Dozens of disappointing Pew polls later, with the United States government having earmarked vast sums of money for public diplomacy, you have to wonder whether Washington hasn’t run up a blind alley in its desire to be popular among Arabs.

The delegates arrived from all over the world including Denmark, Sweden, Turkey and Australia, to take part in the New Media & Public Diplomacy Seminar at Ariel University in Samaria. Their formal goal is to “gain a better understanding of how public diplomacy shapes the Middle East conflict,” but they are also counting on having a lot of fun.

The American embassy in Cairo’s response to Tuesday’s attacks in Egypt and Libya have raised new questions about the role of social media in diplomacy... “How do you govern in an era when Twitter is faster than the CIA?” said Philip Seib, author of the book “Real-Time Diplomacy: Politics and Power in the Social Media Era”.

In today’s globally connected world, there is a great need to establish cooperative relationships and promote a shared sense of humanity. The United States can lead in this effort by supporting a growing segment of its own population - young Muslim Americans.

We should pursue a strategy of diplomatic engagement by inviting as many nations as possible to set shop in Kuwait...With that, we should work hard to establish satellite offices and coordination bureaus of international governmental and non-governmental organizations here in Kuwait bringing in a great number of diplomats as possible.

Scientific and technical knowledge is important in water negotiations, but not in the ways it has often been used. It is counterproductive to use scientific information to justify arbitrary (political) decisions...There is a difference between knowledge of water as an innate object and knowledge of water as a multifaceted resource.

The "zero problems" policy was founded upon two main premises: that trade and economic development would push long-festering ideological and security conflicts aside, and that Turkey's historical and cultural legacy is a soft-power asset, not a liability.

"The use of this public diplomacy on the part of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his defence minister aims to obtain a clearer commitment by the United States to attack if Iran continues its nuclear programme, or at least to give Israel the green light to do so," he told AFP.