Social media, including Twitter, Facebook, Diggit, live video, texting, bloggers, websites, My Space, and other outlets, now focus on the power of mass protests to rally together to topple governments and spread messages to fellow countrymen, and ultimately tell their story to the rest of the world.

Search #endSH on Twitter today, June 20, and you will find a flood of tweets from men and women in Egypt and elsewhere in the region bemoaning and berating the prevalence of sexual harassment in Egypt's streets – and crowdsourcing ways to combat it.

CPD Director Philip Seib was quoted in The Christian Post regarding the use of social media in the Middle East.

This is AFRICOM's remarkable activity. For the first time, we are seeing a regional command from a foreign country engaging in dialogue with African states. This is an attempt to undertake a certain kind of public diplomacy, to see the idea that at the end of the day, AFRICOM is not a tool for domination.

President Barack Obama’s latest speech on the Middle... generated a shrug from a region that is neither looking to Washington for leadership nor particularly convinced this American president has much to offer. Most of all, the public does not see the radical break in American foreign policy...

The campaign is perhaps the largest and most genuinely grass-roots campaign by Saudi women to demand one of the many rights they are denied in this country, which severely restricts female independence.

With support from the Israeli Ministry of Education, the Abraham Fund’s Language as a Cultural Bridge program is paving the way toward mandatory Arabic classes for all Jewish students in public schools.

Turkey is the topic of interest: meetings are being held to discuss it, and writers, journalists, bloggers and even tweeters write incessantly about the lessons the Turkish model holds for Egypt at this crucial juncture while the country readies for a democratic transformation following the great uprising...