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Immigration is the movement of people living in one country into another and is a key part of human history. Learn more about the Immigration Act of 1965, tenements and other immigration facts.

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Why has it been so hard for Washington to fix our country's broken immigration system?

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Table of Contents

1. Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965

2. Immediate Impact

3. Continuing Source of Debate

4. Immigration in the 21st Century

The Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965, also known as the Hart-Celler Act, abolished an earlier quota system based on national origin and established a new immigration policy based on reuniting immigrant families and attracting skilled labor to the United States. Over the next four decades, the policies put into effect in 1965 would greatly change the demographic makeup of the American population, as immigrants entering the United States under the new legislation came increasingly from countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America, as opposed to Europe.

Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965

By the early 1960s, calls to reform U.S. immigration policy had mounted, thanks in no small part to the growing strength of the civil rights movement. At the time, immigration was based on the national-origins quota system in place since the 1920s, under which each nationality was assigned a quota based on its representation in past U.S. census figures. The civil rights movement's focus on equal treatment regardless of race or nationality led many to view the quota system as backward and discriminatory. In particular, Greeks, Poles, Portuguese and Italians-of whom increasing numbers were seeking to enter the U.S.-claimed that the quota system discriminated against them in favor of Northern Europeans. President John F. Kennedy even took up the immigration reform cause, giving a speech in June 1963 calling the quota system "intolerable."

Did you know? A report in early 2009 by the DHS's Office of Immigration Statistics estimated the number of "unauthorized immigrants" in the United States at 10.7 million, down from 11.6 million in 2008. The recent decline in immigration coincided with the economic downturn in the U.S., but figures were still up from 2000, when illegal immigrants numbered some 8.5 million.

After Kennedy's assassination that November, Congress began debating and would eventually pass the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965, co-sponsored by Representative Emanuel Celler of New York and Senator Philip Hart of Michigan and heavily supported by the late president's brother, Senator Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts. During Congressional debates, a number of experts testified that little would effectively change under the reformed legislation, and it was seen more as a matter of principle to have a more open policy. Indeed, on signing the act into law in October 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson stated that the act "is not a revolutionary bill. It does not affect the lives of millions....It will not reshape the structure of our daily lives or add importantly to either our wealth or our power."

Immediate Impact

In reality (and with the benefit of hindsight), the bill signed in 1965 marked a dramatic break with past immigration policy, and would have an immediate and lasting impact. In place of the national-origins quota system, the act provided for preferences to be made according to categories, such as relatives of U.S. citizens or permanent residents, those with skills deemed useful to the United States or refugees of violence or unrest. Though it abolished quotas per se, the system did place caps on per-country and total immigration, as well as caps on each category. As in the past, family reunification was a major goal, and the new immigration policy would increasingly allow entire families to uproot themselves from other countries and reestablish their lives in the U.S.

In the first five years after the bill's passage, immigration to the U.S. from Asian countries-especially those fleeing war-torn Southeast Asia (Vietnam, Cambodia)-would more than quadruple. (Under past immigration policies, Asian immigrants had been effectively barred from entry.) Other Cold War-era conflicts during the 1960s and 1970s saw millions of people fleeing poverty or the hardships of communist regimes in Cuba, Eastern Europe and elsewhere to seek their fortune on American shores. All told, in the three decades following passage of the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965, more than 18 million legal immigrants entered the United States, more than three times the number admitted over the preceding 30 years.

By the end of the 20th century, the policies put into effect by the Immigration Act of 1965 had greatly changed the face of the American population. Whereas in the 1950s, more than half of all immigrants were Europeans and just 6 percent were Asians, by the 1990s only 16 percent were Europeans and 31 percent were of Asian descent, while the percentages of Latino and African immigrants had also jumped significantly. Between 1965 and 2000, the highest number of immigrants (4.3 million) to the U.S. came from Mexico, in addition to some 1.4 million from the Philippines. Korea, the Dominican Republic, India, Cuba and Vietnam were also leading sources of immigrants, each sending between 700,000 and 800,000 over this period.

Continuing Source of Debate

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, illegal immigration was a constant source of political debate, as immigrants continue to pour into the United States, mostly by land routes through Canada and Mexico. The Immigration Reform Act in 1986 attempted to address the issue by providing better enforcement of immigration policies and creating more possibilities to seek legal immigration. The act included two amnesty programs for unauthorized aliens, and collectively granted amnesty to more than 3 million illegal aliens. Another piece of immigration legislation, the 1990 Immigration Act, modified and expanded the 1965 act, increasing the total level of immigration to 700,000. The law also provided for the admission of immigrants from "underrepresented" countries to increase the diversity of the immigrant flow.

The economic recession that hit the country in the early 1990s was accompanied by a resurgence of anti-immigrant feeling, including among lower-income Americans competing for jobs with immigrants willing to work for lower wages. In 1996, Congress passed the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, which addressed border enforcement and the use of social programs by immigrants.

Immigration in the 21st Century

In the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the Homeland Security Act of 2002 created the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which took over many immigration service and enforcement functions formerly performed by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). With some modifications, the policies put into place by the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965 are the same ones governing U.S. immigration in the early 21st century. Non-citizens currently enter the United States lawfully in one of two ways, either by receiving either temporary (non-immigrant) admission or permanent (immigrant) admission. A member of the latter category is classified as a lawful permanent resident, and receives a green card granting them eligibility to work in the United States and to eventually apply for citizenship.

There could be perhaps no greater reflection of the impact of immigration than the 2008 election of Barack Obama, the son of a Kenyan father and an American mother (from Kansas), as the nation's first African-American president. Eighty-five percent white in 1965, the nation's population was one-third minority in 2009 and is on track for a nonwhite majority by 2042.

Fact Check

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U.S. Immigration Since 1965 - Impact, Results & Summary

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The Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965, also known as the Hart-Celler Act, abolished an earlier quota system based on national origin and established a new immigration policy based on reuniting immigrant families and attracting skilled labor to the United States.

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Contents

1. Immigration in the Colonial Era

2. Immigration in the Mid-19th Century

3. Ellis Island and Federal Immigration Regulation

4. European Immigration: 1880-1920

5. The Bracero Program

6. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965

7. PHOTO GALLERIES

The United States experienced major waves of immigration during the colonial era, the first part of the 19th century and from the 1880s to 1920. Many immigrants came to America seeking greater economic opportunity, while some, such as the Pilgrims in the early 1600s, arrived in search of religious freedom. From the 17th to 19th centuries, hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans came to America against their will. The first significant federal legislation restricting immigration was the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. Individual states regulated immigration prior to the 1892 opening of Ellis Island, the country's first federal immigration station. New laws in 1965 ended the quota system that favored European immigrants, and today, the majority of the country's immigrants hail from Asia and Latin America.
WATCH: America: Promised Land on HISTORY Vault
Immigration in the Colonial Era

From its earliest days, America has been a nation of immigrants, starting with its original inhabitants, who crossed the land bridge connecting Asia and North America tens of thousands of years ago. By the 1500s, the first Europeans, led by the Spanish and French, had begun establishing settlements in what would become the United States. In 1607, the English founded their first permanent settlement in present-day America at Jamestown in the Virginia Colony.

