Fighting Poverty Through Microfinance in Pakistan

During 2002 to 2007, Pakistan's economy grew at an average rate of 7% annually, creating about 2.5m jobs a year, barely keeping up with the number of young people ready to join the work force each year, according to Salman Shah, senior economic adviser to former President Musharraf of Pakistan. However, the current economic slowdown has resulted in significant job losses in almost all private sectors of the economy, increasing visible signs of poverty. According to a BBC report last year, three times a day, hundreds of men, women and children line up outside dozens of Karachi restaurants for meals which are paid for by philanthropists and charity donors. These lines were considerably shorter, or non-existent until early 2008. Many of those lining up are industrial workers who have lost their jobs. Credit crunch has taken its toll on all businesses and consumers, even the microfinance sector helping small entrepreneurs has not been spared. There were about 1.8 million beneficiaries of the microfinance institutions during the financial year 2008. They lent more than Rs. 21 billion to the poor people. The number of active borrowers of microloans has dropped by 7%, while the gross loan portfolio (GLP) has fared even worse, declining by 12%, according to the most recent Microwatch newsletter for the last quarter of 2008. Credit has not been extended to a significant number of previous borrowers as the lenders have not been able to roll-over existing lines of credit.

In response to these declines in small loans, the State Bank of Pakistan has acted to help recapitalize the microlenders in Pakistan. According to a recent report by Microcapital, Pakistan's central bank has launched three microfinance initiatives: the Microfinance Credit Guarantee Facility, the Institutional Strengthening Fund, and Improving Access to Finance Services Fund. The initiatives are part of $75 million Financial Inclusion Program (FIP), a joint venture between SPB and the UK Department for International Development. The objective of the three microfinance initiatives is to provide liquidity to the microfinance providers in response to tighter liquidity conditions and a sudden spike in inflation. In 2008, Pakistan’s inflation rate reached 20.8 percent, primarily due to rising world fuel and commodity prices. The announced initiatives are also in line with the aggressive goals outlined in the Pakistani government’s Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper. In the paper, the government has laid out an evidence based policy and set a target of reaching out to three million microfinance borrowers by the end of 2010 and 10 million borrowers by 2015.

The history of microfinance activities in Pakistan started with the launch of Orangi Pilot Project (OPP) in Kutchi Abadies (shanty towns) of Karachi in early 1980’s, according to a paper published by Abdul Qayyum and Munir Ahmed. In the late 1960s, prior to OPP, a few NGOs in the rural areas of Pakistan began to experiment with microcredit by offering subsidized loans. However, they mostly failed to reach the poor due to abuse and corruption. Now there are more than sixteen Micro Finance Institutions working in Pakistan. The MFIs in Pakistan can be divided into different groups based on their uniqueness that separates them from other financial institutions and makes them similar in terms of the way they function.

The first group consists of financial institutions with microfinance as a separate product line. The share of microfinance related activities of these institutions is up to 10 percent. This group includes Orix Leasing and the Bank of Khyber –both are profit making organizations and consider microfinance as a separate product line.

The second group refers to the specialized MFI’s, which includes two microfinance banks - The Khushhali Bank and First Microfinance Bank Limited (FMBL) - and two NGOs - KASHF Foundation and ASASAH. All these institutions completely focus on provision of financial services and also have commercial focus as well.

Third category MFIs related to activities of the Rural Support Programs which deals with integrated Rural Development Programs with microfinance as one of its activities. These organizations are National Rural Support Programs (NRSP), Punjab Rural Support Programs (PRSP) and Sarhad Rural Support Programs (SRSP). The last group consists of private NGOs. These NGOs are basically integrated development organizations with microfinance as one of their activities. These include Orangi Pilot Project, Sungi Foundation, Taraqee Foundation, Development Action for Mobilization and Emancipation (TRDP), Sindh Agricultural & Forestry Workers Coordinating Organization (SAFWCO) and Development Action for Mobilization and Emancipation (DAMEN), among others.

Khushhali Bank was established in August 2000 as part of the Government of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan's Poverty Reduction Strategy. The Pakistan Microfinance Sector Development Program (MSDP) was developed with the technical assistance and funding of the Asian Development Bank, which provided a US$150 million loan to the government of Pakistan, US$70 million being used for micro-loans provided by KB. Headquartered in Islamabad, KB operates under the central bank's supervision (State Bank of Pakistan) with several commercial banks operating as its primary shareholders.

The First Microfinance Bank, established by Agha Khan Foundation in 2002 as the first private sector micro-finance bank in Pakistan, is a premier non-commercial bank licensed by the State Bank of Pakistan under the regulatory framework of the Microfinance Institutions Ordinance 2001, issued by President Musharraf. It was created through a structured transformation of the credit and savings section of the Aga Khan Rural Support Program (AKRSP), an institution that had laid the foundations of the microfinance sector in the country in 1982, beginning in the Northern Areas and Chitral.

To highlight the positive impact of microfinancing on the lives of poor people in Pakistan, Microfinance Connect website has a number of success stories. For example, a Kashf Foundation customer Shehnaz tells the story of how she was able to keep the the business running while dealing with her husband's illness because of health insurance provided through the foundation's microinsurance program. Rashida Bibi, an Asasah customer, succeeded in doubling her dairy business revenue because of the microloan she received. Shopkeeper Mohammad Aijaz tells a similar story of increased business during the holiday season made possible by a Rs. 35000 loan from Tameer.

In addition to microlending for the traditional small businesses, there is a need in Pakistan to expand this effort by emulating the work of Grameen Shakti to empower villagers with electricity, water, sanitation and other necessities. It is one of more than two dozen organizations within the Grameen family of enterprises that is dedicated to improving the quality of rural life in Bangladesh. The lack of electricity results in low levels of human development, low productivity and widespread poverty in the developing world, including Pakistan. The governments of most developing nations, particularly in South Asia, have miserably failed in providing such a basic necessity as electricity to their people. About 40% of the people in both India and Pakistan have no access to electricity, the percentage lacking access in Bangladesh is even higher.

In Pakistan, the total banking sector serves around 6 million borrowers and 25 million depositors, implying a penetration rate of 3.6 percent and 15 percent respectively. In terms of access to microfinance, which means the availability of small loans, micro deposits and micro-insurance services to low income households, the current penetration rate is only 10 percent. In other words, 85 percent of Pakistan's population does not have access to any financial services at all, which inherently creates an uneven and an inequitable economic world, where the majority of people are financially marginalized. This situation drives the poor to rely on informal sources of funding like the unscrupulous moneylender, where the calculus of the relationship works to the detriment of the borrower. A well regulated and highly effective microfinance sector is, therefore, absolutely necessary to give hope to the poor in breaking the vicious cycle of dependence and poverty.

Microfinancing, along with social entrepreneurship, should be an essential component of non-government efforts in Pakistan and other developing nations to empower ordinary people to become self-reliant by lifting them out of poverty and teaching them the right skills to help themselves. “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” This proverb has guided the efforts of late Dr. Akhtar Hameed Khan, acclaimed Pakistani social scientist and founder of Orangi Pilot Project. All efforts at alleviating poverty should be guided by this proverb that captures the essence of self-reliance.

Here is a Kashf Foundation video clip explaining how microfinance works in Pakistan:



Here is a Skoll Foundation video on social entrepreneurship:



Related Links:

Microfinance Connect

Microfinance in Pakistan: A Silver Bullet for Development?

