The Trouble with Tunisian Values

by Daniel Greenfield
August 29, 2012 at 4:30 am

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3315/tunisian-values

The actual attackers are still not in custody, and the inaction of the police is becoming routine in a country where Islamist thugs dispensing vigilante Sharia justice are quickly becoming the law.

Like millions of people around the world, Jamel Gharbi marked the end of summer by taking his family to the beach. Gharbi, a French Socialist regional councilor, had taken his wife and 12 year old daughter back to the Tunisian city where he had been born and had lived until the 1970s before moving to France.

The tide of the Arab Spring had washed over Tunisia and left Gharbi's homeland a very different place. Furious Salafi Islamists attacked them for wearing shorts, offending Islamic values. When Gharbi tried to defend his family, he barely escaped with his life.

Bertrand Delanoe, the Socialist mayor of Paris, condemned the attack as the work of an "extremist minority" in contradiction to "Tunisian values." "The Tunisian people I know," he said, "are committed to tolerance, democracy, pluralism and human rights."

Secretary-General Jean-François Cope, of the conservative UMP opposition, agreed that the Tunisian people were not to blame. The perpetrators, he said, only "pretend to be animated by religious convictions," and dubbed them fanatics and extremists who "do not represent the people of Tunisia."

The peculiar phenomenon of Bertrand Delanoe and Jean-François Cope telling the Tunisian people what their values are is not limited to Gallic shores. As the tides follow the moon, Muslim terrorist attacks are followed by Western leaders asserting that the terrorists do not represent Islam and its tolerant values.

When Faisal Shahzad, the Times Square Bomber, appeared for sentencing, he declared, "If I am given a thousand lives, I will sacrifice them all for the sake of Allah, fighting this cause, defending our lands, making the word of Allah supreme over any religion or system."

Judge Miriam Goldman Cedarbaum told Faisal Shahzad that he needed to "spend some of the time in prison thinking carefully about whether the Koran wants you to kill lots of people." The trouble was that Faisal Shahzad had already decided what his religion had to say about killing lots of people. Similarly the Tunisian people had already decided what their values are.

The Arab Spring began in Tunisia when a male vendor shamed at being struck by a female police officer set himself on fire. It ended with the election of an Islamist party and murderous violence at the sight of a 12-year-old girl wearing shorts.

The Islamist Al-Nahda Party won a landslide victory in 2011 with more votes than every major party combined. It was the only party to cross the one-million vote mark and its popularity is undeniable. Tunisian values, which may not be pluralistic or democratic after all, are the secret to its success.

In an Al-Jazeera poll, nearly half of Tunisians identified strongly with Islamism, while less than 20 percent identified with either Arab nationalism or liberalism. Numbers like these have made the outcome of the Arab Spring inevitable, along with the accompanying attacks on 12-year-old girls and expat Socialists.

The Al-Nahda Party, described with the obligatory "moderate" soubriquet in news articles, has proposed blasphemy laws that come with harsh prison sentences, and one of its constitutional articles defines women as inferior to men. Al-Nahda's view of women can be gleaned from Rachid Ghannouchi, the intellectual leader of the movement, who praised the mothers of suicide bombers as "a new model of woman."

Democracy is the truest test of a nation's values. The Secretary-General of the UMP may be convinced of the moderate values of the Tunisian people, but the Secretary-General of Al-Nahda, Hamadi Jebali, was equally convinced that Al-Nahda's victory was a harbinger of the Sixth Caliphate.

The values of the Tunisian people turned Hamadi Jebali from a prisoner into the leader of the dominant Tunisian political party and from there into the Prime Minister of Tunisia. The Arab Spring's democratic elections have been the acid test of whether Tunisian values and Egyptian values are truly those of "Tolerance, democracy, pluralism and human rights." And the verdict is in.

It took official protests from French leaders for the new Tunisian Islamist government to condemn the attack on Jamel Gharbi. The actual attackers are still not in custody, and the inaction of the police is becoming routine in a country where Islamist thugs dispensing vigilante Sharia justice are swiftly becoming the law.

For his part, Gharbi has vowed not to return to his homeland and warned others to stay away. Instead of speaking about the moderate values of the Tunisian people, his message was far starker. "As soon as you leave the gilded prison of hotels and beaches, you are at the mercy of gangs of Salafists who reign with terror. People who see eye-catching adverts for white beaches … should see what goes on behind the scenes. They mustn't fall into these people's claws."

The Tunisian people and the Egyptian people have spoken. It may be time for Bertrand Delanoe, Jean-François Cope and Miriam Goldman Cedarbaum to accept their verdict and to do what is necessary to prevent their own countries from falling into their claws.

