Speaker 1:  Thank you so much for that insight [???].  I would like to exercise my privilege as a moderator to ask the first question.  In your speech you did not mention the word per se the public diplomacy or transformative diplomacy and [???] words, but you actually alluded to that a lot mentioning President Obama’s [???] speech and the initiative by his secretary and by the special envoy to the Middle East, yet we don’t see a sharp decrease in Anti-Americanism in the Middle East yet.  In Turkey we saw improvements, progress after secretary’s Clinton’s visit and after President Obama’s visit, but Turkey is much better anchored into the west than other Middle Eastern countries.  How soon do you think we could expect a real progress, a sharp degrees in Anti-Americanism among Middle Eastern societies?

Speaker 2: Well I hope that we are not going to see an increase in Anti-Americanism, but an understanding that a new American foreign policy towards the Middle East can be something that will benefit all sides.  It is a not a [???] some gain where we lose and other countries win or other countries lose and we win.  We are talking as the President said in his inaugural speech about mutual interests, shared interests, which we approach on a basis of mutual respect.  Now you mentioned transformational diplomacy.  If transformational diplomacy means as you sometimes felt during the Bush administration that the United States is the nanny to the world and goes around telling people how to improve their domestic situation so that there could be more like the United States, I think that is a sure recipe for causing anti-Americanism.  Of course the publics  in many of these countries want to see changes in their domestic situation, but they don’t want to have changed in imposed from outside and any changes that are really going to be successful and long lasting have to come organically from within those countries and the best thing the United States can do is to be a good example and to be encouraging to people who are moving in the direction of positive change, but to get out of the business of trying to micromanage the tactics and the pace of change on very, very sensitive domestic issues, I don’t think that is appropriate for our government, I think we have failed in the past when we have gone in that direction and I hope that we won’t see a return to that.  So as far as our public diplomacy is concerned I have to give a lot of credit for some of the public statements that have been made by the President, by the secretary of state, by the secretary of defense and hope we get away from the kind of statements that had been made in earlier periods and not simply the Obama administration or the Clinton administration before that.  When you had a feeling that the United States knew best and that everybody had to do things out of way.

Speaker 1: Thank you.  If there are different questions, if you could please stand up and give your affiliations.

Speaker 3: [???] graduate student, University of Maryland.  You mentioned that the Obama administration is expected and by all signals also very likely to take hands on approach on the Israel and Palestinian issue.  Now it is obvious that the big part of that would be to have these rallies stopped, if not reversed building the settlements.  That combined with the fact that now in Israel we have what could be one of the most *hawkish governments in recent memory, isn’t Washington primed for you know, for a clash with Jerusalem and in such case would Obama or the Obama administration be able to resist internal pressure from the public action committees. Thank you.