Microfinance Industry Overview

Pakistan Financial Sector Risks

Akhtar Hamid Khan's Vision

Grameen Foundation in Pakistan

Pakistan's Poverty Reduction Strategy

Grameen Shakti Solar Model For Pakistan

Job Losses Hit India and Pakistan

MicroCapital in Pakistan

Pessimism is the Ultimate Kufr

The news media and the commentators are quite busy making apocalyptic forecasts ranging from the demise of America as a superpower to the imminent collapse of Pakistani state. For example, Gerald Celente, the CEO of Trends Research Institute, has said that by 2012 America will be an undeveloped nation, marked by squatter rebellions by those who refuse to give up their homes or else take over the homes of others. Former Bush administration adviser David Kilcullen has opined that "We're now reaching the point where within one to six months we could see the collapse of the Pakistani state, also because of the global financial crisis, which just exacerbates all these problems. . . . The collapse of Pakistan, al-Qaeda acquiring nuclear weapons, an extremist takeover -- that would dwarf everything we've seen in the war on terror today." The conversation appears to dominated by Chicken Littles screaming "the sky is falling". In my attempts to understand the prevailing pessimism, I found the following article written by American Muslim activist and former Nixon adviser Robert D. Crane which lays out the Islamic perspective. Here is the article published by The American Muslim website late late year:

One of the most astute Saudi investors has expressed concern about the forecast by Gerald Celente shortly before Christmas, 2008, in an interview with Fox News that a social revolution will be sparked during the next four years by the collapse of the American economy followed by an ensuing inflation in a continuing downward spiral unlike anything in American history.

Celente, who is CEO of Trends Research Institute, has the best track record in the professional forecasting industry, so when he speaks people listen. He was almost alone in predicting well in advance the 1987 stock market crash, the 1990 collapse of the Soviet Union, and the 1997 Asian Currency Crisis. More than a year ago, in November, 2007, he told the UPI that the following year would be known as “The Panic of 2008,” adding that “giants would tumble to their deaths,” as indeed happened with Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, and other untouchables. He forecast the sub-prime mortgage collapse and a massive 90% devaluation of the dollar from a failed rescue effort.

His credentials are respected by everyone. CNN Headline News says, “When CNN wants to know about the Top Trends, we ask Gerald Celente.” CNBC comments, “There’s not a better trend forecaster than Gerald Celente. The man knows what he’s talking about.” The Wall Street Journal advises, “Those who take their predictions seriously consider Gerald Celente and the Trends Research Institute.” The New York Times explains that, “Mr. Celente tracks the world’s social, economic, and business trends for corporate clients.” The Atlanta Journal-Constitution adds, “Gerald Celente is always ahead of the curve on trends and uncannily on the mark.” The Los Angeles Times asserts that, “The Trends Research Institute is the Standard and Poors of popular culture.” The New York Post opines that, “If Nostradamus were alive today, he’d have a hard time keeping up with Gerald Celente.”

What has especially caught the attention of both economic and political leaders around the globe is Celente’s forecast of a social and political revolution sparked by the economic devolution. He predicts food riots, accompanied by a tax rebellion. We may see this as early as April 15th, 2009. He says that by 2012 America will be an undeveloped nation, marked by squatter rebellions by those who refuse to give up their homes or else take over the homes of others. “There is going to be a lot of homeless, the likes of what we have never seen before. Tent cities are already sprouting up around the country and we’re going to see many more.” Christmas as a retail bonanza will be a distant memory, reflecting a situation that he says will be “worse than the Great Depression,” because the so-called safety net will collapse.

As a forecaster of sociological change, Celente warns that “there’s going to be a lot of crime” at all levels “worse than in the last 1929 depression” and that the growing wealth gap between the rich and the middle class will threaten social order because the middle class everywhere in the world will become a revolutionary class using knowledge, resources, and skills “to shape transnational processes in their own class interest.” He warns, “There will be a revolution in this country, and we’re going to see a third party in response to the bloodless coup by Wall Street” supported by “a huge underclass of very desperate people with their minds chemically blown beyond anybody’s comprehension.”

This all sounds like the sky is falling, but the prediction both in its parts and in its whole is fallible and has been forecast before. Celente’s horror scenario was actually expected and welcomed 23 years ago by Norman Bailey, then assistant director for international economics in President Reagan’s National Security Council, who was the principal supporter of the Presidential Task Force on Economic Justice, for which I served as Chairman of the Financial Markets Committee until the necessary remedies were dropped as too controversial and therefore premature.

Norm Bailey said that only a real financial catastrophe could make possible the shift from debt to equity in finance and from concentrated to broadened capital ownership as the only means to narrow the wealth gap and as the only means to avoid a revolution that would take from the existing haves and eventually destroy global civilization.

As a lifetime professional long-range global forecaster, it has amazed me that anyone could be surprised by the “crisis of 2008,” other than by the fact that it took so long. Two and a half years ago, Norm Kurland and I founded The American Revolutionary Party (http://www.americanrevolutionaryparty.us) precisely to reveal the most fundamental flaws of Keynesian economic theory and of NeoCon political theory and to advocate equally fundamental remedies based on the theoretical foundation of binary economics developed by Louis Kelso and Mortimer Adler half a century ago. These have been further developed by the Center for Economic and Social Justice (http://www.cesj.org) during the past quarter century, and in practice by its investment banking arm, Equity Expansion International, of which I was one of the five founding principals.

The problem of Celente and of almost all of the 100 forecasting and 100 planning techniques that I summarized as chairman of a big study on the subject in 1980 for Charles Williams Associates in a contract for the National Security Council is that they rely so heavily on existing trends and on trends that are already so observable that they cannot be ignored. They ignore the exogenous variables that are still under the radar and may be entirely outside the paradigmatic parameters of establishment thinking.

Celente is right on the mark when he predicts the rise of a major third party, but he does not envision any solutions that can make a difference and invalidate his conclusions. More specifically he ignores the universal principles of what may be called Islamic economics, not the glitsy stuff of the so-called Islamic banks but the maqasid al shari’ah or universal and essential purposes of justice as taught principally in the haqq al mal of classical Islamic thought, first revived in the modern era by Grand Mufti Ibn Ashur’s book, Maqasid al Shari’ah, published in 1946 and translated by the International Institute of Islamic Thought in 2007. These provide a new paradigm ready to replace the bankrupt paradigm of concentrated power that dominates in both socialism and capitalism.

At a most fundamental level the catch phrase, “Islam is the Answer,” is true, because it teaches that the spiritual and the material can and should be mutually reinforcing. Without specific content, however, it is meaningless and serves only to marginalize the key role of the human person in the maqsud of haqq al nafs (the duty to respect the human person or soul) as the basis for judging human responsibilities and rights, and the key role of the means of production (capital) in producing wealth, elaborated in the maqsud of haqq al mal, and therefore the need for new institutions to actualize the universal, individual right to capital ownership as the key to both economic and political justice.

Celente’s forecast of the next four years is trend bound, which guarantees that it is wrong, since trends never continue independently of unanticipated events and forces. This is especially true in an era of paradigmatic unraveling, when the negentropic or dynamic power of a new paradigm, according to the laws of chaos theory, suddenly replaces the old dying or entropic one.

Perhaps we are not yet at the point of paradigmatic revolution, because President Obama’s advisers seem inclined to focus on saving the old paradigm of concentrating power in order to achieve stability. Perhaps the paradigmatic shift will come too late to avoid global civilizational collapse, but there is hope in the fact that human beings often deviate unintentionally from the expected, both individually and in groups, as shown by the major study that I directed at Charles Williams Associates for the National Security Council in 1981-82 to determine why all ten of the major, long-range, global forecasts had proved to be grossly wrong.

