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When Faida Hamdy slapped Mohamed Bouazizi in the face and set off a revolution.

What happened in Tunisia:

Faida Hamdy, a 45-year-old municipal inspector in Sidi Bouzid, a police officer?s daughter, was single, had a ?strong personality? and an unblemished record, her supervisor said. She inspected buildings, investigated noise complaints and fined vendors like Mr. Bouazizi, whose itinerant trade may or may not have been legal; no one seems to know.

On the morning of Dec. 17, when other vendors say Ms. Hamdy tried to confiscate Mr. Bouazizi?s fruit, and then slapped him in the face for trying to yank back his apples, he became the hero ? now the martyred hero ? and she became the villain in a remarkable swirl of events in which Tunisians have risen up to topple a 23-year dictatorship and march on, demanding radical change in their government.

The revolution has rippled beyond Tunisia, shaking other authoritarian Arab states, whose frustrated young people are often written off as complacent when faced with stifling bureaucracy and an impenetrable and intimidating security apparatus. That assumption was badly shaken with Mr. Bouazizi?s reaction to his slap...

So a woman humiliated a man...

ADDED: Eve gave Adam an apple, and Hamdi took away Bouazizi's apples. In Eden, the man took the apple from the woman, and we know what happened. In Tunisia, the man tried "to yank back his apples." So much meaning lies in the giving and taking of apples between a man and a woman.

Full post as published by Althouse on January 22, 2011 (boomark / email).