middle east

Both sides have taken the fight to the virtual streets during Operation Pillar of Defense, battling for public sympathy through Facebook posts and fiery tweets. Meanwhile, Israelis flock to web-based news, and government sites become targets for cyber warfare.

Early adopters in countries like Morocco, Algeria and Palestine have a more strongly developed and time-tested hip-hop scene—but across the greater Arab world, hip-hop has risen up alongside folk anthems as a revolutionary soundtrack. And in the Western world, Arab diaspora rap preoccupies itself with questions of Eastern and Western dislocated identity.

For nearly two hundred years the measure of a nation’s progress has been its capacity to Westernize. Today, to a great extent, China has shifted this narrative.

In the last three decades, China has lifted over 500 million of its people out of poverty according to the World Bank. The scale and speed of China’s growth are unprecedented. The world has never seen anything like the rise of China according to Martin Jacques, author of bestseller ‘When China Rules the World: the End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order.’

The eruptions in the Middle East have posed perhaps the severest, most direct test yet of the limits of President Obama’s signature foreign policy innovation during his first term, what the White House hails as the “light footprint” strategy.

War is not just about bombs and rockets. It's about words. That's been true for centuries, of course. But the public got a rude awakening this week about just how much those words can matter in the digital age when the Israel Defense Force live tweeted its strike that killed a Hamas leader. The military's live spin about the strike, and Hamas' response on a separate Twitter feed, have been called an unprecedented use of social media.

The members of the band Della Mae come from all over the United States: Vermont, South Carolina, Colorado, Wyoming and Washington State. And they are steeped in the Appalachian bluegrass tradition. You can’t get much more American than that. Perhaps that’s why the US State Department selected Della Mae to be America’s cultural ambassadors to Pakistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. The band calls it their “‘Stan Tour.”

An unpopular military decided to use Twitter to broadcast, explain, and inform about its use of missiles to assassinate terrorist leaders in a hostile environment. Yes, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) live-tweeted its self-described “widespread campaign on terror sites & operatives.” The result is striking in its bluntness.

November 15, 2012

It was inevitable as governments and the militants fighting governments became more adept at social media that they’d end up using Twitter and YouTube against each other. The problem is that in the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, the very real war can come across as farcical on Twitter, as the two sides go at each other.

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