Predicting the future is playing God, which is why the mathematical modeling that drives Wall Street is so polytheistic. Forecasting the future, on the other hand, can serve merely to warn and/or to inspire by posing and perhaps ranking alternative futures through the use of more holistic techniques, such as scenario building. Since reality exists in quality more than in quantity, quality usually drives quantity over the long run. Since the present is bound by the past, but the future is not bound by the present, Celente’s pessimism is unnecessary. Celente’s warnings may turn out to be accurate over the short run of a single U.S. presidential term of office, because quantitative projections right now are all downward by almost every indicator. Nevertheless, over a longer period of time, and even within as few as four years, the revolution that he forecasts may be qualitatively self-correcting before it becomes destructive of civilization.

Such counter-intuitive optimism, otherwise known by skeptics as naivete, is in accordance with the Qur’anic principle known as “facilitation,” whereby God facilitates both the downward spiral known as istidraj, from which at some point there can be no return, and the upward spiral known as ma’ al usri yusra, “with every difficulty there is relief” Surah al Inshirah 94:5. This is designed to teach us that we have the free will to determine our own future both as persons, as nations, and as entire civilizations. There is no excuse for pessimism, because Allah is beyond time and space and therefore knows the future, which includes our free will to determine it.

Pessimism is the ultimate kufr, because it results from reliance on ourselves as the only power in the world. Optimism is the product of taqwa, which results from divinely given awareness and love of God and leads to our reliance on a transcendent power beyond ourselves, which is the very definition of Islam.

Related Links:

Pakistan's Demise Imminent

The American Muslim

The Trend Research Institute

Shakti Solar Model For Pakistan

Reliable 24X7 availability of electricity is taken for granted in most of the developed world. Whenever consumers plug their favorite gadgets into the wall socket, it is assumed that the power will be there. Everyone has access to it. Electrical power outages are extremely rare.

Electricity empowers consumers by enhancing their lives through better learning and entertainment, higher productivity and income, greater comfort, increased safety, superior health, and improved economy. People in the developed world live with the benefits of electricity everyday. While most people give little thought to where electricity comes from, there are many different ways to generate electricity - including coal, oil, gas, hydroelectric, nuclear, wind and solar. It is delivered to individual homes by extensive national grid systems.

In most of the developing nations, however, the availability of electricity to majority of the population is either unreliable or non-existent. The lack of such an essential energy source results in low levels of human development, low productivity and widespread poverty in the developing world, as evident from the chart above. The governments of most developing nations, particularly in South Asia, have miserably failed in providing such a basic necessity as electricity to their people. About 40% of the people in both India and Pakistan have no access to electricity, The percentage lacking access in Bangladesh is even higher. Socially-oriented enterprises such as Grameen Shakti and D.light are offering poor communities an affordable alternative to kerosene, which is ubiquitous but hazardous. The quality of the kerosene lamp light isn't good, it emits pollutants, and it's just plain dangerous. "You travel around these villages, and everyone has a story of a child being burned or a house destroyed by fire," says Nedjip Tozun of D.light, speaking to Fortune by phone from his office in Shenzhen, China. "And yet in some places we found that people were spending 15% to 20% of their income on light." The world's poor spend about $38 billion a year on kerosene for lighting, according to the International Finance Corp.

Pakistan's current installed capacity is around 19,845 MW, of which around 20% is hydroelectric. Much of the rest is thermal, fueled primarily by gas and oil. Per capita energy consumption of the country is estimated at 14 million Btu, which is about the same as India's but only a fraction of other industrializing economies in the region such as Thailand and Malaysia, according to the US Dept of Energy 2006 report. To put it in perspective, the world average per capita energy use is about 65 million BTUs and the average American consumes 352 million BTUs.

Extended electricity load shedding in Karachi's five major industrial estates is causing losses in billions of rupees as the production activity has fallen by about 50 per cent. KESC, Karachi's power supply utility, is dealing with with a shortfall of around 700MW against a total demand of 2200MW. Almost all forms of power generation from fossil fuel-fired thermal to hydroelectric to nuclear are down from a year ago. As a result of the daily rolling blackouts, the economy, major exports and overall employment are also down and the daily wage earners are suffering. The KESC and PEPCO owe more than Rs. 10b to the independent power producers (IPPs) and paying them will help bring them into full operation and ease the crisis at least partially.

The electric power situation in India is not much better. The country is suffering its worst electricity crisis. Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal and Haryana are the worst hit by the ongoing crisis and they are facing power gaps of about 5,000MW, 1,000MW, 2000MW, 1,500MW respectively. Some major cities in India are facing alarming situations; continuous load shedding in Bangalore has led to diesel shortage as people are using diesel generators to deal with the crisis. Times of India has reported student protests against power cuts affecting their studies. Textile and jute mills in West Bengal have been badly hit by unscheduled power cuts. In Tamil Nadu, severe power shortage has hit industrial production, according to MSN India. Companies said production could be down as much as 30 per cent. Sectors like textile, leather and salt appear to be among the worst hit. Industry associations put the loss in production at around Rs 4,000 crore. In Maharashtra, state officials are asking industrial consumers to lower their demand by 10% or be ready to face forced load shedding (rolling blackouts). Last year, IBN reported that New Delhi, the capital, faced 30 percent shortage in power. Maharashtra on an average had 8 to 10 hours of load shedding every day. Madhya Pradesh had 26 percent power deficit. In Gujarat, while the requirement is 5,500 Mega Units, availability is 4,780 Mega Units. Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu are facing 2000 Mega Units of energy deficit and Bihar and Jammu and Kashmir have 1,500 and 1000 Mega Units of power shortages respectively. Cities and towns are facing 7 to 13 hours blackouts.

To empower people and communities in some of the developing nations, social entrepreneurs are stepping in to fill the large gap between supply and demand for electricity. In Bangladesh, for example, Grameen Shakti is a social enterprise selling home solar electricity systems to families that do not have access to electricity otherwise, which includes more than 70% of the country’s population. It is an enterprise that demonstrates the success of a densely networked approach involving mutually reinforcing investments in human, social, ecological and financial capital by a number of organizations.

Solar energy makes much sense for Pakistan for several reasons: firstly, majority of the population lives in 50,000 villages that are far away from the creaking old national grid, according to a report by the Solar Energy Research Center (SERC). Connecting these villages to the national grid would be very costly, thus giving each house a solar panel would be cost efficient and would empower people both economically and socially.

To draw inspiration for empowering Pakistani villagers with solar energy, Pakistanis don't have to look far. In Bangladesh, Grameen Shakti (GS) is demonstrating that it can be done. GS was founded by Bangladeshi Nobel Laureate Mohammad Yunus in 1996 as part of the Grameen Bank’s family of enterprises. Shakti is attempting to rescue the rural people from energy poverty which hampers their social and economic development. Shakti's unique program has taken the first step to break the social and economical divide between those who have energy and those who do not.

The Grameen Bank, based in Dhaka, Bangladesh, was started in 1976 and officially founded in 1983; it operates on a model of providing small loans without collateral to the rural poor in Bangladesh. Grameen Shakti is one of more than two dozen organizations within the Grameen family of enterprises that is dedicated to improving the quality of rural life in Bangladesh. Although registered as a not-for-profit organization, Grameen Shakti is run like a business. In the face of persistent market challenges, the organization achieved profitability in 2000, after only four years of operation. Grameen Shakti has installed more than 40,000 individual solar energy systems that have provided more than 100,000 lower-income individuals with access to reliable electricity.

