A group of Iranian and South Korean artists will be gathering in Masuleh in northern Iran to create artworks with the central theme of a culture of peace for ten days beginning on November 23. The artworks will later go on display in an exhibition at the Iranian Artists Forum.

“JAMM is a vessel to promote cultural diplomacy,” the founders state on their website. “Our goal is to advance Arab and Iranian artists in the West, and Western artists in the East, and thus encourage further collaboration between the two,” they explained.

However, the fact that Israel’s president Shimon Peres now calls military action “more and more likely” suggests that, regardless of the eventual decision, Israel has embarked on a public diplomacy campaign intended to seize international attention.

A favorable image of Iran, once widely held in the Arab world, has started to erode in the last few years and since the beginning of 2011, it has deteriorated sharply. This is because the wave of unrest in the streets of the Arab world has been accompanied by a major shift in perceptions of Iran.

Conditions within Iran, from rising inflation to widespread unemployment to economic stagnation, suggest that Tehran could still go the way of Tunis, Cairo and Tripoli. Against that backdrop, renewed “engagement” with the Iranian regime wouldn’t just be futile; it would be fatal to prospects for real grassroots change within Iran.

Obama should return to his original approach and test the Iranians to see if there is any room for dialogue and agreement. Engaging with Iran, putting its nuclear program under some kind of supervision and finding areas of common interest (such as Afghanistan) would all be important goals.

Culture is the place to convert ugliness to beauty and separation to sympathy. We Iranians have always put culture on top during our thousands of years of civilization and have communicated with the world through our culture, read other part of the speech.

In a clear act of public diplomacy, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton appeared on BBC Persian this week to engage the network's Iranian audience on a range of issues regarding the state of relations between Iran and America.