We hardly know it, but the revolution being played out in Libya is actually about the aspirations of the country's youth. It is not about Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, who is yesterday's man. Yet he has been front and centre of international media coverage of the revolution. He has even claimed that he is the real revolutionary.
One reading is that for him, any publicity is good publicity, because publicity contributes greatly to keeping him in power. By that logic, western media are complicit in keeping him in power and disenfranchising the Libyan people. He is egged on in his extreme barbarism by international media fascination with the extremes of his colourful personality.
His eccentricity, coupled with uncaring ruthlessness, is the act that keeps us transfixed.
It is refreshing to read the analysis of the Jesuit Islamic scholar Samir Khalil Samir, who does not even mention Gaddafi.
Putting the Libyan revolution in the context of those of Tunisia and Egypt, he suggests western countries have been caught napping in their preoccupation with economic investments. It is true that maintaining economic relations involves honouring the dictators rather than the people. But this causes western nations to overlook the youth movements that are energising these nations.
Samir describes what is happening as a 'springtime in the Arab world'. The demonstrators are predominantly young people under 30. They keep in contact with each other and the outside world through social media.
Their ability to communicate is their power base, but their number is also significant. Half the population is under 30. The common thread is the desire to have a job and get married in the midst of economic hardship, and their motivation is overwhelmingly practical. Samir writes:
These young people are focused on national and social problems, they are not demonstrating for any ideology, right wing or left wing. In all these months, no American or Israeli flag has been burnt; no-one has made claims in defence of an Islam that must rule the earth. They do not want ideologies; they want realism.
Samir's Jesuit colleague in Alexandria, Henri Boulad, painted a similar picture earlier this month when he wrote that Egypt's revolution belongs to the young people, not the Muslim Brotherhood, which is attempting to appropriate it for their own purposes.
Samir is confident that the young people will not be manipulated by extremist religious or ideological movements, though he does admit he is worried by the absence of leaders.