By Stanley Collymore
As lascivious whores go they don’t come any more wanton than Hamida M’rabet Labidi who is a past mistress of the art in this kind of activity and quite frankly is literally in a class of her own regarding this kind of behaviour. And in case you’re asking yourself who this slapper is then let me bring you up to speed. She’s the Tunisian ambassador to the UK .
Reading the dishonest and risible PR on this woman anyone with a genuine knowledge of who and what she really is could be easily forgiven for falling about him or herself in uncontrollable fits of laughter; and to give you an idea of what I’m alluding to here’s a flavour of some of the disingenuous and farfetched crap that is being peddled on her behalf.
She claims “to represent my country with a lot of passion and pride, to give a good image to my country and to Arab women.” She then goes on to wax lyrically about the surprise she says she often gets at westerners being themselves surprised to see a woman ambassador from an Arab country, adding barefacedly and without a hint of irony at the real position and even the fate of the overwhelming majority of women in Arab countries that it belies “an ignorance of the level of Arab women” appending with incredible dishonesty that “they are everywhere, in every sector of life.” You don’t say Hamida!
Asking those of us that know the truth about Arab women, how they’re habitually treated and the marked lack of opportunities for the overwhelming majority of them is nothing more than blatant propaganda and unconcealed garbage akin to asking sensible people to believe that pigs do really have the ability to fly. Since anyone who lives in the real world as distinct from the somewhat delusionary one you choose to ensconce yourself in Hamida and has even the most basic knowledge of women residing in these Sykes-Picot created Arab Bantustans that your lot refer to as states and many of your supposed western allies and ironically worst exploiters are more than happy to cynically humour you that they are, are fully cognisant of the fact that Arab women are among the most oppressed, submissive and unliberated persons, not just women, on Planet Earth; and for a delusionary moll like yourself Hamida to be saying otherwise not only flies provocatively in the face of reason and irrefutable facts but is also a crass attempt to insult one’s intellect. First ask yourself why your western handlers do it and secondly why is there a necessity for them to do so when in all the wars they’ve waged against Muslim Arab countries the one recurrent mantra coming from them is about liberating Arab women? Who liberates or would realistically want to liberate someone that is already free Hamida?
You then grandiosely go on to say Hamida that you want people in the UK “to learn even more about the culture, the society, the progress and reality of Tunisia .” Fat chance of that happening Hamida when most Brits or other Europeans for that matter who go to Tunisia for their holiday would be severely pushed, to say the least, who Hannibal was let alone recount anything about ancient Carthage that Tunisia once was since they know bugger all about Tunisian culture and care even less about it. And as I’m quite convinced you well know their primary purposes for going to your country is that it’s a relatively short flight from Europe, it’s dirt cheap financially as holiday venues go when one compares it to prime holiday destinations like Barbados or even middle ranking ones the Dominican Republic and it provides these travellers, the bulk of whom are women, several of them married and frequently well into middle age and even beyond, with a promiscuous thirst for and sexual liaisons with enormously enthusiastic Tunisian young men and underage boys, activities not only confined to these female tourists but quite engaged in as well by their male opposite numbers, since homosexuality, naturally predisposed or financially enforced, is also quite rife in Tunisia too.
Poverty is rampant in Tunisia and jobs extremely hard to come by; and even when that hurdle is surmounted there’s no real job security with such employment since employees can and are frequently known to be dismissed at will with no social security backup system, as pertains in Europe or other similar developed countries, to tide them thorough difficult times economically and which isn’t merely confined to job dismissals but recurrent layoffs as well especially when tourist numbers drop, as that industry which is largely in expat Tunisian or French hands, is the primary driving force in Tunisia. Consequently prostitution in all its many guises: freelance on the streets on top of tour company and hotel organized enterprises, is rather commonplace with the sinister component of paedophilia, principally by middle-aged and even quite elderly white tourists shamelessly taking full advantage of the locally perceived notion that all European or other Caucasian tourists to Tunisia are financially loaded to lure the naive as well as vulnerable underage youth, very much younger in many instances than their own grandchildren, into their beds, fashioning what has become an intrinsic part of the tourism scene, culture and industry in your country Hamida.
I referred earlier to financially enforced prostitution and while the thrust for this is undoubtedly diverse the principal one is economic liberation, getting the hell out of Tunisia and doing so by any means possible while optimistically securing for the impecunious and voluntary sex slave a better future than what he or she could ever envisage for themselves in their homeland Tunisia. It’s a state of affairs that can lead to a situation where both sides with their respective personal agenda will seek to exploit the position they’re in to their individual advantage. For while the lascivious, touristic predator craves and earnestly searches for that unbridled, non-circumspect and even non-judgmental sexual liaison and adventure in Tunisia which they clearly wouldn’t have contemplated let alone dare to engage in, at least not openly so, back home in Europe the chief concern of the Tunisian mark is to forge and cement a relationship with their bed-partner that will ultimately secure for them a EU visa, preferably a British or failing that a French one: Tunisia is a former colony of France, and a viable passport away from their myriad economic, social mobility and political woes in Tunisia.
Not infrequently the marital route with some desperately lonely widow trying to turn the clock back; a lovelorn divorcee endeavouring to make up for the wasted years spent on a precipitous, pointless, utterly unrewarding and sexually unfulfilling marriage despite bearing children in the interim or some bling X-Factor aficionado-type living out her farcical fantasy that she’s found her Arabian Lothario whose every sexual impulse will be exclusively to her emotional benefit and carnal gratification is the preferable one, since this typically forces the woman concern into pulling out all the stops she can to get her Tunisian husband into Europe where he knows that having some place to live, readymade accommodation in other words, will be waiting for him.
An essential roof over his head and economic support while he looks for a job of his own and the prospect of financial independence that will obviously bring, crucial elements creating the stepping stones to his future but rather secretive plans which will entail on his part the enforced weathering out of the five or so years he’s compulsorily and legally obliged, under the terms on which he was granted his British or other EU visa, to cohabit conjugally with his new wife as tangible proof that his wasn’t just a marriage of convenience, else he could statutorily have his visa permit revoked, told he must vacate the country forthwith that he desperately wants to be his new home and summarily sent back to Tunisia, the very last thing on earth that he wants to happen to him.
And from his perspective and evidently not without good reason since he’s completely aware that having scrupulously completed the set number of years he’s statutorily obliged to spend with his wife to visibly demonstrate to the authorities concerned that his marriage in their eyes wasn’t a con, he can now totally unrestrained by any restrictions dump his wife, which was his sole intention all along, embark on a life of his own in his new country with no likelihood of being deported and with absolutely nothing that his wife can do about it except reflect on her rampant foolhardiness and what a prized prat she’s been. He of course as a legal resident of his adopted country can in time apply for citizenship and will be completely free in either capacity to visit the land of his birth, either chose or have chosen for him a local Tunisian or other Arab wife who will then dutifully be carted off to Europe making in the process a complete mockery of our immigration laws. Is this what you mean by strengthening the ties of friendship with the UK Hamida; the same worthless bilge that you puked out during your previous posting in the Netherlands ?