Did you know? On January 1, 1892, Annie Moore, a teenager from County Cork, Ireland, was the first immigrant processed at Ellis Island. She had made the nearly two-week journey across the Atlantic Ocean in steerage with her two younger brothers. Annie later raised a family on New York City's Lower East Side.

Some of America's first settlers came in search of freedom to practice their faith. In 1620, a group of roughly 100 people later known as the Pilgrims fled religious persecution in Europe and arrived at present-day Plymouth, Massachusetts, where they established a colony. They were soon followed by a larger group seeking religious freedom, the Puritans, who established the Massachusetts Bay Colony. By some estimates, 20,000 Puritans migrated to the region between 1630 and 1640.

A larger share of immigrants came to America seeking economic opportunities. However, because the price of passage was steep, an estimated one-half or more of the white Europeans who made the voyage did so by becoming indentured servants. Although some people voluntarily indentured themselves, others were kidnapped in European cities and forced into servitude in America. Additionally, thousands of English convicts were shipped across the Atlantic as indentured servants.

Another group of immigrants who arrived against their will during the colonial period were enslaved people from West Africa. The earliest records of slavery in America include a group of approximately 20 Africans who were forced into indentured servitude in Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619. By 1680, there were some 7,000 Africans in the American colonies, a number that ballooned to 700,000 by 1790, according to some estimates. Congress outlawed the importation of enslaved people to the United States as of 1808, but the practice continued. The U.S. Civil War (1861-1865) resulted in the emancipation of approximately 4 million enslaved people. Although the exact numbers will never be known, it is believed that 500,000 to 650,000 Africans were brought to America and sold into slavery between the 17th and 19th centuries.

Immigration in the Mid-19th Century

Another major wave of immigration occurred from around 1815 to 1865. The majority of these newcomers hailed from Northern and Western Europe. Approximately one-third came from Ireland, which experienced a massive famine in the mid-19th century. In the 1840s, almost half of America's immigrants were from Ireland alone. Typically impoverished, these Irish immigrants settled near their point of arrival in cities along the East Coast. Between 1820 and 1930, some 4.5 million Irish migrated to the United States.

Also in the 19th century, the United States received some 5 million German immigrants. Many of them journeyed to the present-day Midwest to buy farms or congregated in such cities as Milwaukee, St. Louis and Cincinnati. In the national census of 2000, more Americans claimed German ancestry than any other group.

During the mid-1800s, a significant number of Asian immigrants settled in the United States. Lured by news of the California gold rush, some 25,000 Chinese had migrated there by the early 1850s.

The influx of newcomers resulted in anti-immigrant sentiment among certain factions of America's native-born, predominantly Anglo-Saxon Protestant population. The new arrivals were often seen as unwanted competition for jobs, while many Catholics-especially the Irish-experienced discrimination for their religious beliefs. In the 1850s, the anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic American Party (also called the Know-Nothings) tried to severely curb immigration, and even ran a candidate, former U.S. president Millard Fillmore (1800-1874), in the presidential election of 1856.

Following the Civil War, the United States experienced a depression in the 1870s that contributed to a slowdown in immigration.

Ellis Island and Federal Immigration Regulation

One of the first significant pieces of federal legislation aimed at restricting immigration was the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which banned Chinese laborers from coming to America. Californians had agitated for the new law, blaming the Chinese, who were willing to work for less, for a decline in wages.

For much of the 1800s, the federal government had left immigration policy to individual states. However, by the final decade of the century, the government decided it needed to step in to handle the ever-increasing influx of newcomers. In 1890, President Benjamin Harrison (1833-1901) designated Ellis Island, located in New York Harbor near the Statue of Liberty, as a federal immigration station. More than 12 million immigrants entered the United States through Ellis Island during its years of operation from 1892 to 1954.

European Immigration: 1880-1920

Between 1880 and 1920, a time of rapid industrialization and urbanization, America received more than 20 million immigrants. Beginning in the 1890s, the majority of arrivals were from Central, Eastern and Southern Europe. In that decade alone, some 600,000 Italians migrated to America, and by 1920 more than 4 million had entered the United States. Jews from Eastern Europe fleeing religious persecution also arrived in large numbers; over 2 million entered the United States between 1880 and 1920.

The peak year for admission of new immigrants was 1907, when approximately 1.3 million people entered the country legally. Within a decade, the outbreak of World War I (1914-1918) caused a decline in immigration. In 1917, Congress enacted legislation requiring immigrants over 16 to pass a literacy test, and in the early 1920s immigration quotas were established. The Immigration Act of 1924 created a quota system that restricted entry to 2 percent of the total number of people of each nationality in America as of the 1890 national census-a system that favored immigrants from Western Europe-and prohibited immigrants from Asia.

The Bracero Program

The Bracero Program was a series of diplomatic accords between Mexico and the United States signed in 1942 that brought millions of Mexican immigrants to the United States to work on short-term agricultural labor contracts. From 1942 to 1964, 4.6 million contracts were signed - making it the largest U.S. contract labor program to date.

The program also addressed Depression-era deportations and brought many Mexican Americans, who were largely targeted for deportation at the time, back to the states.

The program was criticized because workers often faced discrimination, harsh working conditions, and had virtually no job security. Once their contracts expired, some Braceros returned home with little money because of debts incurred to the stores located in employer-operated housing camps, while others stayed in the United States illegally and sought additional work.

The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965

Immigration plummeted during the global depression of the 1930s and World War II (1939-1945). Between 1930 and 1950, America's foreign-born population decreased from 14.2 to 10.3 million, or from 11.6 to 6.9 percent of the total population, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. After the war, Congress passed special legislation enabling refugees from Europe and the Soviet Union to enter the United States. Following the communist revolution in Cuba in 1959, hundreds of thousands of refugees from that island nation also gained admittance to the United States.

In 1965, Congress passed the Immigration and Nationality Act, which did away with quotas based on nationality and allowed Americans to sponsor relatives from their countries of origin. As a result of this act and subsequent legislation, the nation experienced a shift in immigration patterns. Today, the majority of U.S. immigrants come from Asia and Latin America rather than Europe.

PHOTO GALLERIES

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Immigration in the Colonial Era Immigration in the Mid-19th Century Ellis Island and Federal Immigration Regulation European Immigration: 1880-1920 The Bracero Program The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 PHOTO GALLERIES The United States experienced major waves of immigration during the colonial era, the first part of the 19th century and from the 1880s to 1920.

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U.S. Immigration Timeline: Definition & Reform - HISTORY

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A timeline of U.S. immigration shows how, from the 1600s to today, the United States became a nation of people from hundreds of cultures, languages and beliefs.

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Before your naturalization interview, study for the English and civics test by using our free resources to help you prepare.
English Test Overview
For the English portion of the naturalization test you must demonstrate an understanding of the English language, including the ability to read, write, and speak basic English.

Your ability to speak and understand English will be determined by a USCIS officer during your eligibility interview on Form N-400, Application for Naturalization.

For the reading test, you must read out loud one out of three sentences correctly to demonstrate an ability to read in English.

For the writing test, you must write one out of three sentences correctly to demonstrate an ability to write in English.

Civics Test (2008 Version)
The civics portion of the naturalization test is an oral test. The USCIS officer will ask you up to 10 questions from the list of 100 civics test questions. You must answer 6 questions correctly to pass the civics test.

