Argument by Authority Essay

A few years ago, nearly 1,600 Chinese laborers moved to Saudi Arabia to build a railroad in Mecca. But first these employees of the China Railway Construction Corporation—owned by the officially secular Chinese government—spoke the one-sentence shahada, a declaration of faith in one God and Mohammed as his prophet.

In that same year, 2010, China surpassed the United States as the leading export market for Middle Eastern oil. China also beat out the United States as the top overall exporter to the Middle East, thanks to a 90 percent increase in Chinese exports to the region from 2005 to 2009. This followed China’s 2001 establishment of the Chinese-Arab Friendship Association, which promotes economic cooperation between Beijing and 22 Arab states. And last year the Algerian government granted another Chinese state-owned company a contract to build the Grand Mosque of Algiers, slated to be the world’s third largest Muslim house of worship.

American Islamophobia is no secret in the Muslim world, according to James Zogby, who runs the Washington-based Arab American Institute (AAI). “America is suffering not only from the problem of the treatment of American Muslims, which sullies our image, but also our foreign policy sullies our image in the Arab world.”

A 2004 survey of 3,300 Arabs living in Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Lebanon, the United Arab Emirates, and Egypt showed that approval ratings dropped by an average of more than 11 percentage points since 2002. Another survey comparing 2011 figures with 2008 figures showed that approval ratings of the United States had fallen by as much as half in all of those countries except Lebanon and Saudi Arabia, traditionally staunch U.S. allies, where approval ratings increased.

For now, though, America is the land of the phantom “creeping sharia” threat and of the most obvious forms of Islamophobia, and it continues to execute a foreign policy that alienates the Muslim world. The United States provides military aid in the Middle East and North Africa, but this doesn’t always play well among populations that don’t trust U.S. interference in the region. When Washington announced it would continue military aid to Egypt’s post-revolutionary military government after three decades of propping up Hosni Mubarak’s armed forces, Bahey el-din Hassan, director of the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies, told Al-Masry Al-Youm, the nation’s leading independent paper, “The United States doesn’t care about human rights. This was the attitude under Mubarak, they changed a little after revolution, and now the U.S. has come back again to its original position.”

“Rather than focus narrowly on defense and security, let’s prioritize economic growth, education, and cultural exchange,” Moghul suggests. “It costs far less, and the long-term payoff is significantly higher.”

Tunisia is one place where the United States can do some good. “They have had the most successful revolution so far, but that revolution is not going to develop deep democratic roots if Tunisia cannot provide jobs for its youth,” Moghul warns.

Sami Ben-Romdhane, a Tunisian-American eBay executive, believes that Tunisia could be a new Silicon Valley if technology businesses are able tap into the generation that conducted a revolution in part with tweets and Facebook groups.

But when Ben-Romdhane recently spoke to an audience of young Tunisians at a State Department function, he had to foot his own bill to Tunis.

“My objective wasn’t to save on hotels,” he says, but, given that American military assistance to Tunisia has nearly doubled since the revolution, one has to wonder if the U.S. government has its priorities right. We can debate whether these priorities make us safer, but they’re definitely not making us richer.

Comments:

An authoritative essay must have a credible author who specializes in the area written. It comes from some major newspapers, specialized books, movies or television programs which are generally considered critically reliable. In addition, the purpose of the article is better for public instead of individuals — for public welfare instead of individual benefits. The authors must be qualified to write this kind of articles. This is an authoritative article which is from Boston Review. Boston Review is a bimonthly American political and literary magazine. Many professional writers submit their reviews to the magazine and most of them give Boston Review good evaluations like John Kenneth Galbraith (author of The Good Society) said that “Boston Review operates at a level of literacy and responsibility which is all too rare in our time.”

The author has reported on China, North America, the Middle East, and North Africa for The Atlantic, Newsweek, TIME, and Agence France Presse. He has a lot of experiences and he is an expert in this field. Furthermore, the author used some data or surveys to prove his points and this made the article more credible. In a conclusion, the article is credible. Wherever from the details as authors, the source, the words it use, , the method ,the results…, the article almost can’t be judged to an non- authoritative essay. Maybe the author is not so highly educated but it does not affect the authority of the article.

Example of Non-Authority: How to Lose Weight Fast
Source: Diet and Fitness; Jul2010, Vol. 23 No. 16, p12-14, 3p, 1 Chart Context:

There are numerous diet plans that can tell you how to lose weight fast. Some work better than others for fast weight loss, some are easier to stick to than others, and some are less expensive than others. Scarsdale offers the most choices, which makes it easier to stick to and keep losing weight. The cabbage soup diet is repetitive but cheap to be on, while the lemonade diet requires the least preparing. Sometimes the need to lose weight fast doesn’t translate into keeping the pounds off.

The thing to remember when choosing a diet is to choose one you can stay on for a longer term if you have more than a couple pounds to lose. Look for flavor, variety, and ease of food preparation. Make sure the diet has solid success stories from people like you.

Comments:

One kind of non- authoritative essay is to tell a lie to make readers to purchase their products. What they say is always full of contradiction—they always deny what they said before. The article nearly has no specialized authors or good source. The evidence to proof the judgment or result is always false or incomplete. The authority is not critical, always from an introduction of product, an advertisement or a promotion.

This article is a typically non-authoritative. Firstly, we even don’t know who wrote this article no matter how this author specializes in this area. I think that the ways of losing weight written by the author are not professional and have no basic and reasons or scientific evidences. As we all know, losing weight is not as easy as what the author said. Just like “Three Day Diet” or “doesn’t require weighing, measuring, counting or anything”, I think that both of them are lies. In conclusion, this article is totally a non-authoritative essay. It plays tricks on readers. It is absolutely uncritical.