Lawyers have an unenviable record of distrust among the general public as well as a squalid reputation for being smarmy, fleet of foot, economical with the truth and possessing a marked proclivity for bending, twisting and distorting it out of all proportion to fit their tawdry lies and sleazy agendas; slimeballs for the most part who’d cheerfully betray or sell their own mothers for filthy lucre. Our Tony Blair, as I’m sure you must be aware Hamida, is a classic example of this kind of conduct as it mirrors your own, and from my personal observation of lawyers up close throughout my adult life I can honestly say that business lawyers, or the business attorney as you prefer to call yourself Hamida, are at the very pinnacle of this putrid dung heap. That by the way isn’t the least surprising to me taking into account what utterly loathsome persons you all are and the fact that your behaviour endemic as it is also comes with the territory.
Few people trust lawyers of any description with the overwhelming majority of the public quite sensibly regarding them as a necessary or inescapable evil. And it’s not difficult to fathom out why. Their venal proclivity apart it’s they as legislators, every parliament I know of is filled to busting almost with these noticeably avaricious bastards who draft the laws in their own image making them entirely incomprehensible to the average lay person and thus creating a situation where to understand let alone utilize them one needs to use the services of the very people who formulated them and do so at shocking exorbitant rates; sewer cockroaches lavishly feeding off the misery of those they encounter is how I see them.
It’s an appraisal which resonates tellingly with you Hamida though you’d much prefer to cloak this as you deftly do with all the perfidy, disingenuousness, deceit, immorality and malfeasance that you’re so exceptionally good at, masquerading in your virtuous Arab girl character role as someone who we in the west describe as butter wouldn’t melt in their mouth; but though you may fool many and even get away with it Hamida, to the discerning eye and prescient-minded person you’re a rather contemptible fraudster unscrupulously enlisting and employing for your own self-centred interests a panoply of moral virtues and characteristics that are entirely alien to your true character and all you’ve ever privately stood for but which you’ve no compunction whatever in dishonestly projecting as the real you while grabbing with both your grubby hands every chance that this affords you to cynically but oh so advantageously maximize your social-climbing as well as your financial ambitions.
In 2012 western women seriously challenged and even routinely confronted by a battery of uphill difficulties not least among them the misogynistic prejudices that severely handicap and effectively disqualify them from breaking through the proverbial glass ceiling of opportunities that would enable them to successfully compete in all spheres of social and professional life on an equal footing with men, prudently acknowledge that some progress aside having been made in the areas female upward mobility the road to genuine and lasting equality between the sexes is nevertheless a rather protracted, troublesome and even a difficult one with no easy solutions to convincingly remedy immediately generations and even centuries of stark inequality, blatant discrimination, as well as profoundly deep-rooted and damaging prejudicial perceptions about women.
Everyone in the west whether they support full female emancipation or not know this to be the case, yet in relation to ultra-conservative for the most part, Sharia driven and reinforced Arab societies we have a delusional fantasist female Hamida Labidi ridiculously trying to hoodwink us into believing that all Arab women, contrary to the roles we know they actually perform in everyday life within their local communities, are in effect audacious standard bearers of global female liberation and per se are in point of fact aeons ahead in both the social and professional stakes when compared to women in the west. That in my view is as farcical a situation as I can possibly imagine and is putting it bluntly is quite analogous to a grotesquely overweight person endeavouring to lecture figure-conscious society debutantes on fitness and healthy living; but if you’re a fraud as Hamida Labidi evidently is that kind of garbage comes with the territory.
Hamida an unashamed self-publicist asserts that her past career as a business attorney has been very useful in her diplomatic endeavours as it has not only given her the predictable ability to negotiate skilfully and attain goals “but [importantly] it also allows one to detach from oneself and understand the problems of others;” significantly assisting her she continues to grasp the context of issues. And she further adds: “It has helped me a lot in my work as a diplomat. The advantage of diplomacy [being] that there is no litigation [nor any] conflict but rather dossiers of cooperation and friendly relations. It is simpler than the dossiers of law,” she concludes.
All of which literally amounts to nothing more substantive than a codification of meaningless, intellectually unchallenging and commensurately anodyne tosh that the likes of Hamida Labidi are exceptionally good at disseminating in their adept dissemblance at cheerfully camouflaging their genuine, self-centredly and avowedly venal objectives. Truthfully ask yourself would any Tunisian want to commit suicide and in so gruesome a manner as burning himself to death at the noticeable lack of any real opportunities, social or economic, to advance himself in his own country, frustrations that are genuine enough and replete throughout the Tunisian population as a whole, if as Hamida Labidi fraudulently asserts Tunisian society is as open, egalitarian and gender non-discriminatory as she lyingly tries to make out?
After all in most global societies including western ones it’s men who generally get the breaks well ahead of women and Tunisia is no different from the rest of them. Yet it was a man whose demonstrably public spectacle of burning himself to death was the catalyst, the final straw as it were that finally broke the camel’s back, which triggered Tunisia’s Revolution and vehemently unleashed decades of entirely justifiable and chokingly pent up emotions felt by both men and women across the board at the ongoing state of affairs that precluded them from either playing a positive role in the management of their own country or improving the standard of their own lives, but what you quite duplicitously but farcically would have us believe Hamida Labidi in your delusionary world of make believe is the world’s first and possibly only Utopian Society.
Which prompts the obvious question Hamida: why then are so many Tunisians so eager and will do anything to quit that country, and why is your much approved of by the likes of you ex-colonial master and ongoing controlling puppeteer France happy as always and most keen to control Tunisia and exploit Tunisians within Tunisia even after your so-called revolution yet is quite brazenly using the North African, Immigration, Islamophobia and Race cards at home in its proto-fascist, Nazi style election campaigns, gleefully mirrored and implanted by other EU states, and even publicly threatening in their paranoiac bigotry to jettison the once holy cow of the Shengen Agreement out of absolute hatred and a manifestly pernicious antipathy towards North African and particularly Tunisian migrants to Europe, if for a solitary moment they were inclined to attaching even the slightest iota of credibility to the rather ludicrous delusions you hold Hamida, publicly at any rate, relative to Tunisia. Why aren’t the Québécois for example subjected to the same treatment?
None of which remotely addresses let alone answers the very pertinent questions of why would Tunisians or any other non-Caucasian nationality for that matter voluntarily want to leave their birth country for Europe, or any other European outpost including the United States, knowing in advance the gauntlet of hostility, racial and other prejudices and the frenzied Islamophobia if they Muslim that they’ll have to face and will be routinely subjected to if as you’re idiotically saying in Tunisia’s case Hamida that everything at home from their perspective is marvellous to start with?
But that’s far from being the reality in respect of many of these economic migrants many of whom are also refugees from political persecution, and Tunisia has had more than its fair share of both these categories of persons; a situation notwithstanding the so-called revolution of 2011 that has itself been effectively hijacked by the west, particularly France, the United States and their petro-dollar, Danegeld-subscribing, Persian Gulf, barbaric Bantustan cronies, is still very much a prevalent problem for Tunisia. In effect nothing has changed to improve the daily lives of ordinary Tunisians; rather the opposite is very much in vogue with a patently semi-literate, completely incompetent, absolutely idiotic, wholly biddable, utterly venal, effortlessly bought, sickeningly pusillanimous, incredibly bent, downright fraudulent, Sharia-indoctrinated, tribally sectarian, Dark Ages enthusiastic, rancorously anti-secular, 21st century antagonistic, Qatar and Bantu-Saudi allied and western controlled regime in situ.