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Comment on this item

4 Reader Comments

Mr. M. • Aug 30, 2012 at 14:55

As Mr. Gharbi has rightly chosen to be a French citizen and journalist, I have all the respect for him. But I would like to point out to him that he should respect the law of land he is visiting as a tourist and should not let his wife and his children expose unnecessary flesh in small villages in Tunisia. Any foreigner would abide by that except Mr. Gharby, who originally was Tunisian, but thinks he can speak for the French nation. I will advise Mr. Gharbi to write for his French newspaper and stay in France for his holidays. All French have always been very welcomed by the all the Tunisians.

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Jacob Black • Aug 29, 2012 at 11:14

It seems to me, as someone who has been living here in Tunisia from well before the revolution-and lived through it, and married to a Tunisian lady, that you know very little about what is really going on in this country.

While it is true that there have been several incidents like that, that is not representative of the majority of the people of this country. In fact, in many ways, such incidents have caused the otherwise pacifist majority to wake up and realize that this is not what they want, nor what they had in mind.

After so many years under such a harsh dictatorship, there was no trust in any policital institution - nor in any of the elite family connections, and by default, the people voted in those that were banned because they were the only trustworthy group. It had to do more with needing to fall back on traditional values until they could figure out which direction they wanted to go. That does not mean extremist values.

If you lived here, you would note that there aren't thousands of people with beards and clubs walking the streets, nor are all the women covered up. They are seeking a balance between their own values and the values imposed on them by the television shows that are beamed here. The people are just as worried about falling into the claws of the extremists. Women have been demonstrating for preserving their equal rights under the new constitution. I have lived in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Morcco, as well as in Egypt. What is going on here is nothing like what is going on there.

If we used your measure, then one would be afraid of living in the US for fear of being shot by the latest mass murderer at the mall, the post office, or school. People can walk the streets here - without fear of being raped or shot by some drug addict.

Things like this need time until a balance can be found. Once a dictator is removed, there is always a power grab - and the beardies were making theirs.

I wear shorts, my wife dresses freely and so do my two daughters. We also go to the beach; sadly, Mr. Gharbi was in the wrong place at the wrong time. To say that the Tunisian people and the Egyptian people have spoken is overgeneralizing and inaccurate. This is a process that will take time.

Why not actually take a trip, stay a while and see for yourself? Or perhaps it's more comfortable to sit behind a table halfway across the world and pontificate?

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Ibn Sufi al Kitab • Aug 29, 2012 at 07:48

What Tunisian and Muslim/Arab values do the Dhimmi Dhummi French politicians whine about? Terror, hatred of the infidel, the raping of white meat, sex slavery, polygamy, female mutilation and illiteracy, ignorance, and bowing to Mecca as a slave of Muhammad? Are these the values of civilisation? Are these the values of the Golden Age of Islam (which never existed)? Maybe these values are why the Muslim states are cesspits of iniquity, vice, and racist supremacism - backwards and uncivilized.

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khouloud Soula

Ibn Sufi al Kitab • Sep 2, 2012 at 10:15

Funny coincidence, I am a Tunisian 27-year old girl, and I was wearing shorts all day yesterday. Not at a hotel or resort but first where I live in the Marsa neighborhood, then downtown, and in the bustling streets of the medina. I wasn't beat up, or insulted. I didn' t hear comments about my outfit. Another funny coincidence is that I am from Bizerte, the town where M. Gharbi was unjustifiably attacked by those salafi Islamists. I wore shorts there too, albeit only on the beach. I also swam in the beach in my bikini. This is not to say what happened should be tolerated or that it could even be justified. On the contrary, those people should be arrested (and they actually might have been. I don't have an exact report). Now that that incident and similar ones should be used to write such a summary article that questions "Tunisian values" altogether and as such, that's also a problem.

Contrary to the writer, Bertrand Delanoe, the mayor of Paris whom he quotes here only to criticize is also a native of Bizerte. He comes here every summer, and when he speaks about Tunisian values and foreign, non-representative values, he knows what he is talking about. Although Al Nahdha won the elections, it was not on a platform of religious extremism. It was thanks to dubious campaign resources and by promoting moderate, progressive islamic values precisely. There are currently more and more signs that people are gradually alienated by the government's lenience with the perpetrators of such acts, especially that Tunisians never identified with them, or for that matter with non-Tunisian terrorists the writer cites in parallel as a facile shortcut, whereby Tunisia is denounced as a Salafi hell that the "socialist French" are helplessly trying to mask, and where Tunisian values are epitomized by intolerance and violence. As much as I sympathize with Mr. Gharbi, the statement quoted in this article is simply not truthful. Now how about an article about the recent lynching of an Arab teenager in Zion square by a group of Israeli young people? You might give it "The Problem with Israeli Values" as a title. Perhaps we'd see some of the insight and truthfulness lacking in this article.

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