Al Jazeera helped overthrow Hosni Mubarak,...and has now turned against its onetime ally Syria. The victory over Libya—won in part with Qatari money and weapons and fighters, in addition to the soft power of Al Jazeera—may have been the crowning touch.

Americans are not often heroes in the Arab world, but as nonstop celebrations unfold here in the Libyan capital I keep running into ordinary people who learn where I’m from and then fervently repeat variants of the same phrase: “Thank you, America!”

Running a center for public diplomacy is good news per se, since it means further attention towards the global public opinion and the image Iran is creating of itself for the international community. Public diplomacy is the ‘soft’ tool...

Staff members in Israeli missions worldwide are learning how to bolster their messages on the internet and social networks in preparation for September's UN vote on the Palestinian statehood bid...some 60 staff members of embassies in Europe and representatives of Jewish organizations are taking part in a seminar in Brussels which trains them on the combination between public diplomacy and online media.

THE mass media, including interactive social-networking tools, make you passive, can sap your initiative, leave you content to watch the spectacle of life from your couch or smartphone. Apparently even during a revolution. That is the provocative thesis of a new paper by Navid Hassanpour, a political science graduate student at Yale, titled “Media Disruption Exacerbates Revolutionary Unrest.”

China has “always supported the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people to establish an independent state” on all of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and in Israeli-annexed east Jerusalem, WAFA quoted Hu as saying.

PD is difficult because it’s not simply about the relationship between two countries; the content and prospects for PD activities are often about third countries. The need for messages to balance the requirements of different relationships makes them less persuasive....

Barack Obama has not faced the continuing revolutions in the Arab world with any passion...Yet change has come, and whether Mr Obama likes it or not this will alter Middle Eastern attitudes toward the United States.