And given these depressing circumstances who, hand on heart and capable of even a modicum of human compassion, can blame genuinely devout Muslims let alone secularly-minded ones whose numbers are rapidly on the increase and who can see and what’s more fully comprehend and frankly appreciate not only the many differences that exist between religion and secularism but also why these two coexistent but distinctly separate entities should not be conflated with each other for earnestly wishing to get the hell out of countries like Tunisia. And furthermore whatever difficulties they might find themselves confronted with in their chosen destinations as places of refuge invariably choose to remain, consciously deciding that however irksome these problems might appear to be or actually are the chances of successfully tackling them and thus creating an enhanced future both for themselves and their families are substantially much better augured were they to stay where they migrated to than by ever injudiciously returning home to countries like Tunisia where a barren landscape of stymied ambitions and desolate dreams are the only realistic prospects on offer for them.
Take a close look at these Sykes-Picot balkanized Arab Bantustans or even those entities on the African mainland like Tunisia and Egypt that one can realistically term as states and point out a single woman who is head of state or even the prime minister of that country; there are none and the prospect of that changing in the foreseeable future, if ever, is zilch. A big fat zero! And it compellingly discredits all the trash of Arab and particularly Arab female egalitarianism and emancipation coming out of the tarnished mouth of Hamida Labidi. It’s there for all who want to, to see! For even the populace of those Arab states or Bantustans that were feverishly caught up in the professed Arab Spring of mass political activism for the inalienable right of universal adult suffrage, human rights and the key tenets of democracy are still steadfastly and seemingly inescapably strapped in the deliberately contrived and debilitating straightjacket of pernicious and sadistic male Arab chauvinism and misogyny witnessed across the entire Arab world from Morocco to Bantu-Saudi and with three distinguished exceptions, Syria, Hezbollah and Hamas, accompanied by the hypnotic and Pavlovian-structured, compulsively reflexive mood music of divide and rule that these venally addicted, western controlled and sycophantic Arab puppet regimes simply can’t resist and to the utter detriment of their people are vaingloriously hooked on.
In Egypt the secularists, much too late alas, have woken up to the reality of what’s going on in their country. They witnessed what happened in neighbouring Libya and Tunisia but foolishly deluded themselves that Egypt was different, and having grossly miscalculated on that one are now rather despairingly rueing that decision. They, of course, don’t need to be told that their revolution has been hijacked or are they in any doubt whatsoever as to who is responsible for this development since the answers to both these questions are indelibly etched in their minds. Consequently in view of what has gone on and quite fraudulently so in their name their current, principal and pressing concern is to effectively frustrate by every means at their disposal what was once a cleverly disguised and covert ambition but is now transposed into an open and very unabashed one from coming to fruition. In other words, stopping the transformation of the once secular dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak, administered in the aftermath of his ouster from power by the military junta which presently runs the country and has preserved it, from becoming an Islamist oligarchy with an even more repressive social and political regime under the austere and uncompromising guardianship of the Muslim Brotherhood, whose name speaks for itself.
One could tongue-in-the-cheek ask where’s the female equivalent? But it’d be daft to do so as there’s none, and just as importantly no such female grouping would remotely be tolerated in any of these Arab societies, not even by the women themselves who are conditioned from birth that boys instead of girls and later when these spoilt brats become adult males, but adult only in the sense of age rather than any emotional maturity, the continuum of instinctive deference and unquestioning obedience to them and their every childish whim isn’t just something that every Arab woman should take full cognizance of and adequately satisfy at all times but vitally must without demur acknowledge and accept with comparable equanimity in her life long social and religious duty to her men folk and the purported cohesion of Arab society; itself another bloody myth.
There are of course exceptions, invariably dishonestly contrived, to every manmade rule there is and in the spheres of female cunning, conspiracies and concerted manipulation it would be absolutely ridiculous and utterly foolish to imagine that comparable strategies aren’t knowingly and strategically employed by the women involved to deceitfully but advantageously attain the objective s that they’re after. Sex sells and is an impressively powerful and highly successful commercial agent particularly when exploited by knowledgeable minds and entrusted to adept hands; it can also unlock doors which would otherwise stay shut as well as give that proverbial and sustainable leg up on the social ladder of upward mobility to those that evidently lack the moral uprightness to do this the conventional way, and see the discriminating use of their body with attendant sexual favours as an appropriate shortcut and the easiest way to accomplishing their specific goals.
Then there are those females who don’t have to be told they won’t ever qualify for the title of brains of their respective country and are likewise fully aware that their intellectual acumen, or what little of it there is, is circumscribed at best and to rely on it would be utterly futile to say the least. But they’ve looked in the mirror, seen the physical characteristics with which they’re amply endowed and logically deduce that nature’s deficit on the one hand can be satisfactorily compensated for on the other. In other words they’ll make their good looks, physicality or both if they’re so blessed work for them to achieve the fame, fortune or the standard of living which they know they simply couldn’t in normal circumstances have realistically aspired to let alone seriously have hoped for. Two categories of women then; but each making the conscious and determined decision to use the mechanism of sex as an effective tool to circumvent the gender obstacles which for generations and even millennia men have obtusely and arrogantly placed in the path of female progress.
In the west most people I would imagine are quite familiar with the term “the casting couch” and what its real implications are, but this kind of sexual transaction isn’t restricted to the west alone and can be found in variant forms in other societies, and Arab societies are no different. Here in Western Europe and notably in places like London, Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, Berlin and Hamburg the spectacle of affluent Arab males, particularly the incestuous progeny of these risibly so-called monarchs, princes, emirs, sheiks and the like from the Persian Gulf Bantustans is a regular thing, as these purportedly conservative and devout Muslim practitioners routinely frequent and cheerfully cavort in the casinos, red-light districts, booze parlours and upmarket whorehouses of these European cities shelling out enormous sums of money on their gambling, boozing and sexual proclivity, which in the latter case range from the promiscuously straight to the abandoned homosexual through to the sadistically perverse. God alone knows what Allah thinks of this kind of licentious behaviour. But I do know that among those outside the realms of academia and research who give it any thought, so commonplace has all this become, the general consensus is that it’s the height of bloody hypocrisy for these domestic camel-abusing bastards to be sanctimoniously preaching and brutally enforcing among the general populace at home their warped Salafist and Wahabi doctrinal notions and regime yet when they go abroad their conduct is anything but exemplary.
But don’t be deceived into thinking that this kind of untrammelled and libidinous behaviour is limited solely to wealthy dissolute Arab males, far from it; since their Arab female counterparts behave in precisely the same manner but with one noticeable difference, they tend to be much more discrete in how they conduct their sexual liaisons, and for obvious reasons too since they have a great deal to lose if they’re ever publicly found out and predictably shamed. The curse of womankind one might say that is in marked contrast to how their men folk are perceived and who as we all know are proudly hailed as Jack-the-lads, Casanovas or red-blooded Lotharios if their sexual infamy becomes openly known while their women, even the singe and unattached ones, who sexually misbehave and are found out are instantaneously vilified, condemned and branded as trollops, slappers and much worse by these very men and others like them if a whiff of scandal were ever to swirl around them for doing exactly what their men folk unhesitatingly, without sanctions or any fear of social retaliation for actions which they freely and lasciviously embarked on.
That said who precisely are these women that notwithstanding the risks they’ll certainly run for their temerity in deviating from the accepted code of sexual conduct they’re supposed to follow and whose grim consequences for doing so could permanently jeopardize their complete future and even endanger their lives nevertheless daringly grasp what chances present themselves and are on offer to them to escape, if only with reservations and vigilantly so, from the prescribed societal and sexual roles that their society has arbitrarily fashioned for, imposes on and requires them to both unquestioningly and uncomplainingly conform to? Few of them it’s pretty safe to say emerge from the lower echelons of Arab society and those that do make it from there do so principally through luck or being in the right place, or finding themselves caught up in the right circumstances at the right time, which means that the overwhelming majority of our sexual and fiscally exploitative Arab adventuresses come with a distinctive social, through circumstances of birth, or educational advantage that effectively give them a crucial head start over general or other aspirant all-comers.