For more information, refer to the USCIS Policy Manual Volume 12, Part E, English and Civics Testing and Exceptions, Chapter 2, English and Civics Testing
65/20 Special Consideration
If you are 65 years old or older and have been living in the United States as a lawful permanent resident of the United States for 20 or more years, you may study just the 20 questions that have been marked with an asterisk (*). You may also take the naturalization test in the language of your choice. For more information, see exceptions and accommodations or the USCIS Policy Manual Citizenship and Naturalization Guidance.

Note: On the naturalization test, some answers may change because of elections or appointments. You must answer the question with the name of the official serving at the time of your naturalization interview. For the answers to these specific questions, please visit the Civics Test Updates page.

Sign up to receive Citizenship Resource Center email updates.

Search below for civics flash cards, interactive practice tests, study booklets, videos and more. You may purchase USCIS products and publications from the U.S. Government Bookstore.

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Before your naturalization interview, study for the English and civics test by using our free resources to help you prepare. English Test Overview For the Engli

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Newsela | Issue Overview: Immigration reform

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The Economics of Immigration: Crash Course Econ #33

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FCC Research Guides: English Resource Guide for Instructors (EN101): They Say I Say Resources

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Use this guide to access support materials related to They Say - I Say (campus sections) and Everything's an Argument (online and Dual Enrollment sections) Content arranged by chapters in the text.

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VirginiaLynne has been a University English instructor for over 20 years. She specializes in helping people write essays faster and easier.

BBC News: Reliable source for international news. At the bottom of the home page, you can search by country. You can also search by topic.

New York Times: Excellent detailed articles which give interesting information and links to other sources. Particularly good for topics about the United States.

CNN News: Good for news articles and videos in the United States and internationally.

Discover Magazine: News and links to original research articles on Science topics.

Global Issues: Information and links for many different world topics. Click on a topic to find links to research articles.

CNN blog post by Janet Fleischman argues that the international outcry about the abduction of the schoolgirls in Nigeria should be a reminder that the United States and other nations need to focus on policy changes which promote women's issues and rights.

International Comparison Program data report on the comparison of the size of World Economies.

1. What current ideas are scientists researching to eliminate the problem of malaria?

2. How is light being used to treat cancer and other diseases?

3. Can 3-D printing be used for creating artificial hips and knees for joint replacement?

4. How can looking at how the human brain functions help scientists create a better computer?

5. Scientists have been observing theevolution of a stick insect in California into two different species. What is the best current scientific evidence supporting and explaining the process of the evolution of species?

6. Experts are warning that the deep ocean is being damaged by fishing, mining, and industry. What is the damage being done? Why is this important?

7. Are the new techniques for mining natural gas going to be better or worse for the environment? What is the danger of fracking?

8. What is the current evidence that impact from comets or asteroids has significantly impacted the weather and ecology of the earth?

9. What is the current evidence that Mars has had water and maybe life?

10. What is the current genetic and fossil evidence that chickens, dogs, and other domestic animals were much different even a few hundred years ago? How have humans bred domestic animals to be different from their original wild counterparts?

11. Is Global Warming or climate change something that humans can do something about?

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100 Current Events Research Paper Topics with Research Links

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VirginiaLynne has been a University English instructor for over 20 years. She specializes in helping people write essays faster and easier. BBC News : Reliable source for international news. At the bottom of the home page, you can search by country. You can also search by topic.

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Day 5: Research Paper Proposal - Topic Guideline Worksheet

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Day 5: Research Paper Proposal - Topic Guideline Worksheet

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Research Paper Proposal - Topic Guideline Worksheet.doc

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Day 1: Annotated Bibliography #1 Assignment

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Day 1: Annotated Bibliography #1 Assignment

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Complicit No More: How We Heal America’s Racism Wounds

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Complicit No More: How We Heal America’s Racism Wounds

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There's a lyric in TV on the Radio's latest album Seeds that posits, "revolution, evolution / Rolling back the status quo / How the pace of evolution / Often seems a little slow." Which is to say: isn't it frustrating how often it feels that little steps in social revolution take as long as generational human evolution? The pace in which changes happen in society is slow and often tedious at best. Mostly this comes from a lack of clear understanding as to what needs to be done - which goes doubly for the heated state of race relations in America today. But now it's more clear than ever: white people, it's time to step up. We're the ones that have to change.

Last year, Chris Rock preached as much in his recent conversations with both The New Yorker and The Hollywood Reporter. The world we live in was made for white people. And he's not alone in seeing this: All of this has been abundantly clear to many people who aren't white for awhile. Recently, MTV premiered a documentary from Jose Antonio Vargas titled White People that attempted to tackled the complicit role the longstanding ruling race has in ignoring the plights of those they cannot see or know on a personal level. (Far from an easy task - and certainly not something that's even surface-scratched in a 41-minute long documentary.) It's a conversation that's incredibly polarizing, but brings to light the inherent bias that comes with being white - and how it's our responsibility, white people, to change that.

Biases are difficult to understand - sometimes they're even impossible to see because they're so entrenched in how a society or community operates. It's easy to poo-poo something as just "the way things are," without looking at the ramifications of those things. And white people, especially, live in this weird labyrinth of rationalization, quick to take the discussion and questions that come out of racism incredibly personally while simultaneously disassociating themselves from the racism at hand. "I didn't own slaves," "I don't do this," "I don't do that."

It's not hard to see why: privilege in all its forms - but white privilege specifically - has a dual existence: it is at once bigger than all of us, but something all us paler folks participate in (sometimes through no fault of our own), knowingly or otherwise. At one point during White People, a young man notes that we cannot help how we are born - a sentiment so simple and yet blistering in its reality: none of us, not a single human being on this planet, can help how we were born, be it our race, gender, sexuality, or otherwise. And yet still we find reasons to judge or degrade or base our acceptance of people on these genetically unavoidable things. We rail against acceptance because we don't want to admit the way in which we exist now - perhaps through no direct fault of our own - is detrimental to other people.

This is why racism is so hard to battle. We (white people) by and large see it not as a societal issue, but one based in time. We see racism as something that was happening or, if people are currently racist, those "others" are actively participating in and aware of when, really, that isn't the case in a lot of scenarios. The privilege bestowed upon us based on what we were born as - coupled with the current societal climate - also contributes to racism whether we're aware of it or not. Growing up with members of my family who are not my same race has given me insights into this not as easily had by others.

There is a natural inclination in ALL animals to be wary of that which is foreign: it's a fight or flight mechanism so intrinsic in all of us animals in order to survive. When coupled with the more evolved nature of being human - we create societies, communities, systems of operating that are pretty advance and complicated - it creates a disorienting web of implicated and learned behaviors and/or ideas about those things we do not know (inherently or otherwise) and how we react to them. This is, on the basest level, from which any bigotry stems.

And the social structures that allow such behaviors to contribute to how we all think about certain races, genders, sexualities, abilities, behaviors, etc? Let's call these doings hidden biases and privileges. These hidden, embedded actions and privileges are real - even if you don't recognize them for what they are. And here's the important thing to understand - and where so many of the issues and tensions come from - it doesn't make you a bad person if you don't see them. We all have blind spots and ignorances, we all have things we need to learn, be it math or spelling or how what we do affects others: but once they're brought to your attention, the real, humbling work is in accepting them. That doesn't make you a bad person for admitting things aren't great, it makes you an empathetic one willing to work. And we all have work to do.