GS’s solar program mainly targets those areas, which have no access to conventional electricity and little chance of getting connected to the grid within 5 to 10 years. It is one of its most successful programs. Currently, GS is one of the largest and fastest growing rural based renewable energy companies in the world. GS is also promoting Small Solar Home System to reach low income rural households.

Solar Home Systems(SHSs) can be used to light up homes, shops, fishing boats etc. It can also be used to charge cellular phones, run televisions, radios and cassette players. SHSs have become increasingly popular among users because they present an attractive alternative to conventional electricity such as no monthly bills, no fuel cost, very little repair, maintenance costs, easy to install any where etc.

Grameen Shakti has a micro-utility model for some very poor rural consumers who cannot afford a complete solar home system. Under this model, one entrepreneur installs the system at his own premise and share the load with some of his neighbors. Owner of the system is responsible for making installment payments to GS, more than 50% of which is covered by the rents he collects from the users of his system. Micro-utility model has become very popular in the rural market places and has helped to increase business turnover by extending business hours. More than 1000 micro-utility systems are operating in the rural market places.

GS installed SHSs have made a positive impact on the rural people. GS has introduced micro-utility model in order to reach the poorer people who cannot afford a SHS individually. Another successful GS venture is Polli Phone which allows people is off grid areas the facilities of telecommunication through SHS powered mobile phones.

Pakistani blog Pakistaniat has reported practical examples of the use of solar energy as seen in some villages of Pakistan where each house has been provided with a solar panel that’s sufficient to run an electric fan and two energy saving bulbs. Prior to this arrangement, the whole village used to go dark at night. In Narian Khorian, a village about 50 kilometers from Islamabad, 100 solar panels have been installed by a local firm, free of cost, to promote the use of solar energy. With these panels, the residents of 100 households are enjoying light and fan facilities. This would not have happened for decades as the supply of electricity from the national grid would be difficult and costly due to the mountainous terrain.

Dawn newspaper recently reported that the Alternative Energy Development Board is planning electrification of 6968 remote villages through solar photovoltaic (PV) systems in the next 20 years. All the renewable energy projects, being undertaken by AEDB in the country, are financed by federal government through public sector development program (PSDP) allocation and funding from international multi-lateral institutions.

Among private non-government initiatives, a number of community-based micro hydro projects are being executed with the help of the Agha Khan Foundation in Pakistan's Northern Areas and NWFP. Within this region, out of a total of 137 micro-hydro plants, the AKRSP has established 28 micro-hydros with an installed capacity of 619kW. Initially, in 1986, these plants started as research and demonstration units. These projects were extended to Village Organizations (VOs) and became participatory projects. A Village Organization (VO) is a body of villagers who have organized themselves around a common interest.

Shakti Solar offers a very good model for organizing and funding a larger, nation-wide effort to empower Pakistanis with electrical energy to improve their lives.

Last February, I wrote an article "Solar Energy For Sunny Pakistan" suggesting that Pakistanis should seriously pursue the solar energy option. Many of the comments on the post were quite skeptical, some even cynical. But one particular response elated me. It was posted by someone with initials SK, who wrote as follows: "I am a consultant for the World Bank and I work on energy and infrastructure development issues. I am in the process of leaving and starting a non-profit organization to replicate the Grameen Shakti solar pv model in Pakistan because it is the only project I ever reviewed that seemed to make a bit of difference in actually alleviating poverty".

I do hope SK is out there now trying to light up a few homes in Pakistan to empower people. I wish SK, and others like him, great success as social entrepreneurs in Pakistan. It is indeed better to light candles than to curse darkness.

Here is a video on Grameen Shakti Solar:




Related Links:

Energy Shortage

Electric Power Crisis Worsens in Pakistan

Light a Candle, Don't Curse Darkness

Social Entrepreneurs Target India and Pakistan

Solar Energy For Sunny Pakistan

UN Millennium Goals in Pakistani Village

Kashmir in Context

Here is a documentary video by Pervez Hoodbhoy and Zia Mian.

It's rather long 46 minutes presentation requiring patience, but I found the video to be the most honest account of the Kashmir problem which is surrounded by all kinds of misinformation, disinformation and spin from all sides. Hoodbhoy puts it in historical context, shows the cynical role of the politicians and extremists on both sides, and talks about the realities of the Kashmir tragedy as it affects both Kashmiri Muslims and Hindu pandits who have been dispossessed and dispersed, and led to radicalization of the populations on both sides.

The footage of late Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru's pledge of the plebiscite to the people of Kashmir to decide their own fate can be seen and heard about 23 minutes into the 46 minute video.

I recommend this video to any one interested in understanding the Kashmir issue in depth and how it has drastically polarized the people South Asia.



Video Copyright Eqbal Ahmad Foundation, 2004.

The continued Indian occupation of Kashmir is neither legal nor moral. It's illegal because it violates security council resolutions 47(1948) of 21 April, 1948, 51(1948) of 3 June, 1948, 80 (1950) of 14 March, 1950 and 91(1951) of 30 March, 1951, that are binding on all UN member nations. It's immoral because it breaks repeated pledges to the people of Kashmir in late 40s and early 50s by Indian prime minister and various Indian officials.

As Hoodbhoy points out in the video, Kashmir has become the cause celebre for the radicals on both sides of the border and threatens the future of all of South Asia. Settling Kashmir is crucial to defeat the extremists and bring some normalcy to relations between India and Pakistan that could eventually lead to a common market greatly benefiting all of South Asia.


Related Links:

Nehru's Speeches on Kashmir
Nehru's Pledges on Kashmir
Obama's South Asia Policy

Military Occupation of Kashmir

Bruce Riedel Interview

Clues to Obama's South Asia Policy

Hoodbhoy on India

Can Pakistani Military Defeat Taliban?

On Thursday, Pakistan's Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani declared in a televised national address that the Pakistani government would pursue no further peace deals with the Pakistani Taliban but was rather dedicated to eliminating them and reasserting national writ in the northwest of the country. The speech marked a major shift in policy for the Pakistani government, which has fought militants in the Pushtun areas off and on for years. President Pervez Musharraf was the first to attempt to conclude a truce with them, in 2006. A similar truce was proposed for the Swat Valley by the provincial government of the North-West Frontier Province, dominated by a Pushtun nationalist party earlier this year, but has decisively broken down over the expansionism of the guerrillas, who attempted to expand their territory from Swat into nearby Buner.

Given the history of insurgencies in different parts of the world and various nations' abilities of dealing with them, are there any parallels in nature as far as human body's reaction to internal biological strife goes? As I pondered this question, I was struck by the relevance of the recent research on how the flu affects different people differently. Why do some people infected with the influenza virus have symptoms resembling an ordinary cold, while other people infected with the same virus may get very sick or even die? Writing in the Journal of Leukocyte Biology, a group of researchers say they now have a better understanding of some of the factors involved in the severity of influenza infections.

In an infected person, they say, the virus can sometimes temporarily paralyze the immune system, making that person more vulnerable to other, more deadly infections.

As the human body senses the presence of the flu virus, its immune system kicks in to deal with the insurgent virus. The body produces Interferon which interferes with the replication and growth of the virus, and alerts the T-cells (killer cells) to engage with and kill the virus. These T-cells also kill the healthy tissue and cells along with the diseased tissue. The dead cells are then coughed up and removed from the body.

In most cases, the human immune system handles the infections and people get well quickly. But sometimes, the body overreacts with too many killer T-cells attacking the virus and paralyze our body's immune system, exposing us to various other infections, including deadly forms of bacterial infections. Children and elderly patients often fare worse because their immune systems are either not well developed enough or too weak to fight infections.