Some of these females would already have successfully and lucratively made it as the wives of diplomats, influential businessmen, prominent politicians, affluent entrepreneurs and even as the spouses of those aforesaid Arab Lotharios who didn’t mind putting it about themselves yet paradoxically expected the women they took as wives to be chaste and furthermore counted on them to be faithful, something they would never countenance for themselves, throughout their marriage; but all of these women nevertheless tenacious females whose sexual and specifically their carnal adventurism is purely for personal gratification and has nothing at all to do with the acquisition of financial gain or economic enhancement since these are assets they already have securely locked up in their wily grasp through the courtesy of their highly beneficial marriages. In a nutshell to them their sexual escapades are for the most part nothing more than the age-old scenario of while the cat’s away the mice will play, and with love or personal emotions having nothing whatsoever to do with their sexual exploits.
Exuberant and hard on their heels but in a class all of their own are the young, early twenties to thirty something or other, unmarried daughters or sisters of the moneyed class. These females will inescapably settle for marriages with socially apt, scrupulously family vetted and evidently selected husbands, but in the meantime to gratuitously pander to the endemic colonial mindset that seriously infects this privileged group while simultaneously have these females physically demonstrate at large that they’re essentially, significantly and socially above the average young women and others in their communities; insomuch that they have, can effortlessly afford and will take and fully exploit the opportunities provided them, but which are noticeably denied to their lesser well off peers, to travel to the west, mix there with those whom they ingratiatingly look up to, have a tendency to ape, and like their Arab male equivalent their money can readily buy access to, as they self-centredly and self-congratulatorily assure themselves that culturally and socially they’ve arrived as it were and moreover in the environment where it matters most to them.
These young women will of course readily consent in the planning stages of their proposed trip abroad to being female-chaperoned during their indefinite sojourn in the west in order to pacify minds at home, but for these enthusiastic and nubile Arab adventuresses this is just a fig leaf that they’ll deviously and manipulatively use to their advantage; publicly at all times giving the air of being entirely chaste while privately wantonly doing a great deal of chasing of their own.
Intellectually airheads for the most part they none the less know that as long as they sensibly keep their personal lifestyles closely under wraps and don’t give any grounds for suspicion or scandal they’ll be just fine and perfectly at liberty, though circumspectly so of course, to carry on with business as usual. Not least because the pressing need of having to find employment in the job market, fret incessantly about their personal financial circumstances, or live a life that’s fraught on a daily basis with social inequalities or the kind of pernicious and rather upsettingly debilitating gender discrimination that the overwhelming majority of Arab women habitually have to face, must worrisomely endure for most if not all of their adult lives, and are therefore obligated to resourcefully find ways to adequately contend with these prejudicial disadvantages that beset their lives, restrict their ambitions and stymie their future won’t be issues of concern to them or experiences that they’ll ever have to weather or surmount in their own lives.
Similarly because of the rigorous medical regime and other sagacious precautionary measures undertaken by these well-heeled, Arab, sexual adventuresses it’s most unlikely that the virulent beasts of sexually transmitted diseases, or God forbid any unwanted pregnancies will get a look in to calamitously cloud let alone ruin their high-spirited fun. After all knowledgeably, liberally and excitedly partaking of the delightfully appealing and compellingly addictive fruits from the tree of Epicurean Delights doesn’t imply that one should additionally and impetuously ascend that tree without a care in the world while running the genuine risk of intemperately trying to exceed one’s natural competency and concomitantly in the process fall disastrously from grace by doing so.
Too much is at stake to lose in such circumstances for these Arab women even when matters of principle are very much on the line as was the case with the indomitably free spirit, endearingly prepossessing and distinctly emotionally and sexually liberated princess from Bantu-Saudi who humiliatingly had her head publicly and bloodily severed from her young body, the consensual preference of the incestuously barbaric and idiotic horde of male chauvinistic pigs that brutally and intransigently run that Persian Gulf Bantustan, for what in their blinkered eyes was a most disgusting crime, that of reciprocally falling in love with the man of her choice and openly and appropriately expressing that love in the way that all normal and civilized people do.
So with it practically impossible even for those Arab females purportedly of royal birth to buck the iniquitous system which they’re ruthlessly hemmed in by and successfully get away with it what credible chance is there for those lower down the social ladder, and that includes potential female mavericks, to openly succeed where their social betters have sadly failed? Therefore the only way for any of these Arab women that are privately dissatisfied with their lot to challenge and expectantly defeat the system is to resort to subterfuge; on the one hand publicly and quite affectedly so giving the appearance of unstinting, wholehearted, supportive and full submissive conformity to the system while on the other covertly doing everything possible to subvert and permanently destroy it.
And where better to fight this guerrilla warfare against the warped precepts of theocratic and male dominated tribal obfuscation than in the intimate preserve of the sexual arena where the rules there rigid though they are nevertheless do tend at times to conflate with expectations that in themselves can and do give rise to circumstances where these same rules if they’re skilfully exploited, cunningly adjusted or even premeditatedly manipulated can bring about meaningful and even essential changes that though not entirely seismic in nature either in their relevance to or general impact in the short term on the host Arab community will, even so, unavoidably and undeniably have a profoundly psychological effect on those involved, giving tremendous scope wherever successes do abound to a viable platform from where long term this unwholesomely unsociable, perniciously pervasive and paranoiac obedience conscription system that defiantly, corruptly and exclusively permits Arab men to unreasonably and even capriciously control and subjugate the lives of their women will be openly confronted and done away with forever.
A highly toxic mix then of general Arab female subservience incongruously coupled with the covertly-contrived, spasmodic and contumacious artifice of last resort absurdly but piquantly all the same juxtaposed with characteristically irremediable and endemic Arab male insecurity and overbearing immaturity that societally leaves one totally flabbergasted as to how on earth any rational person could or would actually want to collectively or logically take these people seriously in relation to anything mildly of importance, and goes a long way towards explaining the conundrum of why without exception Arab rulers, intrinsically authoritarian and in practice a rather self-serving and self-perpetuating bunch of bestial and loathsomely barbaric monsters, treat the overwhelming majority of their population with imperious disdain suggestive of them being worthless children which they clearly consider them to be and in turn allow their de facto controllers and western puppet masters taking their cue from them to happily do likewise.
But there’s also a third group of claimants that most definitely must be included in the equation of these Arab female adventuresses; these are the authentically intellectually bright, immensely ambitious and meritocratically motivated upwardly mobile aspirants who through a convoluted set of circumstances make it to university or higher education, maybe postgraduate studies and into the professions but tellingly lacking any shattering of that proverbial glass ceiling which is still consistently viewed by the vast majority of both sexes to be the sole preserve of the male gender. Most of these female students will study in their home country but a fortunate few will be given the option and added benefit, which they’ll readily take, to study abroad usually in the west; and amongst this latter group will be those who notwithstanding their strong familial ties or financially contractual at home that either individually or jointly conspire to take them back there will nevertheless chance their luck and opt to stay abroad.