This is where humility and empathy are key - and, yes/sorry, white people, but this one is on us: we have to accept that yes, racism is real and happening now - and sometimes it's not so much a frame of mind or active set of behaviors. But in order to evolve past these things, we have to actively look at social structures, institutions, mindsets, and even passing comments/jokes and see what they really imply. How they hurt, how they're harmful. Because one of the biggest things I saw in White People was fear: fear of change, fear of the unknown, fear that admitting an unintended complicity makes you a capital-R racist. It doesn't mean that - not always - because active hate is another breed of thing, and there are many ways in which racism exists. But to say that's the only way racism exists ignores the myriad ways in which our current societal system breeds, and continues to proliferate, bigoted behaviors in communities and individuals.

It's about more than apologizing and saying, "yes, this is real." It's about white people standing up and saying, "OK, this one's on us. And we're going to accept responsibility for our privilege and be the adult that is required of us in nuanced and complicated situations, and do what's right to fix this. We're going to listen, we're going to learn, we're going to see outside of ourselves. Because 'the way things are' isn't good enough anymore." Humans are better than that - so let's move beyond it. It's like Chris Rock said in his New York Magazine interview in 2014, "Yeah, it's unfair that you can get judged by something you didn't do," but that's exactly what happens to black people (and Mexicans, and Chinese, and women, and transgender people, and the list goes on and on) ALL THE TIME. But that judgement? That's what we have to battle.

I'm heartened by young folks every day: yours are mindsets more evolved on all of these things, but behaviors can still be learned that are harmful. The detriments of how we, or our social systems, operate aren't always crystal clear - in fact in most cases they're not all that easy to see at all. But that's why we have to be the rising tide: we have to lift each other up by listening, and learning, and taking to heart that some of this stuff isn't personal even when it might feel that way. We're going slow so we can lift all boats and not leave anyone behind. This isn't about us versus them, countries or communities pitted against one another: we're all human beings and we have to start operating that way, and living with each other beyond the constructs and confines we've created for ourselves. Ignorance isn't bliss anymore.

-
Alicia Lutes is the Associate Editor of Smart Girls. Find her on Twitter @alicialutes.
Image Credit: KlairedeLys/deviantART

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Complicit No More: How We Heal America's Racism Wounds

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There's a lyric in TV on the Radio's latest album Seeds that posits, "revolution, evolution / Rolling back the status quo / How the pace of evolution / Often seems a little slow." Which is to say: isn't it frustrating how often it feels that little steps in social revolution take as long as generational human evolution?

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Day 10: “Losing
the ‘War’” by Reza Aslan

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Day 10: “Losing
the ‘War’” by Reza Aslan

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Today's guest post is from Daily Beast blogger and author of How to Win A Cosmic War: God, Globalization, and the War on Terror Reza Aslan. If you'd like to learn more about his new book, see the interview posted today by Editor-and-Chief of Shahed Amanullah. Later this month, Dr. Aslan will return as a guest on Inside Islam's radio series to be interviewed by host Jean Feraca. Feel free to comment at the end of today's guest post, or send us an email with your thoughts for Reza before the radio broadcast on May 13 (3 pm CT). Jean may read your comments on the air.

Dr. Aslan's earlier appearances on Inside Islam are available through the links below, followed by his guest post.

Losing the 'war on terror'
by Dr. Reza Aslan
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton let slip last week that the Obama administration has finally abandoned the phrase "war on terror." Its absence had been noted by commentators. There was no directive, Clinton said, "it's just not being used."

It may seem a trivial thing, but the change in rhetoric marks a significant turning point in the ideological contest with radical Islam. That is because the war on terror has always been a conflict more rhetorical than real. There is, of course, a very real, very bloody military component in the struggle against extremist forces in the Muslim world, though one can argue whether the U.S. and allied engagements in Iraq, Afghanistan and beyond are an integral part of that struggle, a distraction from it or, worse, evidence of its subversion and failure. But to the extent that the war on terror has been posited, from the start, as a war of ideology - a clash of civilizations - it is a rhetorical war, one fought more constructively with words and ideas than with guns and bombs.

The truth is that the phrase "war on terror" has always been problematic, not just because "terror," "terrorism" and "terrorist" are wastebasket terms that often convey as much about the person using them as they do about the events or people being described, but because this was never meant to be a war against terrorism per se. If it were, it would have involved the Basque separatists in Spain, the Hindu/Marxist Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, the Maoist rebels in eastern India, Israeli ultranationalists, the Kurdish PKK, remnants of the Irish Republican Army and the Sikh separatist movements, and so on.

Rather, the war on terror, as conceived of by the Bush administration, was targeted at a particular brand of terrorism - that employed exclusively by Islamic entities. Which is why the enemy in this ideological conflict was gradually and systematically expanded to include not just the people who attacked the U.S. on Sept. 11, 2001, and the organizations that supported them, but an ever-widening conspiracy of disparate groups, such as Hamas in Palestine, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, the clerical regime in Iran, the Sunni insurgency in Iraq, the Kashmiri militants, the Taliban and any other organization that declared itself Muslim and employed terrorism as a tactic.

According to the master narrative of the war on terror, these were a monolithic enemy with a common agenda and a shared ideology. Never mind that many of these groups consider one another to be a graver threat than they consider America, that they have vastly different and sometimes irreconcilable political yearnings and religious beliefs, and that, until the war on terror, many had never thought of the United States as an enemy. Give this imaginary monolith a made-up name - say, "Islamofascism" - and an easily recognizable enemy is created, one that exists not so much as a force to be defeated but as an idea to be opposed, one whose chief attribute appears to be that "they" are not "us."

By lumping together the disparate forces, movements, armies, ideas and grievances of the greater Muslim world, from Morocco to Malaysia; by placing them in a single category ("enemy"), assigning them a single identity ("terrorist"); and by countering them with a single strategy (war), the Bush administration seemed to be making a blatant statement that the war on terror was, in fact, "a war against Islam."

That is certainly how the conflict has been viewed by a majority in four major Muslim countries - Egypt, Morocco, Pakistan and Indonesia - in a worldpublicopinion.org poll in 2007. Nearly two-thirds of respondents said they believe that the purpose of the war on terror is to "spread Christianity in the region" of the Middle East.

Indeed, if the war on terror was meant to be an ideological battle against groups such as Al Qaeda for the hearts and minds of Muslims, the consensus around the globe seems to be that the battle has been lost.

A September 2008 BBC World Service survey of 23 countries, including Russia, Australia, Pakistan, Turkey, France, Germany, Britain, the U.S., China and Mexico, found that almost 60% of all respondents said the war on terror has either had no effect or that it has made Al Qaeda stronger. Forty-seven percent said they think that neither side was winning; 56% of Americans have that view.

It is time not just to abandon the phrase "war on terror" but to admit that the ideological struggle against radical Islam could never be won militarily. The battle for the hearts and minds of Muslims will take place not in the streets of Baghdad or in the mountains of Afghanistan but in the suburbs of Paris, the slums of East London and the cosmopolitan cities of Berlin and New York.

In the end, the most effective weapon in countering the appeal of groups such as Al Qaeda may be the words we use.
This article was originally published in The Los Angeles Times, and was posted here on Inside Islam with the author's permission.
How to Listen and Participate

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Today's guest post is from Daily Beast blogger and author of How to Win A Cosmic War: God, Globalization, and the War on Terror Reza Aslan. If you'd like to learn more about his new book, see the interview posted today by Editor-and-Chief of Shahed Amanullah.

