The causes of these demonstrations are not some act of Islamophobia but the agitation of revolutionary Islamist groups that work systematically every day to build anti-Americanism, hatred of the West, and the loathing of Jews and Christians.

The Pew Research Center is out with a new poll on American reactions to last week’s attacks on the U.S. embassies in Cairo and Libya. Contrary to speculation that the attacks would hurt President Obama politically—speculation that likened Obama to Jimmy Carter and the Iranian hostage crisis–Pew’s results suggest that at least among people following the story—the attacks have done more to hurt Governor Romney.

The notorious tweet reaffirming a statement that condemned "the continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims" has been deleted by the U.S. Embassy in Cairo, but the incident raises a question that lingers: Is blasting out 140-character messages on Twitter a good way to conduct diplomacy, given the political, and even mortal, risks?

“The death of U.S. public diplomacy” was how one Twitter user last Tuesday described the now-infamous apology from the U.S. embassy in Cairo for the ill-conceived movie Innocence of Muslims. Strong words, but there is no doubt about it: The need for American public diplomacy in the Middle East needs to be rebooted and rethought. But how?

On the heels of Tuesday's deadly attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, protesters took to the streets of Tripoli to offer condolences for the death of U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and express their disapproval of the protests against a film that demonstrators deemed blasphemous to the Prophet Muhammad.

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 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”.

First of all, after the end of the Cold war, public opinion research demonstrates that in both countries the perception of the other side as an enemy decreased; in the United States it remains pretty stable, and the majority of Americans do not perceive Russia as a Cold-war-style adversary.