There are lessons to draw from such research that can help in dealing with the Taliban insurgency in Pakistan:

1. Pakistan needs an interferon strategy to disrupt the growth of Talibanization in Pakistan. With international help, such a strategy should rely on extensive use of soft power that creates economic incentives for young men to stay away from the Taliban. Beyond the efforts to create and fund reconstruction opportunity zones (ROZ) in FATA which are desirable and welcome, what is really needed is an international Marshall Plan style effort toward transforming Pakistan from a feudal/tribal to an industrial society which can employ its growing young population. Pakistan's President Zardari has called for such a Marshall Plan for Pakistan. Such an effort will face major hurdles from Zardari's own party and its corrupt feudal leadership. However, if it is successfully implemented to respond to mounting pressure by the Taliban, new opportunities will open up for the nation's young population to offer them better alternatives to joining Jihadi outfits or seeking work in countries like Saudi Arabia where they are further radicalized.


2. The use of military force, the equivalent of the killer T-cells in the body, to respond to Pakistan's Taliban insurgency needs to be carefully calibrated to do the job effectively. These soldiers (T-cells) must minimize the death of innocent civilians (healthy cells) or collateral damage. Too little force will not stop the insurgents. But too much force can create a powerful backlash against the military's efforts and become counterproductive. Open and continuing pronouncements by the United States officials on the situation in Pakistan and the ongoing US predator attacks will inflame opinion against Pakistani government.

Watching public opinion in Pakistan is the key to success for all parties involved in bringing peace and stability to Pakistan. With Taliban's recent well-publicized excesses in Swat, Pakistan public opinion has begun to turn against the Taliban. But public opinion is fickle and it can change again. While it is understandable that there will be refugees who must be well cared for, the Pakistani public opinion will shift against Pakistani government if the military is seen as displacing or killing large numbers of innocent civilians caught in the battle, or the US continues its drone attacks that end up killing innocent civilians. There is a lot of sensitivity required during the counterinsurgency operations.

Related Links:

Taliban: Enemies of Islam and Pakistan

Taliban Target Pakistan's Landed Elite

FATA Raid Charades

WorldFocus on Afghanistan

Pakistan's Prospects

Counterinsurgency in Afghanistan and Pakistan

Obama's South Asia Policy

Arundhati Roy in Pakistan

Indian author and activist Arundhati Roy is currently visiting Pakistan. “An individual resorts to taking up weapons only when he does not get justice in society,” she said. Here's a report on what she is saying to her Pakistani audience:

Is there a threat of Talibanization engulfing the entire region?

I think it has already engulfed our region. I think there’s a need for a very clear thinking (on this issue of Talibanization). In India, there are two kinds of terrorism: one is Islamic terrorism and the other Maoist terrorism. But this term terrorism, we must ask, what do they mean by it.

In Pakistan, I’m here to understand what they mean by this term. When we say we must fight the Taliban or must defeat them, what does it mean? I’m here to understand what you mean when you say Taliban. Do you mean a militant? Do you mean an ideology? Exactly what is it that is being fought? That needs to be clarified.

I think both needs to be fought. But if it’s an ideology it has to be fought differently, while if it’s a person with a gun then it has to be fought differently. We know from the history of the war on terror that a military strategy is only making matters worse all over the world. The war on terror has made the world a more dangerous place. In India, they have been fighting insurgencies military since 1947 and it has become a more dangerous place.

Swat and the Taliban boy

It is very important for me to understand what exactly is going in Swat. How did it start? A Taliban boy asked me why women can’t be like plastic bags and banned. The point is that the plastic bag was made in a factory but so was the boy. He was made in a factory that is producing this kind of mind(set). (The question is) who owns that factory, who funds it? Unless we deal with that factory, dealing with the boy doesn’t help us.

Water is the main issue

One danger in Pakistan is that we talk about the threat of Taliban so much that other important issues lose focus. In my view, the problem of water in the world will become the most important problem. I think big dams are economically unviable, environmentally unsustainable and politically undemocratic. They are a way of taking away a river from the poor and giving it to the rich. Like in India, there’s an issue of SEZs (Special Economic Zones), whereby the land of the people are given to corporations. But the bigger problem is that there are making dams and giving water to the industries. This way the people who live in villages by the streams and rivers have no water for themselves. So building dams is one of the most ecologically destructive things that you can do.

Fight over Siachen glacier

There are thousands of Pakistani and Indian soldiers deployed on the Siachen glacier. Both of our countries are spending billions of dollars on high altitude warfare and weapons. The whole of the Siachen glacier is sort of an icy monument to human folly. Each day it is being filled with ice axes, old boots, tents and so on. Meanwhile, that battlefield is melting. Siachen glacier is about half its size now. It’s not melting because the Indian and Pakistani soldiers are on it. But it’s because people somewhere on the other side of the world are leading a good life….in countries that call themselves democracies that believe in human rights and free speech. Their economies depend on selling weapons to both of us. Now, when that glacier melts, there will be floods first, then there will be a drought and then we’ll have even more reasons to fight. We’ll buy more weapons from those democracies and in this way human beings will prove themselves to be the stupidest animals on earth.

Money and the Indian elections

Whatever system of government you have, whether it is a military dictatorship or a democracy, and you have that for a long time, eventually big money manages to subvert it. That has begun to happen even in a democracy (like India). For example, political parties need a lot of publicity, but the media is also run by corporate money. If you look at the big political parties like the Congress and the BJP, you see how much money is being put out just in their advertising budgets. Now where does all that come from?

RSS and the Indian establishment

The RSS has infiltrated everything to a great extent. In India, we have 120-150 million Muslims and it’s considered a minority…It’s impossible to not belong to a minority of some sort in India. Caste or ethnicity or religion or whatever, in some way everyone belongs to a minority. The fights that many of us are waging against the RSS and against the BJP are to say that we live in a society which accommodates everybody. Everybody doesn’t have to love everybody, but everybody has to be accommodated. The RSS has infiltrated the (Indian) army as much as various kinds of Wahabism or other kinds of religious ideology have infiltrated the ISI or the armed forces in Pakistan. They are human beings like everyone else and they too get influenced.

Indian media and sensationalizing of news coming out from Pakistan

I think the media in both countries play this game. Whenever something happens here, they hype it up there, while when something happens there, they hype the news here. We say that we live in times of an information revolution and free press, but even then nobody gets to know the complete picture…

The Pakistani media is a little different from the Indian media. They stand on a slightly different foundation. But both share the problem of a lack of accountability…The trouble in India is that 90 per cent of their revenue comes from the corporate sector…there’s increasing privatization and corporatization of governance, education, health, infrastructure and water management. So in India you see an open criticism of governance, but very rarely criticism of corporations. It’s a structural problem. It’s not about good people or bad people. It’s just that you can’t expect a company to work against itself. This is a very serious issue which needs to be sorted out.

Is the Indian army a sacred cow?

The Indian army is quite a sacred cow especially on TV and Bollywood. But at the same time if you talk to the people in the Indian army, they say that they feel that the media is very critical of them. I don’t share that view. I think it is a sacred cow. People are willing to give them a lot of leeway.

Women and their fight for justice

When women fight for justice, we must fight for every kind of justice…We must fight for justice for men and justice for children. Because if you fight for one kind of justice and you tolerate another, then it’s a pretty hollow fight. You may not be able to fight every battle, but you should be able to put yourself on the line and say I believe this.

Source: Dawn.com

Related Links:

Arundhati Roy on Mumbai

Arundhati Roy on Kashmir

Job Losses Hit India and Pakistan

According to an OECD report published in 2007, India generated 11.3 million new jobs per year on an average during 2000-2005.