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Day 7: “To
Any Would-Be Terrorist” by Naomi Shihab Nye

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Day 7: “To
Any Would-Be Terrorist” by Naomi Shihab Nye

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Islamic Studies, Islam, Arabic, and Religion website of Dr. Alan Godlas of the University of Georgia.

Letter from Naomi Shihab Nye, Arab-American Poet:

To Any Would-Be Terrorists

I am sorry I have to call you that, but I don't know how else to get your attention. I hate that word. Do you know how hard some of us have worked to get rid of that word, to deny its instant connection to the Middle East? And now look. Look what extra work we have. Not only did your colleagues kill thousands of innocent, international people in those buildings and scar their families forever, they wounded a huge community of people in the Middle East, in the United States and all over the world. If that's what they wanted to do, please know the mission was a terrible success, and you can stop now.

Because I feel a little closer to you than many Americans could possibly feel, or ever want to feel, I insist that you listen to me. Sit down and listen. I know what kinds of foods you like. I would feed them to you if you were right here, because it is very very important that you listen. I am humble in my country's pain and I am furious.

My Palestinian father became a refugee in 1948. He came to the United States as a college student. He is 74 years old now and still homesick. He has planted fig trees. He has invited all the Ethiopians in his neighborhood to fill their little paper sacks with his figs. He has written columns and stories saying the Arabs are not terrorists, he has worked all his life to defy that word. Arabs are businessmen and students and kind neighbors. There is no one like him and there are thousands like him - gentle Arab daddies who make everyone laugh around the dinner table, who have a hard time with headlines, who stand outside in the evenings with their hands in their pockets staring toward the far horizon.

I am sorry if you did not have a father like that. I wish everyone could have a father like that.

My hard-working American mother has spent 50 years trying to convince her fellow teachers and choir mates not to believe stereotypes about the Middle East. She always told them, there is a much larger story. If you knew the story, you would not jump to conclusions from what you see in the news. But now look at the news. What a mess has been made. Sometimes I wish everyone could have parents from different countries or ethnic groups so they would be forced to cross boundaries, to believe in mixtures, every day of their lives. Because this is what the world calls us to do. WAKE UP!

The Palestinian grocer in my Mexican-American neighborhood paints pictures of the Palestinian flag on his empty cartons. He paints trees and rivers. He gives his paintings away. He says, "Don't insult me" when I try to pay him for a lemonade. Arabs have always been famous for their generosity. Remember? My half-Arab brother with an Arabic name looks more like an Arab than many full-blooded Arabs do and he has to fly every week.

My Palestinian cousins in Texas have beautiful brown little boys. Many of them haven't gone to school yet. And now they have this heavy word to carry in their backpacks along with the weight of their papers and books. I repeat, the mission was a terrible success. But it was also a complete, total tragedy and I want you to think about a few things.

1. Many people, thousands of people, perhaps even millions of people, in the United States are very aware of the long unfairness of our country's policies regarding Israel and Palestine. We talk about this all the time. It exhausts us and we keep talking. We write letters to newspapers, to politicians, to each other. We speak out in public even when it is uncomfortable to do so, because that is our responsibility. Many of these people aren't even Arabs. Many happen to be Jews who are equally troubled by the inequity. I promise you this is true. Because I am Arab-American, people always express these views to me and I am amazed how many understand the intricate situation and have strong, caring feelings for Arabs and Palestinians even when they don't have to. Think of them, please: All those people who have been standing up for Arabs when they didn't have to. But as ordinary citizens we don't run the government and don't get to make all our government's policies, which makes us sad sometimes. We believe in the power of the word and we keep using it, even when it seems no one large enough is listening. That is one of the best things about this country: the free power of free words. Maybe we take it for granted too much. Many of the people killed in the World Trade Center probably believed in a free Palestine and were probably talking about it all the time.

But this tragedy could never help the Palestinians. Somehow, miraculously, if other people won't help them more, they are going to have to help themselves. And it will be peace, not violence, that fixes things. You could ask any one of the kids in the Seeds of Peace organization and they would tell you that. Do you ever talk to kids? Please, please, talk to more kids.

2. Have you noticed how many roads there are? Sure you have. You must check out maps and highways and small alternate routes just like anyone else. There is no way everyone on earth could travel on the same road, or believe in exactly the same religion. It would be too crowded, it would be dumb. I don't believe you want us all to be Muslims. My Palestinian grandmother lived to be 106 years old, and did not read or write, but even she was much smarter than that. The only place she ever went beyond Palestine and Jordan was to Mecca, by bus, and she was very proud to be called a Hajji and to wear white clothes afterwards. She worked very hard to get stains out of everyone's dresses -- scrubbing them with a stone. I think she would consider the recent tragedies a terrible stain on her religion and her whole part of the world. She would weep. She was scared of airplanes anyway. She wanted people to worship God in whatever ways they felt comfortable. Just worship. Just remember God in every single day and doing. It didn't matter what they called it. When people asked her how she felt about the peace talks that were happening right before she died, she puffed up like a proud little bird and said, in Arabic, "I never lost my peace inside." To her, Islam was a welcoming religion. After her home in Jerusalem was stolen from her, she lived in a small village that contained a Christian shrine. She felt very tender toward the people who would visit it. A Jewish professor tracked me down a few years ago in Jerusalem to tell me she changed his life after he went to her village to do an oral history project on Arabs. "Don't think she only mattered to you!" he said. "She gave me a whole different reality to imagine - yet it was amazing how close we became. Arabs could never be just a "project" after that."

Did you have a grandmother or two? Mine never wanted people to be pushed around. What did yours want? Reading about Islam since my grandmother died, I note the "tolerance" that was "typical of Islam" even in the old days. The Muslim leader Khalid ibn al-Walid signed a Jerusalem treaty which declared, "in the name of God, you have complete security for your churches which shall not be occupied by the Muslims or destroyed." It is the new millenium in which we should be even smarter than we used to be, right? But I think we have fallen behind.

3. Many Americans do not want to kill any more innocent people anywhere in the world. We are extremely worried about military actions killing innocent people. We didn't like this in Iraq, we never liked it anywhere. We would like no more violence, from us as well as from you. HEAR US! We would like to stop the terrifying wheel of violence, just stop it, right on the road, and find something more creative to do to fix these huge problems we have. Violence is not creative, it is stupid and scary and many of us hate all those terrible movies and TV shows made in our own country that try to pretend otherwise. Don't watch them. Everyone should stop watching them. An appetite for explosive sounds and toppling buildings is not a healthy thing for anyone in any country. The USA should apologize to the whole world for sending this trash out into the air and for paying people to make it.

But here's something good you may not know - one of the best-selling books of poetry in the United States in recent years is the Coleman Barks translation of Rumi, a mystical Sufi poet of the 13th century, and Sufism is Islam and doesn't that make you glad?

Everyone is talking about the suffering that ethnic Americans are going through. Many will no doubt go through more of it, but I would like to thank everyone who has sent me a consolation card. Americans are usually very kind people. Didn't your colleagues find that out during their time living here? It is hard to imagine they missed it. How could they do what they did, knowing that?

