In the post-9/11 world there is an urgent the need for Americans to understand the Muslim world, and vice versa. Yet precisely when they should be visiting Muslim countries, Americans are kept at home by fears of terrorism. War zones aside, those fears are overblown. It is time their government and their media helped would-be American travelers gain a more realistic understanding of the typically minor risk of anti-U.S. violence that awaits them in the Muslim world.

Recently my wife and I spent a week strolling the streets of Beirut and traveling by bus in its hinterland. The trip was a fool's amusement in the scary light of official and media images of the Middle East as a dangerous place. Yet everywhere we went we felt welcomed.

I own a t-shirt that spells out "CANADA" in large letters beneath a maple leaf. Before leaving California I thought, only half-facetiously, of bringing it along. I'm glad I left it behind. The Lebanese we met were hospitable not hostile.

I am not advising naivete; Lebanon's horrific civil war in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s destroyed much of this city. Washington intervened. More than 200 American soldiers died in a building shrunk to rubble, apparently by Hezbollah -- a self-described Party of Allah that the U.S. still considers a terrorist organization. Beirut became a synonym for mayhem.

Echoes of Beirut's frightening reputation were heard this year in a series of bombings that killed nearly two dozen Lebanese, including Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri in February, scholar-journalist Samir Kassir in May, and opposition politician George Hawi on 21 June, only two days after we had left the country.

An American visitor's initial impressions of Beirut today are ambiguous. Inspiring confidence are the relaxed atmosphere at the new, ultra-modern, and just-renamed Rafiq Hariri Airport and, seen through taxi windows, the attractively renovated downtown area. But then one's taxi skirts the burned-out hulk of the St. George Hotel and, alongside it, behind police tape and armed guards, the twisted carcasses of cars -- detritus from Hariri's assassination.

This juxtaposition of alarm and assurance has become the unnerving natural condition of American travel to and in Muslim or mostly Muslim countries. Survey research shows approval of the United States among the world's billion-plus followers of Islam near an all-time low. The U.S. is viewed unfavorably by 58 percent of Lebanese, according to a just-released Pew Research Center opinion poll. Lebanon and other Muslim-majority societies account for more than half of the 29 countries to which the State Department discourages American travel. Yet in these mainly Muslim destinations the odds that a prudent American tourist will become a casualty of terrorism remain infinitesimal.

I went to Lebanon to do research, to lecture at the American University of Beirut, and to help celebrate the 100th anniversary of my high-school alma mater, the American Community School. For decades, Arab sons and daughters have vied for entry into these and comparable institutions elsewhere in the Middle East, including the American University in Cairo. In Lebanon, in the upland village of Deir al Qamar, I found a small photo shop whose owner had proudly posted a sign identifying himself as a "U.S.A. GRADUATE, BOSTON."

These signs of American popularity must seem incomprehensible to Americans fearful of Muslim wrath. But what really makes no sense is the apocalyptic vision of the Muslim world that America's media tend to purvey, a vision that encourages would-be travelers to stay in Indiana and skip Indonesia.

Overseas Muslims in my experience have a split-level view of America. Most of them dislike -- some detest -- U.S. policy while simultaneously admiring the freedom and openness that Americans, at their best, represent. Many Americans feel the same way. Meanwhile, security concerns have encircled U.S. embassies with enough protective barriers and identity checks to make diplomacy resemble self-imprisonment.

As relaxed interactions at the official level have become a casualty of the war on terror, people-to-people contacts have become more vital than before. The fewer Americans Muslims meet, the less contested will be the image of the U.S. as a cruel montage of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib.

A task force ought to brainstorm ways of overcoming unrealistic fears of travel. The Bush administration has acknowledged the need to win Muslim hearts and minds abroad. It is time to win back overfearful American hearts and minds as well.

After an intensive selection process, the Asia-Pacific Research Center at the Stanford Institute for International Studies has selected the 2005-2006 recipients of its Pantech Fellowships in Korean Studies for Mid-Career Professionals.

Daniel Sneider and Scott Snyder will be in residence during the 2005-2006 academic year and collaborate with the faculty and fellows in the Korean Studies Program and at APARC. The fellowships were made possible by generous gift from the Pantech Group. Professor Gi-Wook Shin, the director of the Korean Studies Program is excited to welcome the new fellows. "Considerable tension currently exists in the U.S.-Korea relationship, which is complicating the management of that alliance," he observed. "Dan Sneider and Scott Snyder are both well-established experts on U.S.-Korea relations -- and disconnects --and their work at APARC will contribute not only to our program here at Stanford, but also to the larger relationship between the two countries."

An accomplished journalist, Daniel Sneider has had a long career in reporting foreign affairs, and is currently foreign affairs writer for the San Jose Mercury News. His weekly column for that paper focuses on the Asia-Pacific, national security issues, and news analysis, and is syndicated on the Knight Ridder Tribune service, reaching about 400 newspapers. His writings have appeared in numerous other publications including The New Republic, the National Review, the Financial Times, the International Herald Tribune, Defense News, and the Far Eastern Economic Review. He appears frequently as a commentator on National Public Radio's "Day to Day" program and on the News Hour with Jim Lehrer. Sneider served as Tokyo Correspondent (1985-1990) and Moscow Bureau Chief (1990-1994) for the Christian Science Monitor, and as National Foreign Editor (1998-2003) for the San Jose Mercury News. He received his B.A. from Columbia University and an M.P.A. from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Sneider was a visiting fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at the Stanford Institute for International Studies in 1994-1995. While in residence at APARC, he will research the interaction between generational change and alliance management in Northeast Asia, with particular focus on Korea.

Based in Washington, DC, Scott Snyder is a senior associate in the international relations program at the Asia Foundation, and in the Pacific Forum of the Center for International and Strategic Studies (CSIS). From 2000 to 2004, he lived in Seoul, South Korea as the Asia Foundation's Korea Representative. His publications include Paved With Good Intentions: The NGO Experience in North Korea (2003), co-edited with L. Gordon Flake, and Negotiating on the Edge: North Korean Negotiating Behavior (1999). Snyder received his B.A. from Rice University and an M.A. from the Regional Studies East Asia Program at Harvard University. He was the recipient of an Abe Fellowship, administered by the Social Sciences Research Council, in 1998-1999, and was a Thomas G. Watson Fellow at Yonsei University in South Korea in 1987-1988. While in residence at APARC, he will research the transformation of the Sino-South Korean relationship and its implications for the U.S.-South Korea security alliance.