Japan’s latest hostage crisis has exposed shortcomings in Japan’s public diplomacy and raises questions about the advice Prime Minister Shinzo Abe received in publicly announcing $200 million in humanitarian aid to help those displaced by conflict with the Islamic State group.

The UK and the Islamic Development Bank (IDB) have signed a new Memorandum of Understanding to help boost business opportunities and create jobs for thousands of women across the Middle East and North Africa.

Last week, the Jerusalem Post announced a new joint venture between the Israeli Prime Minister's office and StandWithUS, a nonprofit organization, aimed at training university students on how to use social media to educate the world about Israel. 

President Barack Obama asked Congress Tuesday to authorize military action against Islamic State extremists, saying the U.S. can defeat them without being “dragged into another ground war in the Middle East.”

Evidence from the Middle East suggests a mixed record of benefits and challenges to American higher education arising out of the recent trend in creating branch and satellite campuses. (...) This projection of "soft power" as a tool of public diplomacy is particularly resonant in a region of the world where the impact of United States policy has, on occasion, been perceived as far from benign.

In a world in which diplomacy has expanded from government-to-government contacts into public and cultural diplomacy, and in which nations are ranked as much for their performance in high-profile international tournaments as on other attributes, autocratic abuse of sports and its impact on football, including performance, is nowhere more prevalent than in the Middle East and North Africa. 

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe warned on Saturday that the world would suffer an “immeasurable loss” if terrorism spreads in the Middle East and pledged about $200 million in non-military assistance for countries battling Islamic State.