Writing a column, The Siege Within, under the title, Blood does not sleep, stays awake as nightmare, in the Times of India ( 11/01/09) , M.J.Akbar, a veteran journalist, points out the educational gap in Muslim countries in the context of Israel-Palestinian dispute. He writes,:
" Poor governance has created a knowledge deficit; and knowledge is the key to strength. An Arab friend sent me some startling statistics; the e-mail was captioned ' A time for introspection'. Here are just a few: there are only 500 odd universities in the Muslim world. The United States has 5,758 and India has nearly 8,500. Literacy in the developed world is 90% as against 40% in the Muslim world. If you removed Turkey from the list, the comparison would look grimmer. High tech goods and services constitute only 0.9% of the exports from Pakistan, and 0.3% from Algeria. They add up to 68% of Singapore's exports.
Men die for two diametrically opposed reasons : when they value what they seek to defend and when when there is nothing worth living for. Israel has created a state worth defending. The Palestinians must be given some thing to live for."
Here is some scope for the Congress to send a Sachar committee to find out who is preventing the empowerment of Muslims in Muslim countries.
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