Some of these may have successfully secured promising job offers made on the recognition of their undoubted abilities or academic prowess, others through their marriage to westerners thus alleviating in both instances the need to return to a society where no matter how good they are at what they professionally do their female gender, remorselessly restricted by the stultifying cultural limits placed upon it specifically after their sexually and socially liberating experiences abroad and especially so in the west, will for them be an indefensible and wholly unacceptable hindrance to their prized ambitions; for which ever way we care to look at it sexual liberation is a key element in this ongoing drive for true feminine emancipation.
Arab women may not yet be quite ready to audaciously burn their bras or revolutionarily shake off en masse the paraphernalia of cultural repression that shackles them to a past that is entirely at variance with anything that’s distantly connected with modernity and bluntly has no place at all in the 21st Century, since most of what they spontaneously and submissively put up with has no justification to it at all and observantly tends to represent and predominantly revolve around the caprices, insecurities, puerile immaturity and narcissistic vaingloriousness of Arab men that quite evidently and dependably so, mulishly but rather ludicrously rely on the immutable factor of their male gender: something which they don’t nor could they ever have had any say on and in credible terms is indistinguishable from the insane beliefs of whites that steadfastly consider their ethnicity and skin colour as rites of passage, insignia of pride and a valid passport to their far-fetched and Utopian world of white supremacy, as the sole and unquestionable authoritative delineation not just of who they see themselves to be as Arab men but also as the possessors of this valued entity called masculinity the entrusted bearers of an unchallengeable authorization where women are concerned to do with them precisely as they please.
This all too familiar narrative was pithily played out to my personal knowledge on numerous occasions by a number of Arab men that I encountered and interviewed over several years both in their home environment and also in the west, with one Tunisian man that among scores of others had befriended me and whose friendship or acquaintanceship I had in turn reciprocated openly and unabashedly encapsulating in as direct and honest a way as anyone had previously conveyed their thoughts on this matter to me or that I could have realistically expected them to just what this thorny issue is all about. Sam, the young man in question and in his mid-thirties, hails from the north of Tunisia and for many years now has been a regular staff member of the Dar Khayam Hotel in Hammamet where until quite recently I was a recurrent long-stay, winter season only guest at that particular hotel and he’s closely linked with the animation and general entertainments provision team there.
A genial, good-natured and thoroughly well-liked fellow that evidently cares a great deal about his work and transparently enjoys doing it Sam like the other members of the animation team who are predominantly male, plus all the other up-for-it libidinous staffers at the Dar Khayam, and that includes the management there as well, is hugely popular with the female guests of all statuses and who are essentially European that patronize this hotel and unashamedly I must say aren’t the least bit retiring about predatorily letting him, his fellow Tunisian Lotharios or their equally available, willingly accessible and keenly enthusiastic lesbian equivalents like Sana the hotel’s principal female receptionist, all sexual preferences are copiously catered for at the Dar Khayam Hotel with the full knowledge and tacit agreement of the hotel’s senior management, know precisely what it is that they’re after, lasciviously intend to penetratingly and extensively explore and carnally expect to be completely sated.
Uncommonly among the numerous Tunisian contacts and sources I’ve methodically cultivated and clearly have made constructive use of both inside and outside of Tunisia over the extensive and uninterrupted periods of time I’ve travelled there, and that includes a number of Tunisian students I’ve altruistically used what influence that I have to vigorously and quite legally assist them in getting places at UK and other European universities, Sam is the only Tunisian person, male as well as female, that I’ve come across who didn’t actually care as long as he had regular employment at home for leaving his country. I know this because in the many informal or quite impromptu conversations we had with each other at the Dar Khayam Hotel when Sam was at a bit of a loose end to occupy himself as there was nothing in terms of his normal work schedule for him to do, he would always seek me out in that private corner of the extensive, picturesque and external quadrangle that’s centrally embedded among the multifaceted low rise buildings that enclose it and where I often repaired to during my periods of contemplation and forgivably on my part and apologetically on his interrupt the academic or research work I was physically engaged in at the time. And during these tète à têtes he would often say when commenting not only on his own personal situation but those of his colleagues and other workmates who he saw as wholly obsessed with wanting to get out of Tunisia that for his part he had no real wish to do so himself.
Sexually and consensually active with loads of European women and eager pubescent teenage girls all carnally disposed to going to bed with him was one thing, making the physical move to Europe however, and there were a number of serious and realistic offers that I personally know of that were tendered to Sam from some of these women during our friendship, was all together something else he informed me; for despite his sexual promiscuity and voluntary indulgences with these females morally Sam doesn’t think much of them and candidly told me that were he to ever marry the woman concerned would have to be a virgin and stay exclusively faithful to him throughout their marriage, though as a man he automatically felt he was at liberty without any such obligatory constraints being required or actually placed upon him to sexually indulge at will with other female partners in addition to his wife who took his fancy. But knowing that European women generally, unlike their Arab counterparts who’ll uncomplainingly put up with this kind of behaviour won’t play ball and tolerate this kind of stuff from him he didn’t see any requirement to ruin the prospect of being able simultaneously in his current position or a likely Tunisian marital one to be able to eat his cake and still have it too.
Therefore whoever he took as a wife, he said would be a Tunisian national and most preferably someone from the rural north of the country where he himself originated from and who would obediently and noticeably unlike his European lovers or even those avant-garde, cosmopolitan-minded Tunisian women that he had no time for, feared and actually detested in equal measure live out the prescribed and inflexible marital role he’d fashioned for her and she in turn would dutifully follow.
It’s enormously difficult to comprehend let alone accept this kind of puerile state of mind from a member of the male gender with its attendant automatic and unassertive obeisance on the part of females especially when it comes from people who one personally knows, likes and in other ways seem quite normal, even though I’ve experienced it firsthand on numerous occasions and unearthed it innumerable times during extensive bouts of research meticulously conducted over several years. That said, misogyny though incontestably an accursed affliction that needs to be exhaustively eliminated from all manner of social intercourse isn’t by any means a pestilence that’s unique to Arab societies only, far from it; since although little talked about, it plagues the west as well and consistently so among sections of our so-called enlightened communities that know it’s both morally dishonest and completely indefensible but nevertheless either cowardly, irrationally or even superciliously still permit the quite pervasive spectre of male chauvinism to unchallengingly intrude in their deliberations and codify itself in the decisions that eventually stem from them, and which consistently turn out both in theoretical and practical terms to be male-egocentric and of course inimical to the progressive interests of women as a whole.
Sensibly explain to me if you can why single and unattached Arab women that secretly indulge in premarital sexual intercourse, even if the woman concerned only slept with the one partner and therefore cannot by any true definition of that word be honestly labelled as promiscuous, regardless of how many sexual partners she eventually had and furthermore at a time when she wasn’t emotionally involved with any man let alone genuinely engaged to be married, none the less feels it incumbent on her when the prospect of a seemingly advantageous marriage looms on her personal horizon, whether that prospective marriage is a preference determined by her own free will or a handy alliance marked auspicious and thrust upon her, she mustn’t only give the seemly and naturally expected public appearance of having always been, since the onset of her puberty, the archetypically male-interpreted but logically more caricature than reality Arab female virgin but also privately and physically demonstrate to a husband eager to deflower, and presumptuously full of himself at the prospect of doing, so his apparently spousal virgin who is carnally untouched by covetous hands other than his own that she’s really what he erroneously, a notion which she must at all times stringently preserve, thinks she is.