4. We will all die soon enough. Why not take the short time we have on this delicate planet and figure out some really interesting things we might do together? I promise you, God would be happier. So many people are always trying to speak for God - I know it is a very dangerous thing to do. I tried my whole life not to do it. But this one time is an exception. Because there are so many people crying and scarred and confused and complicated and exhausted right now - it is as if we have all had a giant simultaneous break-down. I beg you, as your distant Arab cousin, as your American neighbor, listen to me. Our hearts are broken, as yours may also feel broken in some ways we can't understand, unless you tell us in words. Killing people won't tell us. We can't read that message. Find another way to live. Don't expect others to be like you. Read Rumi. Read Arabic poetry. Poetry humanizes us in a way that news, or even religion, has a harder time doing. A great Arab scholar, Dr. Salma Jayyusi, said, "If we read one another, we won't kill one another." Read American poetry. Plant mint. Find a friend who is so different from you, you can't believe how much you have in common. Love them. Let them love you. Surprise people in gentle ways, as friends do. The rest of us will try harder too. Make our family proud.

naomi shihab nye

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Letter from Naomi Shihab Nye To Any Would-Be Terrorists

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Islamic Studies, Islam, Arabic, and Religion website of Dr. Alan Godlas of the University of Georgia. To Any Would-Be Terrorists I am sorry I have to call you that, but I don't know how else to get your attention. I hate that word.

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Day 7: John
Greene’s Islam, The Quran, & the Five Pillars

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Day 7: John
Greene’s Islam, The Quran, & the Five Pillars

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Islam, the Quran, and the Five Pillars All Without a Flamewar: Crash Course World History #13

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Day 6: “Globalization
Rocked the Ancient World Too” by Jared Diamond

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Day 6: “Globalization
Rocked the Ancient World Too” by Jared Diamond

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Spread of trade and culture -- even genetically modified food -- rocked the ancient world too

We tend to think of globalization as uniquely modern, a product of 20th century advances in transportation, technology, agriculture and communications. But widespread dispersal, from a few centers, of culture, language, political ideas and economic systems -- even genetically modified foods -- is actually quite an ancient phenomenon.

The first wave of globalization began around 8500 BC, driven primarily by genetically modified foods created in the Mideast and China, and to a lesser extent Mexico, the Andes and Nigeria. As those foods spread to the rest of the world, so did the cultures that created them, a process that reshaped the ancient world in much the same way the U.S., Europe and Japan are reshaping today's world.

Our ancient ancestors' method of genetically modifying food was of course much different from the way it is done today. When humans lived as hunters and gatherers, they had to make do with whatever wild plants and animals they found. It turned out, though, that some of the wild species upon which humans relied for food could be domesticated. Early farmers soon learned not only how to cultivate the resulting crops and raise livestock but also how to select the traits they valued, thereby genetically modifying foods.

In choosing to sow seeds from wild plants with particularly desirable traits -- often the result of mutations -- early farmers changed genetically, albeit unconsciously, the foods they raised.

Take the case of peas. Most wild pea plants carry a gene that makes their pods pop open on the stalk, causing the peas to spill onto the ground. It is no surprise that early farmers sought out mutant plants with a gene for pods that stayed closed, which made for an easier harvest. As a consequence of their preference, by selecting, over many generations, seeds from the plants that best served them, they ended up with a genetically modified variety of peas.

Would-be farmers in some regions had a huge advantage. It turned out that only a few species of wild plants and animals could be domesticated, most of them native to the Mideast, China, Mexico, the Andes or Nigeria -- precisely those places that became ancient centers of power. The crops and livestock of those five restricted homelands of agriculture still dominate our foods today. Many of the lands most productive for modern agriculture -- including California, Europe, Japan and Java -- contributed no species that were domesticated.

Ancient people lucky enough to live in one of the few areas with wild plants that could be domesticated radically altered their societies. Hunters and gatherers traded their nomadic lifestyles for safer, more settled lives in villages near their gardens, orchards and pastures. Agricultural surpluses, like wheat and cheese, could be stored for winter or used to feed inventors and bureaucrats. For the first time in history, societies could support individuals who weren't directly involved in producing food and who therefore had time to govern or to figure out how to smelt iron and steel. As a result of all the extra food and stability, farming societies increased in population density a thousandfold over neighboring hunter-gatherers.

Ultimately, ancient genetically modified foods conferred military and economic might on the societies that possessed them. It was easy for armies of 1,000 farmers, brandishing steel swords and led by a general, to kill or drive out small bands of nomads armed only with wooden spears. The result was globalization, as early farmers spread out from those first five homelands, carrying their genes, foods, technologies, cultures, scripts and languages around the world.

It is because of this first wave of globalization that almost every literate person alive today uses one of only two writing systems: an alphabet derived from the first Mideastern alphabet or a character-based language that grew out of Chinese. This is also why more than 90% of people alive today speak languages belonging to just a half-dozen language families, derived thousands of years ago from a half-dozen languages of the five ancient homelands. The Indo-European family that includes English, for example, originated in the Mideast. But then as now, there was also a cost: Countless other ancient languages and cultures were eliminated as the early farmers and their languages spread.

The first wave of globalization moved faster along east-west axes than along north-south axes. The explanation is simple: Regions lying due east or west of one another share the same latitude, and therefore the same day length and seasonality. They are also likely to share similar climates, habitats and diseases, all of which means that crops, livestock and humans can spread east and west more easily, since the conditions to which they have adapted are similar. Conversely, crops, animals and technologies adapted to one latitude spread only with difficulty north or south to another latitude with a different seasonality and climate.

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Spread of trade and culture -- even genetically modified food -- rocked the ancient world too We tend to think of globalization as uniquely modern, a product of 20th century advances in transportation, technology, agriculture and communications.

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Globalization II - Good or Bad?: Crash Course World History #42

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Day 5: “Prologue:
The Super-Story” by Thomas Friedman 

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Day 5: “Prologue:
The Super-Story” by Thomas Friedman 

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Globalization I - The Upside: Crash Course World History #41

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Day 3: “The
America I Love” by Elie Wiesel 

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Day 3: “The
America I Love” by Elie Wiesel 

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The HyperTexts

The America I Love
by Elie Wiesel

This page was compiled and edited by Michael R. Burch , an editor and publisher of Holocaust and Nakba poetry. You can click here to read his essay: "What I learned from Elie Wiesel and other Jewish Holocaust Survivors, about achieving World Peace.
There is divine beauty in learning,
just as there is human beauty in tolerance.
-Elie Wiesel

Even if only one free individual is left,
he is proof that the dictator is powerless against freedom.
But a free man is never alone; the dictator is alone.
The free man is the one who, even in prison,
gives to the other prisoners
their thirst for, their memory of, freedom.
-Elie Wiesel

The day I received American citizenship was a turning point in my life. I had ceased to be stateless. Until then, unprotected by any government and unwanted by any society, the Jew in me was overcome by a feeling of pride mixed with gratitude.

From that day on, I felt privileged to belong to a country which, for two centuries, has stood as a living symbol of all that is charitable and decent to victims of injustice everywhere-a country in which every person is entitled to dream of happiness, peace and liberty; where those who have are taught to give back.

In America, compassion for the refugee and respect for the other still have biblical connotations.