India’s phenomenal growth and job creation of the last five years were fueled in large part by huge inflow of cash and investment. Investment accounted for about 39 percent of the country’s gross domestic product in fiscal year 2008, up from 25 percent five years ago. At its peak, more than a third of investment came from abroad, according to Credit Suisse. But in the last three months of last year, foreign loans and direct investment fell by nearly a third, to their lowest level in more than two years, according to a report in New York Times.

The decline in foreign investment has taken a big toll on sectors like real estate, manufacturing and infrastructure. In the last quarter of 2008, the economy’s growth rate plummeted to about 5.3 percent, the lowest in five years. While consumer demand has kept the economy growing so far, the sudden slowing in the flow of foreign funds and rising unemployment will make it harder for the country to grow fast enough to pull hundreds of millions of people out of grinding poverty.

With the economy expected to slow to about 5%, employment generation in India has fallen by 49 percent during January-March this year, largely due to a slow growth of services industries like IT and banking, according to an industry lobby survey.

"The Assocham placement parameter (APP) Index (the body’s index for measuring employment generation) has shown a steep fall of 49 percent and has came down to 509.72 from the base value of 1,000," the Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry (Assocham) said in a statement.

The APP index Series consist of 26 sectoral indices and a composite index giving an overall picture. The composite index is developed on the principle of weighted average quarterly job creation and has a base value of 1,000.

The study, which tracked employment generation across various sectors throughout metro and non-metro cities, said most of the highest employment generating sectors have curtailed their hiring.

The worst performer in terms of job creation is the IT sector, with its share in the overall index falling to 34 percent from 41 percent, the original allocation for the segment in the base value.

"The IT sector is facing major challenges with contracted demand due to recession in the primary client countries of the US and Europe. The value of the APP IT index has substantially declined by 50.8 percent," the report said.

The sectors that have recorded maximum decline in employment generation include education, hospitality, IT and IT enabled services, real estate, banking, media, textiles, auto, construction, and engineering.

However, some sectors like telecom and fast moving consumer goods (FMCG) have bucked the trend and created more jobs during the same period.

The telecom sector was a leading job generator with its share in the composite index rising from 3 percent to 3.35 percent during the period.

"The pressure on employment, confidence and price levels would be more burdensome than in the past... Moreover, India could be impacted by the return of migrant workers or declining remittances," Citigroup India economist Rohini Malkani said in a recent report.

Citi further said that the Ministry of Labor has indicated that over 5,00,000 jobs were lost during October-December 2008, with export-oriented sectors such as gems and jewelery, autos, and textiles being most impacted.

However, the Citi report stated that this statistic only covers the organized sector, which comprises just 10 per cent of the country's workforce of close to 385 million.

Pakistan, too, has a huge youthful population as India: roughly 105 million out of 170 million Pakistanis are under 25 years old. It will be these people who drive Pakistan's economy in the decades ahead, according Pakistani economist Salman Shah, who talked with the Wall Street Journal recently.

Like India, Pakistan had an economic boom led by construction, manufacturing, telecom, banking and consumers during 2001-2007, under Musharraf-Aziz administration. With annual economic growth approaching 7-8%, it created about 2.5m jobs a year during this period. Talking about foreign direct investment (FDI) in emerging economies, former US Federal Reserve Chief Alan Greenspan said in his book titled "The Age of Turbulence" : “But clearly the Licence Raj (in India) has discouraged foreign direct investment. India received $7 billion in FDI in 2005, a sum dwarfed by China’s $72 billion. India’s cumulative stock of FDI at 6 per cent of GDP at the end of 2005 compares with 9 per cent for Pakistan, 14 per cent for China, and 61 per cent for Vietnam. The reason FDI has lagged badly in India is perhaps no better illustrated than by India’s unwillingness to fully embrace market forces. That is all too evident in India’s often statist response to economic problems. Faced with rising food inflation in early 2007, the response was not to allow rising prices to prompt an increase in supply, but to ban wheat exports for the rest of the year and suspend futures trading to ‘curb speculation’ — the very market forces that the Indian economy needs to break the stranglehold of bureaucracy.” (p. 322 of "The Age of Turbulence" by Alan Greenspan.)

But recently, as with so much else in Pakistan, it's economy has gone awry. The current administration nixed the international money-raising program, even before the seize-up in global markets could do the job for it.

The rapidly rising unemployment and skyrocketing inflation together have dramatically increased hunger and poverty among the most vulnerable in Pakistan. At 33%, the sum of unemployment rate and inflation, known as the misery index, stands at its highest level in Pakistan's history, and it is likely to increase social strife and hurt the chances of recovery.

International investors, not surprisingly, also have bailed: Pakistan fails to meet the definition of a low-risk investment that is attracting money in today's environment with the ongoing financial crisis. As a result, its economy is slowing dramatically, expected to grow only about 1% this year. In part that's because the central bank has kept interest rates in double digits to control inflation, as required by the IMF conditions for Pakistan's bailout. There is a crisis of confidence in the country's leadership that is affecting consumers, investors and businesses. The sensational news headlines about the Taliban advance toward Islamabad are also scaring away the investors. As a result of this economic slowdown, job losses have mounted across almost all sectors of the economy. Few new jobs are being created.

And Pakistan's future, as India's, lies in the nation's ability to move workers from farms to manufacturing and in engaging more with the world rather than retreating from it. Pakistan, like India, also is relatively light on exports as a part of the overall economy. In Pakistan, exports account for less than 15% of gross domestic product, according to Shah, compared with about 25% in India and 40% in China. While India's economy must create 11-12 million new million jobs a year, Pakistan's economy needs to add 2.5-3 million jobs annually to employ all the young people entering the job market each year.

Unemployment in both India and Pakistan is expected to rise further with home coming of migrant workers losing their jobs overseas.

Given strong underlying growth dynamics in South Asia, the negative feedback effects of the global financial crisis are expected to be temporary. A relatively rapid rebound is expected in 2010, with a projected revival of GDP growth to 7.2 per cent, spurring job growth again.

Related Links:

Declining Economy Hurts Pakistani Workers

Global Slowdown Hits Foreign Workers

Pakistan's Foreign Visitors Pleasantly Surprised

Start-ups Drive a Boom in Pakistan

Pakistan Conducting Research in Antartica

Pakistan's Telecom Boom

ITU Internet Data

NEDUET Progress Report 2008

Pakistani Entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley

Musharraf's Economic Legacy

Should Pakistanis be Proud of Their Country?

Gaza Compared With Warsaw's Nazi Concentration Camp

"Gaza is Israel's Warsaw -- a vast concentration camp that confined and blockaded Palestinians. We are witness to a slow-motion process of genocide," says sociology professor William I. Robinson of University of California at Santa Barbara.

As is the norm at universities in America, any criticism of Israel is immediately followed by an orchestrated campaign of attacks and intimidation against the critic. In this case, there has been swift condemnation of professor Robinson, who is Jewish, as being an anti-Semite. Beyond verbal attacks, he is being actively harassed by the well-known actors usually involved in curbing any freedom of expression that involves criticism of the Jewish state.

In addition to its powerful presence in Washington, the Israel lobby has moved into the university campuses in America to ‘take back the campuses’, according to John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt of Harvard university, who have written as follows:

(Following criticism of Israel on campuses after Oslo’s collapse and Sharon’s access to power in 2002) The Lobby moved immediately to ‘take back the campuses’. New groups sprang up, like the Caravan for Democracy, which brought Israeli speakers to US colleges. Established groups like the Jewish Council for Public Affairs and Hillel joined in, and a new group, the Israel on Campus Coalition, was formed to co-ordinate the many bodies that now sought to put Israel’s case. Finally, AIPAC more than tripled its spending on programmes to monitor university activities and to train young advocates, in order to ‘vastly expand the number of students involved on campus . . . in the national pro-Israel effort’.