That’s why in leading western cities like London and Paris and similarly illustrious and world-renowned medical locations like Harley Street there’s an unobtrusively conducted but none the less established culture of and thriving business in artificially constructed and replaced hymens that sexually active, resolute, but now prepared for marriage Arab and Muslim women who’re absolutely determined not to be sexually compromised on their wedding night freely make full and beneficial use of, giving an entirely new dimension to the term pussyfooting around; since it’s the medical staff that do a proficient and cleverly undetectable job of restructuring for these self-confident but wily women what’s clearly for them a psychologically focal, fundamentally physical and crucially priceless part of their vagina, or pussy as it’s more intimately referred to here in the west, and they who obviously foot the medical bills.
This naturally raises a quite interesting conundrum which I’m in no doubt any bright five years old child will be able to resolve; for if lustful Arab or other men are obtusely going to continue actively and unrestrictively put it about sexually, even if they’re not incestuously sleeping with their sisters or other close female relatives, it’s a given that other like-minded men, just as sure as the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, will in similar circumstances be bedding female relatives of theirs, which brings into sharp focus the matter of diminishing returns.
For if every supposedly red-blooded Arab Muslim man consciously sets out on the immutable path of having sexual intercourse with as many available Arab Muslim women as he possibly can whether these acts are consensually or even coercively embarked upon and, in turn, Arab Muslim women understandably so as a direct consequence of the transparently feudalistically cultural and sexual environment which they’re forcibly made to live in furtively decide to rebel against the intolerable repression which routinely they’re both physically and psychologically subjected to are equally keen and prepared, even if perhaps somewhat duplicitously so at times, to liberally but always in the most scrupulously conducted clandestine manner they can devise revel, irrespective of what their individual marital status might be, in the same bacchanalian delights as their male equivalent frequently and more openly do, who can honestly blame them for doing so; and furthermore knowledgeably aware of this amusingly ongoing but all the same carefully concealed female artifice not logically conclude that the store of genuine Arab female virginity over the age of puberty if not already empty is at best finite and more pragmatically possibly a non-existent commodity as well?
And it doesn’t require the intellectual capability of a rocket scientist to work that out or deduce why it is that so many Arab Muslim males have obstinately taken to deluding themselves that for the unconscionably and even barbaric deeds they’ve committed in this life and pervertedly so in the name of Islam they’ll nevertheless be richly rewarded in the after life with an array of sexually enthusiastic young virgins for the heinous crimes they’ve perpetrated here and now. A seemingly subconscious inclination towards paedophilia in this bizarre narrative aside it also in my view begs the obvious question of: why if there are so many mature and of sexual age Arab virgins around and sufficiently accessible in their respective societies at the present time don’t these supposedly virile and carnally predisposed Arab men make full use of them as one would normally expect them to, even inside the limits of marriage if necessary should moral scruples intervene and get in the way of them not using these women beforehand, rather than patiently wait for the uncertain advent of death and the spurious chance of having unsolicited and for all time celestial virgins aplenty then?
Absolutely risible to me it’s a scenario that vividly calls to mind a striking and informatively sagacious discussion that my dad had with me during my early pubescent years. In general, he enlightened me, taking a female’s virginity can be compared to the vain antics of an extremely obsessive and self-centred motorist possessed of the financial wherewithal to do so seeking and getting the authoritative permission he’s after to idiosyncratically, solely at his own expense and with no input or assistance whatsoever of any kind from anyone to construct an elaborate motorway through what is evidently a substantially difficult and even exacting terrain. Then when all the hard work of formulating the project as its creator envisaged and expressly wants it to be it’s eventually finished and functionally ready to go into full operation expectedly and plausibly so for the exclusive or at the very least the primary benefit of the sole individual who made it all possible, along comes a plethora of other motorists who liberally, unconcernedly of the proprietorial rights and privileges of the one who was there first quite advantageously make full use of what in its pristine state they would never have expended the time, energy or their treasure on but as matters now stand, and someone else having done all the donkey’s work for them, they monstrously have no problem or any scruples whatsoever in deceitfully exploiting.
“What then the purported value of such a nebulous, variable and even fickle treasure?” my dad opined. Intelligently advising me that every sexual adventure I engaged in and which of course would always be heterosexual an always with someone who was above the legally prescribed age of consent, mustn’t only on my part be indisputably consensual at all times with the partner I was involved with, reciprocally and fundamentally beneficial to both of us whether she was significantly sexually experienced or a genuine virgin embarked on her maiden flight of sexual emancipation, but equally from my perspective as well I should at all times be totally cognisant of the fact that sex and love aren’t the same thing or are they even necessarily compatible with each other, and hence in either or both of these regards shouldn’t be conflated with or rendered as indivisible from each other.
I judiciously took my father’s advice and consequentially have had a fully comprehensive and thoroughly enjoyable sexual life that moreover has been absolutely fulfilling for me and which thankfully and pleasurably is still ongoing without an iota of regret by me for any of it. So the likelihood of my ever having a totally asinine and ludicrously obsessive hang-up about virgins either in this world or the next or any empathy with or sympathy for those that do won’t appear even so much as a decidedly remote blip on my sexual radar, and accurately accounts for why I so contemptuously dismiss and have nothing but a consummate revulsion for everyone of those males, whether they class themselves as Arab, Jew, Muslim, Christian or whatever, who view a female’s virginity through the insalubrious prism of their warped sensibilities, or likewise those women that calculatingly consider a female’s enforced or opportunely subscribed to abstinence from sexual intercourse prior to her marriage as simply a situation to be effectively exploited with the primary and even the sole aim of artfully securing substantial financial or major social benefits for the women involved.
This then is the stark reality of the Arab Muslim world that you Hamida are quite expediently ignoring as you disingenuously, fraudulently and rather ridiculously peddle a version of it that doesn’t exist to those who either don’t know anything about Arabian communities, are poorly informed about them, or simply couldn’t care two hoots in relation to Arabs generally far less bugger all for their societies come to that so long as the precious oil and gas that are extremely crucial to the economies of the west keep flowing there and their legitimate owners, those that western minds insensitively perceive as predatorily barbaric and completely incorrigible with it, are firmly kept in their prescribed places by western installed, diplomatically supported and militaristically protected Muslim Arab stooges.
But away from this conscious obfuscation of the facts on your part Hamida Labidi you in your sinister, reprobate and conspiratorial heart well know just as the many Arab sources, several of them native and resident Tunisians, that I have along with myself are similarly well aware of it, what the publicly awkward but undeniably domestically soul-destroying and utterly despairing reality in these Arab Muslim societies actually are. Therefore against this antipathetic backdrop that exists in them towards females several pertinent questions do justifiably arise and naturally quickly come to the fore in your case Hamida, not least of these being how you managed not only to buck a trend but also an entire invidious system too which is universally known to be rather inimical to the interests of women in your society, yet apparently with relative ease you were able to circumvent the intrinsically corrupt culture of Tunisian politics first under Ben Ali and now that of this right shower of inept, vacuous bunch of morons that presently run Tunisia and in the process rather successfully and profitably climb your way up the greasy pole of your country’s official indicator relative to and determinant of who profits from social advancement and political preference, and do so in a way Hamida that many brilliant and highly competent Tunisian men with the education to match find it practically impossible to do and their female counterparts who wouldn’t even be given a look in anyway can only stand, watch, wonder and envy from afar. Lucky you!
