NEW YORK CITY – While you were enjoying the various holidays on offer, Tunisian President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali went on live television to address a nation gripped by the worst unrest in a decade.

Unsurprisingly, he was agitated. When you’ve been in power for 23 years, you are used to addressing the nation when you want. This wasn’t one of those times. Two young men driven to desperation by unemployment had attempted suicide (one successfully) and had lit a fuse of popular anger that was spilling across one of the most tightly controlled police states in the Middle East. Ben Ali was not having a good day.

And then, in the middle of his live address, as he feigned concern for the young and the poor, the telephone on his desk started ringing.

I kid you not.

If ever a moment symbolized the utter disregard Ben Ali and his cohort of aging dictators across the Middle East have for their citizens — the majority of whom are younger than 30 and have known no other leaders but those old men — nothing could top that ringing phone.

As he railed against “mercenaries” and “foreign news channels” (read: Al Jazeera), which he claimed were behind the unrest with the aim of making Tunisia look bad, the real inspiration for the uprising lay in hospital slowly, painfully dying. On Dec. 17, Mohamed Bouazizi, 26, doused himself in gasoline and lit a match after police confiscated fruits and vegetables he’d been selling without a permit to make a living in lieu of a job he could not find despite a university degree.

By the time Ben Ali gave his speech, at least two other young men had died during protests: an 18-year-old was killed by police when they opened fire on protestors outside a police station; the other — an unemployed youth — electrocuted himself on an electricity pylon. Days later, another protester would die from police bullets and two more unemployed young men would attempt suicide.

Demonstrators set police cars ablaze and threw firebombs at official buildings and there sat the president chiding them for scaring tourists. And there rang the phone, reminding us all that Ben Ali was bogus.

Ben Ali’s attempted crackdown was predictably harsh: live ammunition, curfews, mass arrests and a near-complete media blackout. Human rights activists say police have started a campaign of night raids against demonstrators and union leaders.

All this was happening sometime between the office parties, turkeys and fireworks of the holidays — but don’t bother going through your pile of old newspapers. You’ll find very little if anything on Tunisia. Not as sexy as perennial media darling Iran — ugly mullahs versus sexy Prada Boys and Gucci Girls — or as proficient at sucking the oxygen out of the news agenda as the self-absorbed Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Tunisia rings no bells.

I wager the majority of North Americans could not find Tunisia on a map and that for most Europeans it brings nothing more to mind than sunny beach vacations. Police state? Who knew!

Twitter taught me everything about the momentous events in Tunisia: the uprising has been hashtagged.

A stream of tweets, all including #Sidibouzid (Bouazizi’s hometown), flows through my Twitter feed every day in Arabic, English and French, carrying links to Tunisian blogs, video filmed by protestors (which provided much of Al Jazeera’s coverage) and live updates from solidarity demonstrations in other Arab cities.

My friend, the Boston-based Mauritanian-American activist Nasser Weddady, has become a one-man information feed. He re-tweets the latest from Tunisian activists and bloggers and — 140 characters be damned — provides context and analyses.

He also passes on information he gets from activists on how Tunisians online can avoid the malicious state campaigns to shut down their email accounts, blogs and Facebook accounts. So vicious has the Tunisian government’s online war against its opponents been that the Internet activist group “Anonymous” has targeted several government websites in protest at what it says is “an outrageous level of censorship.”

Minutes after Ben Ali and his ringing phone addressed the nation, Weddady had shared on Twitter a link to a video of the speech that someone had already uploaded to YouTube.

It quickly provided some much-needed levity with tweets flowing in from around the Middle East taking a guess at who could’ve been calling Ben Ali. Stevie Wonder to say “I love you?” joked one tweet.

I imagined President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, who has ruled my country of birth for the past 29 years, calling to tell Ben Ali to shut up before he made it even worse for the rest of the totalitarian old men in power.

When activists in Cairo protested in solidarity with Tunisians, they made that connection: “Revolution till victory. Revolution in Tunisia. Revolution in Egypt,” they chanted (and then told the rest of us via Twitter).

How could they not make the connection? Corruption, nepotism and unemployment taunt them in both countries. Activists in Jordan and Lebanon also held solidarity protests.

And that’s why Tunisia counts.

Mohamed Bouazizi died on Tuesday night. I found out through Saudi journalist and blogger Hasan Almustafa, again on Twitter.

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As he lay dying of severe burns, Bouazizi inspired not just compatriots fed up with unemployment and repression but young men and women in neighbouring countries who could identify all too well.

Mona Eltahawy is an Egyptian-born award-winning columnist and public speaker on Arab and Muslim issues.