The Lobby also monitors what professors write and teach. In September 2002, Martin Kramer and Daniel Pipes, two passionately pro-Israel neo-conservatives, established a website (Campus Watch) that posted dossiers on suspect academics and encouraged students to report remarks or behaviour that might be considered hostile to Israel. This transparent attempt to blacklist and intimidate scholars provoked a harsh reaction and Pipes and Kramer later removed the dossiers, but the website still invites students to report ‘anti-Israel’ activity.

Groups within the Lobby put pressure on particular academics and universities. Columbia has been a frequent target, no doubt because of the presence of the late Edward Said on its faculty. ‘One can be sure that any public statement in support of the Palestinian people by the pre-eminent literary critic Edward Said will elicit hundreds of emails, letters and journalistic accounts that call on us to denounce Said and to either sanction or fire him,’ Jonathan Cole, its former provost, reported. When Columbia recruited the historian Rashid Khalidi from Chicago, the same thing happened. It was a problem Princeton also faced a few years later when it considered wooing Khalidi away from Columbia.

A classic illustration of the effort to police academia occurred towards the end of 2004, when the David Project produced a film alleging that faculty members of Columbia’s Middle East Studies programme were anti-semitic and were intimidating Jewish students who stood up for Israel. Columbia was hauled over the coals, but a faculty committee which was assigned to investigate the charges found no evidence of anti-semitism and the only incident possibly worth noting was that one professor had ‘responded heatedly’ to a student’s question. The committee also discovered that the academics in question had themselves been the target of an overt campaign of intimidation.

Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of all this is the efforts Jewish groups have made to push Congress into establishing mechanisms to monitor what professors say. If they manage to get this passed, universities judged to have an anti-Israel bias would be denied federal funding. Their efforts have not yet succeeded, but they are an indication of the importance placed on controlling debate.

A number of Jewish philanthropists have recently established Israel Studies programmes (in addition to the roughly 130 Jewish Studies programmes already in existence) so as to increase the number of Israel-friendly scholars on campus. In May 2003, NYU announced the establishment of the Taub Center for Israel Studies; similar programmes have been set up at Berkeley, Brandeis and Emory. Academic administrators emphasise their pedagogical value, but the truth is that they are intended in large part to promote Israel’s image. Fred Laffer, the head of the Taub Foundation, makes it clear that his foundation funded the NYU centre to help counter the ‘Arabic [sic] point of view’ that he thinks is prevalent in NYU’s Middle East programmes.

Here is the text of the email sent by Professor Robinson:

Subject: [socforum] parallel images of Nazis and Israelis
From: “William I. Robinson” …
Date: Mon, 19 Jan 2009 21:00:05
…

If Martin Luther King were alive on this day of January 19, 2009, there is no doubt that he would be condemning the Israeli aggression against Gaza along with U.S. military and political support for Israeli war crimes, or that he would be standing shoulder to shoulder with the Palestinians. I am forwarding some horrific, parallel images of Nazi atrocities against the Jews and Israeli atrocities against the Palestinians. Perhaps the most frightening are not those providing a graphic depiction of the carnage but that which shows Israeli children writing “with love” on a bomb that will tear apart Palestinian children.

Gaza is Israel’s Warsaw - a vast concentration camp that confined and blockaded Palestinians, subjecting them to the slow death of malnutrition, disease and despair, nearly two years before their subjection to the quick death of Israeli bombs. We are witness to a slow-motion process of genocide (Websters: “the systematic killing of, or a program of action intended to destroy, a whole national or ethnic group”), a process whose objective is not so much to physically eliminate each and every Palestinian than to eliminate the Palestinians as a people in any meaningful sense of the notion of people-hood.

The Israeli army is the fifth most potent military machine in the world and one that is backed by a propaganda machine that rivals and may well surpass that of the U.S., a machine that dares to make the ludicrous and obnoxious claim that opposition to the policies and practices of the Israeli state is anti-Semitism. It should be no surprise that a state founded on the negation of a people was one of the principal backers of the apartheid South African state not to mention of the Latin American military dictatorships until those regimes collapsed under mass protest, and today arms, trains, and advises military and paramilitary forces in Colombia, one of the world’s worst human rights violators.

Here is the latest story about Professor Robinson as reported by Los Angles Times recently:

Controversy has erupted at UC Santa Barbara over a professor's decision to send his students an e-mail in which he compared graphic images of Jews in the Holocaust to pictures of Palestinians caught up in Israel's recent Gaza offensive.

The e-mail by tenured sociology professor William I. Robinson has triggered a campus investigation and drawn accusations of anti-Semitism from two national Jewish groups, even as many students and faculty members have voiced support for him.

The uproar began in January when Robinson sent his message -- titled "parallel images of Nazis and Israelis" -- to the 80 students in his sociology of globalization class.

The e-mail contained more than two dozen photographs of Jewish victims of the Nazis, including those of dead children, juxtaposed with nearly identical images from the Gaza Strip. It also included an article critical of Israel's treatment of the Palestinians and a note from Robinson.

"Gaza is Israel's Warsaw -- a vast concentration camp that confined and blockaded Palestinians," the professor wrote. "We are witness to a slow-motion process of genocide."

Two Jewish students dropped the class, saying they felt intimidated by the professor's message. They contacted the Simon Wiesenthal Center, which advised them to file formal complaints with the university.

In their letters, senior Rebecca Joseph and junior Tova Hausman accused Robinson of violating the campus' faculty code of conduct by disseminating personal, political material unrelated to his course.

"I was shocked," said Joseph, 22. "He overstepped his boundaries as a professor. He has his own freedom of speech, but he doesn't have the freedom to send his students his own opinion that is so strong."

Robinson, 50, who is Jewish, called the accusations and the campus investigation an attack on academic freedom. He said his former students, the Wiesenthal Center and the Anti-Defamation League had all confused his criticism of Israeli policies with anti-Semitism.

"That's like saying if I condemn the U.S. government for the invasion of Iraq, I'm anti-American," he said. "It's the most absurd, baseless argument."

Robinson said he regularly sends his students voluntary reading material about current events for the global affairs course, and that no one raised questions when he subsequently discussed his e-mail.

"The whole nature of academic freedom is to introduce students to controversial material, to provoke students to think and make students uncomfortable," said Robinson, a UC Santa Barbara professor for nine years.

As the dispute over his e-mail plays out, UC Santa Barbara has become the most recent U.S. university to confront campus unrest over issues related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

In recent years, Jewish and Muslim groups have quarreled repeatedly at UC Irvine about the Holocaust and Israeli policies toward the Palestinians. Professors and students at Columbia University have also argued over issues of intimidation and academic freedom amid debates on the Mideast.

In Robinson's case, reaction has been strong -- on both sides.

Shortly after hearing from the two students in January, the Wiesenthal Center produced a YouTube video titled "Jewish Students Under Siege from Professor at UC Santa Barbara." The clip shows one of Robinson's former students, her face obscured to protect her identity, reading from his e-mail.

The head of the ADL's Santa Barbara region sent Robinson a letter in February calling on him to repudiate his statements about Israel. Last month, the ADL's national director, Abraham Foxman, in a meeting with faculty members at the campus, urged the university to conduct an investigation into Robinson. He was told that an inquiry was already underway.