But I’m quite sure you’ve sussed it out by now Hamida that how you did this isn’t the closely guarded secret that you thought it was, safely entrusted in the hands of a few close friends and associates that you relied on to keep it that way and clearly wished for it permanently to remain as is frequently done by actresses who make it to the top, having previously in their aspiration to do so engaged in an assortment of unwholesome activities that usually come back to haunt them, creating unwelcome demons that can prove to be both compromising and embarrassing once they’re at the top and were any of this to get into the public domain, vigorously and quite systematically set about airbrushing their past with all the energy and financial clout that they can muster.
No need however to panic on my account since I’ve known all I need to know about you for some considerable time now thanks to the very informative discourses I’ve had with my many excellent Tunisian and other sources, and of course my own investigative research; after all I’m an investigative journalist. Besides this article isn’t about you per se let alone an expose of you or any of the other prominent or not so prominent but up and coming Tunisians that I have in my sights and have similarly had the lowdown on them for a number of years. And I say this in all honesty since prurient salaciousness into the lifestyle of other people though I naturally take cognizance of it isn’t remotely of interest to me let alone what one can sensibly call a specific forte.
For the unvarnished truth is Hamida that I needed a stalking horse for this swingeing article not only on Tunisia but Arab society generally and for a diversity of significantly relevant reasons you are the ideal specimen. As I see it the immense iniquities, double standards and downright hypocrisies that like a virulent cancer infect and permeate the society of which you are a part and having yourself cynically and immorally used these injustices to feather your own nest you now utterly loathsomely and dishonestly seek to defend is quite contemptible I feel; the classic situation of having climbed up the ladder of advancement going as far as you can get you then heartlessly kick down the said ladder from under your feet to prevent others from making any such ascendancy to their cherished aspirations of success; and that’s wholly unforgivable!
Intimately associated with Tunisia for several years and notwithstanding its many adverse and challenging drawbacks I nevertheless had high hopes for the country’s progressive future. Ben Ali might have been a crook but if it’s not a contradiction in terms he was an honest crook who made no bones about what he was actually doing. A dictator too, yes; but a tolerable one I felt who as long as you didn’t overtly challenge his will or authority that individual had nothing to fear, and under him Tunisia, unlike every other Arab country that existed then and does to this very day, had all the genuine hallmarks of a secular state where religion happily coexisted with secularism. This is a remarkable phenomenon unheard of in the rest of the Arab Muslim world, but it wasn’t just that alone Ben Ali knew it was a vital factor that is absolutely essential and a crucial prerequisite for any country let alone an Arab one languishing as so many of them still are in the feudal Dark Ages to take them into the modern world and especially the 21st Century where is exactly he wanted Tunisia to be. And I’m absolutely convinced that deep in his heart this is what Ben Ali fully understood, recognized and wanted for Tunisia; but like all dictators irrespective of how benign they are in practice matching their aspirations and the progress they would like to see and know are crucial for the development of their country with relinquishing absolute power and control isn’t something that’s easily achieved. Nevertheless the framework was there and significantly I never felt threatened, insecure or forced to hold my tongue as a foreigner in Ben Ali’s Tunisia .
As it happened I was in Tunisia when the revolution broke out and voluntarily remained there during the most intense part of it when everyone else on holiday there had long hightailed it back to Europe . Taking calculated risks and giving full rein to the journalist in me I confidently went into the streets at different hours of the day and talked to a broad cross-section of people ranging from pro-democracy activists to staunch Ben Ali supporters in order to get a firsthand and accurate perception of what they thought and crucially what they envisaged would emanate long-term from the disturbances that were throwing the entire country into turmoil, and when I finally left Tunisia I was pretty optimistic having also at great length discussed the matter with my sources in the country and reaching a consensual agreement with them that distant though such aspirations still were a democratic and secular Tunisia was real possibility.
Crushing disappointingly that has all since disappeared. I returned as planned to Tunisia in the winter of 2011 intending as normal to be there well into early part of the New Year but didn’t stay for very long as the atmosphere in the country had dramatically changed for the worst with optimism very prevalent in the direct aftermath of the revolution giving way, and justifiably so, to extensive pessimism. Corruption abounds in post-revolutionary Tunisia ; arrogant ineptness is now pervasive nationally and a distinct Animal Farm mindset has taken a pernicious grip on the country. The president is feckless; the prime minister a pusillanimous, arse-licking dimwit, intellectually challenged and a venal, self-serving and corrupt stooge of the petro-dollar Persian Gulf Arab Bantustans most notably Bantu-Saudi, paradoxically the current home of none other than Ben Ali himself, who this PM says he won’t extradite back to Tunisia as his links with the barbaric Bantu-Saudi entity are far more important; and then there’s the Tunisian parliament: a disparate collection of nonentities united only in their Salafist, Wahabi and feudalistic desire to catapult Tunisia back into the Dark Ages and on a par with Qatar and Bantu-Saudi itself. To be honest with you one couldn’t have wished a more contemptible bunch of idiots on their worst enemy than those who currently run Tunisia .
Economically Tunisia is deep in the doldrums; the tourist industry, a principal money earner, is sluggishly beginning to crawl again after the damaging effects of the revolution but still has a long way to go to fully resuscitate itself, if ever manages to do so again, with many former and prospective tourists astutely opting to stay away, and in terms of ownership many of the hotels and indeed most of the paraphernalia associated with them are still solidly in French and other expatriate European hand, and it’s they who reap the benefits while the average Tunisian does the real work. Crime is on the increase throughout the country, personal security on the streets and even in hotels once a given under the rule of Ben Ali has evaporated altogether and when I was last in Tunisia in December 2011 had firsthand information of three incidents and know of a further two at least at the Dar Khayham Hotel in Hammamet involving English female guests staying there with their husbands and children who were sexually attacked, two of them in the female loos, by Tunisian men, something previously unheard of in all the years I’ve been going there.
One could list a catalogue of failings now current in post-revolutionary Tunisia from poor hotel service to a total indifference to the real and even urgent concerns of the guests that still bother to go there, but for how much longer I ask myself. And significantly the temporary abatement of the desire to emigrate from Tunisia while people optimistically hoped the post-revolutionary era would noticeably improve things and make their lives infinitely better has been completely and dejectedly abandoned as Tunisians realize that there’s no hope of a better life for them at home and so the mad rush to leave the country by any means possible is on again in full force.
Meanwhile financial corruption in Tunisia has become a growth industry with the government and Tunisian banks energetically colluding with each other to swindle what tourists the country still gets unsuspectingly of their money. Outside of Tunisia the country currency the Dinar isn’t worth the price of the toilet paper that people in Britain for instance routinely after usage flush down their toilet lavatory bowls. Reputable Bureaux de Change in the UK or the rest of the EU don’t touch this Monopoly currency so tourists who are aware of this generally dispense with it in whatever way they can before they leave Tunisia. A customary way is to give some of it to worthy hotel staffers, usually the hardworking and hard-pressed cleaners, to help supplement their lousy wages, but if the Tunisian Dinars left over at the holiday’s end are appreciable sums of money this unfortunately can create a major problem.
In Britain , the rest of the EU, the US and all other countries I know of travellers can go to their local banks, Bureaux de Change or post offices and purchase foreign currencies or have what foreign currencies they have in their possession routinely exchanged into the local one. Not so with Tunisian Dinars. Most tourists who travel from Europe to Tunisia on a regular basis know this and therefore only sparingly change their home currency into Tunisian Dinars if and when they absolutely have to do so. However, what even the overwhelming majority of these people let alone those first timers to Tunisia don’t know, and clearly the government, banks and tourist officials involved in and collusively operating this vile con don’t want them to and certainly for very obvious reasons don’t tell them either, is that if they change money at a Tunisian bank or other government sanctioned financial outlet the standard receipt money changers everywhere in the world get when such a routine transaction is carried out must be kept.
