The events from Tunisia and Egypt to Yemen and now Libya also shined a spotlight on Al Jazeera, as the Qatar-based news network used its well-positioned reporters to garner scoops and become, almost overnight, a new must-view for millions of global citizens interested in the big Middle East story.

The international community moved to isolate Libya further on Wednesday, with France pressing for European Union sanctions and Peru severing relations against Moammar Gadhafi's government after the U.N. Security Council condemned his crackdown on government protesters.

Calling it “the most successful project in the Jewish world,” Israel’s Minister of Public Diplomacy and Diaspora Affairs Yuli Edelstein, who serves as chairman of Birthright-Taglit’s steering committee, hailed the new application figures. “We see Taglit-Birthright Israel turning into a real rite of passage for a majority of young Jews worldwide and we hope many more thousands will come to Israel.”

"New media and old media converge to become now media." That maxim, so persuasively articulated by 21st century public diplomacy guru Matt Armstrong, has now become real in a Voice of America Persian language television program called Parazit.

It is of course possible, and probably likely, that the Arab Spring of 2011 will fail, as other springs in the Middle East and elsewhere have never come to fruition. There would still be a case, for reasons of honor and duty, for the United States to try to help, to do the right thing, to stand with the opponents of tyranny, even if one thought them likely, even nearly certain, to fail.

The voanews.com website was back to normal when I checked. Using Google cache, I found the hacked version, work of the "Iranian Cyber Army," which apparently went after all VOA sites.

The demise of autocratic regimes, first in Tunisia and right after in Egypt, has triggered a broad debate that centers on the following question: Is the coming regime in Egypt, which carries a central importance for the Arab world, likely to resemble Turkey, or Iran?