Grandiloquent words used for public oratory? Even now, as America is in the midst of puzzling uncertainty and understandable introspection because of tragic events in Iraq, these words reflect my personal belief. For I cannot forget another day that remains alive in my memory: April 11, 1945.

That day I encountered the first American soldiers in the Buchenwald concentration camp. I remember them well. Bewildered, disbelieving, they walked around the place, hell on earth, where our destiny had been played out. They looked at us, just liberated, and did not know what to do or say. Survivors snatched from the dark throes of death, we were empty of all hope-too weak, too emaciated to hug them or even speak to them. Like lost children, the American soldiers wept and wept with rage and sadness. And we received their tears as if they were heartrending offerings from a wounded and generous humanity.

In America, compassion for the refugee and respect for the other still have biblical connotations.

Ever since that encounter, I cannot repress my emotion before the flag and the uniform-anything that represents American heroism in battle. That is especially true on July Fourth. I reread the Declaration of Independence, a document sanctified by the passion of a nation's thirst for justice and sovereignty, forever admiring both its moral content and majestic intonation. Opposition to oppression in all its forms, defense of all human liberties, celebration of what is right in social intercourse: All this and much more is in that text, which today has special meaning.

Granted, U.S. history has gone through severe trials, of which anti-black racism was the most scandalous and depressing. I happened to witness it in the late Fifties, as I traveled through the South. What did I feel? Shame. Yes, shame for being white. What made it worse was the realization that, at that time, racism was the law, thus making the law itself immoral and unjust.

Still, my generation was lucky to see the downfall of prejudice in many of its forms. True, it took much pain and protest for that law to be changed, but it was. Today, while fanatically stubborn racists are still around, some of them vocal, racism as such has vanished from the American scene. That is true of anti-Semitism too. Jew-haters still exist here and there, but organized anti-Semitism does not-unlike in Europe, where it has been growing with disturbing speed.

As a great power, America has always seemed concerned with other people's welfare, especially in Europe. Twice in the 20th century, it saved the "Old World" from dictatorship and tyranny.

America understands that a nation is great not because its economy is flourishing or its army invincible but because its ideals are loftier. Hence America's desire to help those who have lost their freedom to conquer it again. America's credo might read as follows: For an individual, as for a nation, to be free is an admirable duty-but to help others become free is even more admirable.

Some skeptics may object: But what about Vietnam? And Cambodia? And the support some administrations gave to corrupt regimes in Africa or the Middle East? And the occupation of Iraq? Did we go wrong-and if so, where?

And what are we to make of the despicable, abominable "interrogation methods" used on Iraqi prisoners of war by a few soldiers (but even a few are too many) in Iraqi military prisons? Hope is the key word for men and women like myself, who found in America the strength to
overcome cynicism and despair.

Well, one could say that no nation is composed of saints alone. None is sheltered from mistakes or misdeeds. All have their Cain and Abel. It takes vision and courage to undergo serious soul-searching and to favor moral conscience over political expediency. And America, in extreme situations, is endowed with both. America is always ready to learn from its mishaps. Self-criticism remains its second nature.

Not surprising, some Europeans do not share such views. In extreme left-wing political and intellectual circles, suspicion and distrust toward America is the order of the day. They deride America's motives for its military interventions, particularly in Iraq. They say: It's just money. As if America went to war only to please the oil-rich capitalists.

They are wrong. America went to war to liberate a population too long subjected to terror and death.

We see in newspapers and magazines and on television screens the mass graves and torture chambers imposed by Saddam Hussein and his accomplices. One cannot but feel grateful to the young Americans who leave their families, some to lose their lives, in order to bring to Iraq the first rays of hope-without which no people can imagine the happiness of welcoming freedom.

Hope is a key word in the vocabulary of men and women like myself and so many others who discovered in America the strength to overcome cynicism and despair. Remember the legendary Pandora's box? It is filled with implacable, terrifying curses. But underneath, at the very bottom, there is hope. Now as before, now more than ever, it is waiting for us.

The HyperTexts

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The HyperTexts The America I Love by Elie Wiesel This page was compiled and edited by Michael R. Burch , an editor and publisher of Holocaust and Nakba poetry. You can click here to read his essay: "What I learned from Elie Wiesel and other Jewish Holocaust Survivors, about achieving World Peace.

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Day 2: “Why
I Could Never Hate America” by Mehdi Hasan

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Day 2: “Why
I Could Never Hate America” by Mehdi Hasan

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"Any jokes or inappropriate remarks may result in your arrest," says a robotic voice over the Tannoy at Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston, as I join the silent procession of bleary-eyed passengers disembarking from the plane after a ten-hour transatlantic flight. Welcome, as they say, to the United States.

I'm in Texas on holiday, making the annual pilgrimage to see my in-laws. I married an American in 2003, and each time we return to her homeland I'm reminded of the New Yorker journalist Hendrik Hertzberg's description of the "brutal fuck-you that greets foreigners arriving in the United States", and his call to US immigration officials to stop making "preventive war" on innocent tourists. "It might make us more friends."

But making friends isn't high on the agenda at Bush Intercontinental. This is my ninth trip to Houston since 2000, and it doesn't get any easier. I attributed a rare smooth entry in March last year to the change in administration, from bellicose Bush to benign Barack. My mistake.

"What is the purpose of your trip?" asks a morose airport official, thumbing through my passport and refusing to look me in the eye. The badge on his arm says "US Customs and Border Patrol", part of the department of homeland security. Perhaps I don't look happy enough to be here on holiday. Moments later, I'm deposited in a homeland security "holding lounge". "Why am I here?" I ask the nearest uniformed officer. "Random check," he grunts. Random? I'm sitting in a room filled exclusively with black, Hispanic and Asian passengers.

Name and shame

Nor is it my first time in this "lounge". A few years ago I spent several hours here, detained because my surname matched that of a wanted insurgent inside Iraq. Yes, "Hasan" - the Middle Eastern equivalent of "Smith" or "Jones". Incidentally, I note an addition to the waiting room in the form of a giant map of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Iraq is so 2003.

Why does my detention matter? Isn't my inconvenience far less important than US airport security? Of course, but as the former secretary of state Colin Powell remarked in 2007: "We are taking too much counsel of our fears . . . Let's make sure people come to Disney World and not throw them up against the wall in Orlando simply because they have a Muslim name . . . Let's show the world a face of openness and what a democratic system can do."

Time and again we have been told that the "war on terror" is at its core a struggle for hearts and minds. Not so on US borders, where foreigners are met, in Hertzberg's words, with "delays, ugliness, sullen contempt and near chaos while being treated alternately as cattle or potential terrorists". Despite Hollywood's best efforts, millions of people across the world no longer consider the US to be "the land of the free and the home of the brave" (to quote the national anthem), the "shining city upon a hill" (Ronald Reagan), or the "indispensable nation" (Madeleine Albright).

Indeed, anti-Americanism is rife. Some argue it has a long and shameful history, pre-dating even the founding of the United States in 1776. In the mid-18th century, the French naturalist the Comte de Buffon - together with Voltaire and the Dutch philosopher Cornelius de Pauw, among others - condemned the "degeneracy" of the inhabitants of the Americas. But as the British historian Tony Judt points out, anti-Americanism today is not confined to smug intellectuals - European or otherwise. Most foreigners are untroubled by the cultural dominance of the US, and many even aspire to the so-called American way of life. "Most of them don't despise America, and they certainly don't hate Americans," Judt writes. "What upsets them is US foreign policy . . ."