Tunisia is the only country in the world that does this knowing full well that no normal person having changed money into the local currency, checked to see that they got the right amount of money due them in exchange then proceeds to hold on to what is effectively a worthless piece of paper throughout the rest of their holiday, anymore than they would hold on indefinitely to a receipt given to them after purchase of the groceries they bought in their local supermarket or elsewhere; this sort of thing isn’t done as Europeans simply dispose of the receipt once they’re out of the shop and the Tunisian authorities know this well and it’s what they’re counting on in the furtherance of their repugnant financial scam. But the scam can be and often is pretty costly for the tourist that at the end of their holiday is left with a sizeable sum of Tunisian Dinars but understandably got rid of that worthless till receipt and now wants to change their Dinars back into their home currency; suddenly they’re told this can’t be done.
This notwithstanding the fact that there’s no way on earth that the individual or persons caught up in this authorized and unremitting Tunisian scam could have gotten hold of these Dinars and one’s passport and other germane documents like those relating to the hotel they stayed at, how long they were there for and even their return tickets on the airline carrier that bought them into the country demonstrably prove that they are bona fide holiday guests to Tunisia. In any other country such unmitigated inanity wouldn’t exist let alone be allowed to thrive, but when you’re as corrupt as this present Tunisian government and the other subordinate authorities there now overwhelmingly are and with their fixated, trough-snouting, collective and venal propensity for easy money by any means possible, particularly precious western-backed foreign exchange, it’s not that at all difficult to discern why they go to such desperate lengths to asininely fleece even the geese that lay their golden eggs.
As I said and fully maintain it’s a corrupt swindle perpetrated by the Tunisian government, the country’s banks and other relevant and conspiratorial authorities there and I personally know of several people that quite unsuspectingly have been snared in this odious racket and are now left holding useless Tunisian Dinars because the banks, other financial outlets and the commercial entities at the airports authorized to carry out such money changing transactions refuse to do so without that blasted till receipt stating what is patently obvious to anyone with a working brain cell in his or her head that the Dinars concerned were got in Tunisia and done so quite lawfully when the individual changed their Euros or Pounds Sterling for example into Tunisian Dinars. Furthermore there’s nothing unique or the least special about this so-called receipt as it’s just a till receipt of the kind that one would normally receive if they bought a bar of soap or requisite from a pharmacy for Christ’s sake and you don’t or would you realistically be expected to keep those.
As a matter of fact it’s not unusual for most people once they’ve paid for the articles they’ve purchased not to even bother to take the till receipt which is only a sign of proof if you were to be challenged by a shop security guard for example that you’ve actually purchased the items in your possession and didn’t steal them as he or she might have suspected. Besides most banks like shops and supermarkets nowadays routinely have CCTV cameras in them that rule out all this malarkey Tunisia being the exception even though CCTV cameras are positioned in these premises; but the reason this technology isn’t being utilized even though they’re widely in use in Tunisian banks as well, is because the European or other tourist to Tunisia that ventures into them is effectively dealing with a bunch of crooks.
The banks till receipts serve exactly the same purpose as those given in a shop or supermarket and there’s no constitutional duty or any laws anywhere in the world that I know of, apart from Tunisia perhaps, and if so they’ve certainly kept that quiet, that says one is legally obligated to keep for an indeterminate period of time a till receipt that formed part of a routine transaction of changing one’s own money into Tunisian Dinars in Tunisia, and should you desire to change the Dinars which you have left over after boosting the Tunisian economy by making purchases there of souvenirs, spending your cash in restaurants, going on trips and organized tours and all the rest of it that normal tourists everywhere do, and I do personally know this as I’ve travelled the world extensively, unlike every other rational country I know of you are strictly prohibited from doing so in Tunisia unless you can produce that bank till receipt you got when you made that original money changing transaction. For without it you’re left stuck with Tunisian Dinars that are utterly useless to you anywhere else on Planet Earth. Now if that isn’t a scam then I don’t know what one is.
Yet predictably the same banks in Tunisia don’t ask for any such till receipts or proof of where you got your Euros, Pounds Sterling or Dollars when you seek to change these or other western hard currencies into Tunisian Dinars, and like excited kids opening their presents on Christmas Day are all too keen to get their hands on them. And that’s why they, the Tunisian government, prohibits hotels from changing Tunisian Dinars into foreign currencies, but there’s no problem whatsoever on their part if you want to change your foreign currency into Tunisian Dinars from doing so; then they’ll happily do this. Any other transaction and you’re told you must do this at the airport on your way out of the country; it’s not rocket science to work out why.
I know of a number of UK and mainland European tourists to Tunisia who’ve been ensnared in this Tunisian government authorized and run scam and were forced to take considerable sums of Tunisian Dinars that they’d exchanged their Pounds Sterling or Euros for back with them to Europe . Unable to have these Dinars reconverted into their local currency in banks, Bureaux de Change or post offices back home some of them contacted the Tunisian Embassy in their home country and even their MPs as a matter of last resort but all to no avail. It’s no laughing matter at all when one is forcibly stuck with the equivalent of £1000,000 Pounds Sterling in worthless Tunisian Dinars and despite pleas to the Tunisian Embassy in London, I know this for a fact as I’ve personally seen the emails and GPO recorded delivery must sign for correspondences sent specifically to you Hamida, no assistance whatsoever was offered or given. And don’t you dare deny any of this as the emails have all been recorded as were the letters sent and received from the MPs involved; and juxtaposed with all this in respect of the recorded and must sign for mail sent to you Hamida the GPO tracking service has confirmed that these arrived as intended were signed for at the embassy, the dates these occurred and proof of this provided to the individual concerned by the GPO.
So these correspondences and requests are in your possession Hamida yet you’ve never had the decency or common courtesy nor have any of your underlings if you felt it was all infra dig and thus beneath your dignity to do so respond to any of these correspondences. So honestly tell me what the hell is this person to do with £1000,000 Pounds Sterling of utterly worthless Tunisian Dinars knowing they’ll never set foot in Tunisia again? And even if the latter were not the case why should they be put in this wholly intolerable situation in the first place? I’ve not published the individual’s name or given any revealing details relating to them in this article but am more than happy to send them to you personally; in the meantime perhaps you might like to examine the personal correspondences sent to you on the 29 December 2011; 30 December 2011, GPO Recorded Delivery First Class Mail, Reference Number: BR 5625 1050 1GB as well as further urgent correspondences and emails sent to you throughout January 2012, none of which have been acknowledged by you or anyone else come to that at the Tunisian Embassy in London.
Tunisia as I see it is on a fast downward slope to criminal and barbaric Salafism masquerading as Islamic piety, a nonentity status not dissimilar to what I see as characteristically endemic of the Persian Gulf Arab Bantustans; a pawn of the west with idiotic stooges deluding themselves that they’re authentic leaders while loathsomely selling out their own people Judas-style for 30 pieces of silver. This regrettably is what Tunisia has become, much worse than anything I ever noticed under Ben Ali; and though I shall retain my Tunisian friends and the invaluable sources I cultivated and treasured over the years, I personally want no further part in terms of any other links with this stinking cesspit that Tunisia now is and you Hamida Labidi are very much a part of.
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