their leaders were transferring many products to the Palestinians to allow them to survive, as I have personally heard the wife of former Tunisian president Ben Ali say in 2002 on the French-language radio station during a stay in Djerba: she spoke of "necessary sacrifices" to support the effort of the Palestinian people. 

The Tunisians, but also the Algerians, the Egyptians and the Jordanians, are becoming more and more aware, especially when they see on the Arabic tv channels the standard of living of the Israeli Arabs and even the Palestinians, that the money is not going to "the Palestinian children" as has been claimed, but to big cars, a festive lifestyle and opulent villas for the military-fundamentalist mafia which has been leading those countries for decades with Western and Wahhabi support. 

That is the reality. French officials and intellectuals were not only linking the fate of the North African and Middle Eastern peoples to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but submitting it to the condition of a solution for the conflict. The truth is that the conflict has been artificially maintained by military-mafioso dictatorships and their Western accomplices, precisely to prevent a reasonable peace which could eliminate this false argument to justify the misery of these people. And because a solution is made impossible, the blame can be put on Israel. Everything fits. 

For years and years, in a haranguing atmosphere full of pedantic pity, part of the media-politico-intellectual "rent-a-thought" elite was blaming the obvious lack of real democracy in these countries on both the Arab-Jewish problem, and on the fact that these countries could not "have a democracy like ours". In fact democracy, like electricity, is a technique for organizing the Polis - in a cultural context, of course, for the same reason why France is not Germany. We do not see on what grounds, if not obviously a postmodern relativism which leads to nihilism, the democratic system could not settle permanently in this region. 

It is time that we stop giving the floor to these former supporters of communist or khomeynist dictatorships (USSR, Cuba, Cambodia, etc.), which are recycled today as "geopolitical experts" of the democratic process (no kidding), while they know nothing about it. It is unbelievable that genuine experts of democracy, such as Raymond Boudon, Jean Baechler or Pierre Manent, are never interviewed on this point, except fortunately for Chantal Delsol (whose next book will certainly make noise, I will write about it soon). 

Many Algerians have tried to set themselves on fire. One of them died. Let's hope that these sacrifices have not been made in vain, and that we realize that the socio-political situation of these countries has been obscured for decades by a flood of ignorance. It is time to open our eyes and help these people to emancipate themselves instead of sharing only pity and condescension with them. "Democracy is not a part of their culture": that is the real racism.