There is evidence to support this. During the eight years of the Bush administration, with its lawless and bloody wars, positive opinion of the US declined in most European countries. A Pew Global Attitudes Project poll showed how, between 2000 and 2006, "favourable opinions" of the US dropped from 83 per cent to 56 per cent in the UK, from 62 per cent to 39 per cent in France and from 78 per cent to 37 per cent in Germany. In the Middle East, Zogby International found that negative attitudes towards the US jumped between 2002 and 2004, from 76 per cent to 98 per cent in Egypt, from 61 per cent to 88 per cent in Morocco and from 87 per cent to 94 per cent in Saudi Arabia - and these are allies of Uncle Sam. Respondents in most of these countries said they objected, above all, to US foreign policies that they considered unjust.

Love, actually

In Destiny Disrupted: a History of the World Through Islamic Eyes, the Afghan-American writer Tamim Ansary shows how the Middle Eastern view of the US in the early 20th century was much more positive than negative. Wilsonian idealism was seductive to Arabs living under colonial rule but craving self-determination. It was, Ansary argues, only after the CIA-funded coup against the secular, democratically elected prime minister of Iran, Muhammed Mossadeq, that anger and disillusionment with the US spread across the region.

Noam Chomsky, bête noire of the right, has long argued that the notion of anti-Americanism itself seeks to excuse the crimes of US elites and "identify state policy with the society, the people, the culture". It is an important point. I condemn the actions of the US government in Iraq, Afghanistan and Yemen, without attacking my American friends in Houston, LA or New York.

"I am willing to love all mankind," Samuel Johnson said, "except an American." I cannot agree. I may be considered anti-American, in that I abhor many US foreign policies, but the person I love most happens to be an American. America is not the American government. Nor is it the US border patrol.

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"Any jokes or inappropriate remarks may result in your arrest," says a robotic voice over the Tannoy at Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston, as I join the silent procession of bleary-eyed passengers disembarking from the plane after a ten-hour transatlantic flight. Welcome, as they say, to the United States.

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When I use the term "scholarly source", I mean a source that is peer reviewed or published in a recognized scholarly source, like a journal or a university publisher. How do you tell the difference between a scholarly source and other sources? Well, the library has a that might help, at least in telling the difference between scholarly journals and popular magazines. Here are a few other tips:

1. Is the journal published by a scholarly association or society, or a university, or a recognized scholarly publisher? If it is not one of these, then it may not be a scholarly journal. Now, you might not know all of the scholarly associations or publishers, so you might have to apply some other criteria...

2. Are the articles reviewed in some way? You may well find a statement in the masthead about reviewing policy. If the articles are sent out to "peers", or other members in a field, for anonymous review, that's a good indication that the journal is scholarly.

3. What are the articles like? Are they written for an academic audience, or for a popular audience? How do they use evidence or support? Are the citations clear and abundant (in general - not every article will necessarily be like this).

4. What if it is a book you are looking at? Well, same thing about the publishers - there are some recognized academic publishers that regularly send work to peer reviewers before it is published. Some of these are university presses, others (e.g., Routledge , Blackwell , Peter Lang , etc.) are not associated with universities, but are still excellent academic publishers.

5. Is a course text a scholarly source? If it is a textbook written for classroom use, probably not. It is intended as a teaching tool. It should not be used in a paper, although you can use the references in the textbook to look in more scholarly sources. However, sometimes professors assign classic works as classroom reading. These are works not originally written for classroom use, and can be used in a paper. When in doubt, ask the professor.

The key in looking for a scholarly source is to identify the mechanisms used to ensure that the article is of a high standard. Sometimes we just trust the reputation of a journal or publisher, and sometimes we actually look for a statement about the review process. Magazines, in general, do not have a review process, and their material is meant for a wider audience. It may be valuable, but it is not scholarly.

Are internet sources scholarly?

Now, what about sources from the internet? These can be harder to deal with. First, the easy ones. There are some scholarly journals that publish a web version, and in some cases they only publish a web version. The fact that the journal is on the web should not necessarily detract from using it. The real issue is still the scholarly process it has gone through. This certainly applies to articles you may find using one of the article databases in the library . Most journals now provide on-line versions, and these are as reliable and acceptable as their hard-copy equivalents.

Sometimes you will find papers on the web that are not published. See, for example, the papers I have listed . Some of these are papers in various stages of completion. Others are papers that have been published. If a paper is published, then (usually) it has gone through a review process, and it is fine to use. But other papers I have up are just drafts, and have yet to go through that process. They are what we sometimes call "pre-prints", that is, a release of a paper before publication, meant for discussion. These should not be used as scholarly sources, although in some cases you may find that the writer has actually published the paper. Then it's ok. Drafts, though, are works in progress, almost guaranteed to change, and should not be trusted.

Now, how about articles in zines? They are likely not scholarly - again, the review process is the key. Anyone can put anything up on the internet, and so the review process is all the more important.

How about reference works like or Encyclopedia Britannica ? Let's take Wikipedia first. A wiki is a community-edited document, one which anyone can add to or change. That's not exactly peer review, because the reviewers aren't necessarily people who have studied an area. Wikipedia might, though, give you ideas to follow up elsewhere, and that's fine. But I wouldn't use it as a scholarly source. Encyclopedia Britannica: It has a real editorial staff, and high quality articles. It is, however, a general encyclopedia, and so its purpose is to meet the needs of a general audience, not a specialist audience. For philosophy, for instance, it is a better idea to use either the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, or one of the two major on-line encyclopedias of philosophy (which are, by the way, reviewed), the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy .

You should be quite suspicious of other works on the web. Just typing something into Google will not give you reliable results. You might, though, look for portal pages for particular topics or issues. Sometimes academics will make pages of the best resources on the web. These can be useful, but even many of these resources are not likely peer reviewed, and so would probably not be up to the level required for your papers.

Many students are tempted to do all their work with web-based sources. This is a mistake. Even with a lot of work being put on the web, there is no substitute for the library. Make sure to use it.

Here are some other resources on scholarly sources:

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When I use the term "scholarly source", I mean a source that is peer reviewed or published in a recognized scholarly source, like a journal or a university publisher. How do you tell the difference between a scholarly source and other sources?

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Day 2: Purdue
OWL Annotated Bibliography

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Day 2: Purdue
OWL Annotated Bibliography

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The Purdue University Online Writing Lab serves writers from around the world and the Purdue University Writing Lab helps writers on Purdue's campus.

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Day 1: What the World thinks of Us (NBC News)

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Day 1: What the World thinks of Us (NBC News)

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Video on msnbc.com: NBC News speaks with citizens from around the globe, asking the question, 'What Does America Mean to You?'

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Day 1: Annotated Bibliographies: An Illustrated Guide

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Day 1: Annotated Bibliographies: An Illustrated Guide

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Annotated Bibliographies: An Illustrated Guide

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A quick tour of the what, why, and how of an annotated bibliography. Created to support information literacy instruction at Lincoln Memorial University. "Empty rooms (small theme)" by _ghost is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license. http://ccmixter.org/files/_ghost/31006 To contact the creator of this video, email zsharrow@wooster.edu