"You can criticize Israel; you can criticize the war in Gaza," Foxman said. "But to compare what the Israelis are doing in defense of their citizens to what the Nazis did to the Jews is clearly anti-Semitism."

Robinson's supporters say the professor is being maligned for exercising his right to challenge his students to think critically about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Students on campus have formed a group, the Committee to Defend Academic Freedom at UCSB, which is chronicling the saga on its website.

Letters of support also have arrived from academics across the country, including one from California Scholars for Academic Freedom, which says it represents 100 professors at 20 college campuses. The group argues that the allegations have been raised against Robinson to "silence criticism of Israeli policies and practices."

Some UC Santa Barbara faculty members also are speaking up for Robinson. History professor Harold Marcuse, who attended the March meeting with the ADL's Foxman, said the pictures e-mailed by Robinson were "well within the bounds of appropriateness on campus. It's something I could have used in a course."

Marcuse, who is Jewish and teaches about the Holocaust in his world history and German history classes, said he would not have injected his own views into such a message to students, but added: "I don't think Bill Robinson's e-mail is anti-Semitic in any way. I think criticism of Israel is OK."

One UC Santa Barbara official has already looked into the allegations against Robinson, and a faculty committee is being formed to decide whether to forward the case to UC Santa Barbara Chancellor Henry Yang. A university spokesman declined to comment on the case.

Robinson has hired an attorney, and the student committee supporting him has scheduled a May 14 campus forum on the matter. Joseph and Hausman, the students who filed the original complaints, said they plan to attend. So do Hausman's parents from Los Angeles and Rabbi Aron Hier, director of campus outreach for the Wiesenthal Center.

"I just want to bring awareness," said Hausman, 20. "I want people to know that educators shouldn't be sending out something that is so disturbing."

Related Links:

Pictorial Review of Young Gaza Victims

Israel's Gaza Attack is Criminal, Not Defensive

Is Obama True Friend of Israel?

Who Rules America?

Demographic Trends Favor Muslims in West?

As the Muslim population continues to grow in Europe and America, there are some Evangelical Christians worrying about the demographic trends, and issuing call to action to their membership to increase their birth rates and evangelize. Also, a number of Islamophobes and xenophobes are sounding alarms to restrict Muslim immigration or incite fear and hatred of Muslims and Islam that could potentially lead to violence. A blogger at Islam in the West blog urges European politicians to "take a stand: either they opt for the Islamization of their countries and accept the given demographic parameters, or they opt to stay pluralistic, yet predominantly non-Islamic societies and change those parameters".

With the exception of Germany where 47% of Muslims say they are thriving, Muslims in the rest of Europe are reporting much lower satisfaction ratings, according to a recent Gallup poll. In America, 41% of Muslims say they are thriving. Only 11% of British Muslims and a paltry 7% of Pakistanis say they are thriving.

While Muslims should welcome the predicted demographic changes favoring Islam in the West, it is important for the followers of Islamic faith to be prepared to deal with the backlash and hostility that is likely to come with it. It is important for the Muslim communities to step up their interfaith efforts and to show that they are part of the larger communities they live in and wish to make positive contribution to society, regardless of nationality, religion or race or ethnicity of their fellow citizens.



The video clip embedded below, produced by a Christian Evangelical group, highlights the following points:

* A culture can only maintain itself for more than 25 years if it has a fertility rate 2.11 or higher. Once the fertility falls below 1.9, it can not be reversed.

* The fertility rates in Europe are currently very low, but the population continues to grow mainly due to immigration from Muslim nations and birth of Muslim children.

* Fertility rates in Europe: France 1.8, England 1.6, Greece 1.3, Germany 1.3, Italy 1.2, Spain 1.1, European Union 1.38

* There are more mosques than churches in France. 30% of all children in France are Muslim.

* There are 23 million Muslims in Russia today. 1 out of 5 Russians is Muslim. 40% of Russian Army will be Muslim by 2020.

* One-third of all European children will be born in Muslim families by 2025.

* 52 million Muslims today in EU will double to 104 million by 2015.

* Canada's 1.6 fertility rate is not reversible.

* US has 1.6 fertility, Latinos increase it to 2.11. US Muslim population has grown from 100,000 in 1970 to about 9 million now.

* Muslim organizations are evangelizing in America through journalism, politics,
education and more to reach their goal of 50m Muslims in America

* Islam will be the dominant religion in the West by 2050.

* Islam will overwhelm Christendom unless Christians recognize the demographic
realities, begin reproducing again, and share the gospel with Muslims.

The above data has come under heavy criticism by many researchers and scholars as vicious propaganda against the Muslim minority in Europe. Gallup pollster Dalia Mogahed believes that the data in the video is highly exaggerated, and the truth is that the birth rates of Muslims immigrants who have been in Europe for a generation have similar birth rates as their non-Muslim counterparts. To put the above data in perspective, the total fertility rates in the world range from 7.19 in Niger to 1.0 in Hong Kong. TFRs in many Muslim Middle Eastern nations are already at sub-replacement level of below 2.1 TFR. For example, Turkey is at 1.87, Algeria is at 1.82, Tunisia is at 1.73 and Iran is at 1.71. Pakistan is among the exceptions, but its TFR has also been declining. Its current fertility rate is 3.52, down from over 4 earlier in the last decade.

In a book titled "The Empty Cradle", the author Philip Longman warns that the declining birth rates around the world will cause many social and economic problems. As a consequence of declining ferility, by 2050 the population of Europe will have fallen to what it was in 1950. Mr. Longman says this is happening all around the world: Women are having fewer children. It's happening in Brazil, it's happening in China, India and Japan. It's even happening in the Middle East. Wherever there is rapid urbanization, education for women and visions of urban affluence, birthrates are falling. Having and raising children is seen as an expense and a burden.

"So we have a "free rider" problem. You don't need to have children to provide for your old age -- but the pension systems need them." Says Longman, referring to the coming Social Security crunch as the number of retired people rises faster than the number of workers.

December 2009 Update:

A new Gallup poll that came out recently reveals that Muslims in Britain, Germany and France are well integrated into their communities. The report by Gallup and the Coexist Foundation says 77% of British Muslims identified with the UK, compared with 50% of the general public. There was a similar finding in Germany, the survey says.

The research - which focused mainly on European Muslims in Britain, France and Germany - polled around 500 Muslims and 1,000 members of the general public in each country.

In Britain, the report found that more than three-quarters of Muslims identified with the country and its institutions - far more even than the general population did.

But whereas the vast majority of British Muslims (82%) felt Muslims were loyal citizens, the general public remained suspicious of them.

In Germany, 40% of Muslims identified with the country against 32% of the wider public.

German Muslims were also found far more likely than the general public to have confidence in the judicial system, financial institutions and the honesty of elections.

They had higher levels of confidence in their national government than society as a whole, but much less faith in the media.

In France, 52% of Muslims identified with the country, compared with 55% of the general public.

However, the report found that French Muslims had much less confidence in the nation's institutions, including police.

The survey also said that European Muslims felt far more isolated than those living in the United States and Canada.



Related Links:

The Empty Cradle by Philip Longman

Are Muslim "Hordes" About to Overrun the West?

European Muslim Gallup Poll 2009

Integrating Islam in Europe

Total Fertility Rates For Countries of the World

Muslims Doing Well in America

Islamophobia Watch

The Muslim West Facts Project

Total Fertility Rates Ranking of Nations

America's Fastest Growing Faiths: Islam and Buddhism

India's Washington Lobby Emulates AIPAC

Gallup Poll of Muslim Americans

American Muslims Thriving, but Not Content

World Happiness Index Ranking